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Although administrators in higher education typically feel tremendous economic pressure the irony is that these pressures are essentially internal. Newman and his colleagues (2004) commented that, except for brief declines during recessions, revenues adjusted for inflation from all revenue sources (tuition, state funding, etc.) are actually increasing. The economic pressure comes from ever increasing expenditures rather than declining revenues. Administrators are simply spending more money on more things. This spending is typically focused on institutional status and “mission creep” (Newman et al., 2004). Thus, the increased revenue is not being spent on student learning. Instead, the money is spent on programs with poor ROI, causing further economic pressure, leading to even more programs with poor ROI. The dog is chasing its tail.
The result is not only the perceived economic pressure, but actual external political pressure as well. Students, parents, and political leaders see skyrocketing tuition paired with atrocious four year graduation rates (e.g., Hess, Schneider, Carey,&Kelly, 2009). They also encounter institutional resistance when they try to hold institutions accountable for student learning. They may not be aware of the results of national tests showing that 50% of college graduates cannot read or do mathematics at a college level (Pascarella&Terenzini, 2005), but they have a vague sense that the revenue from rapidly increasing tuition and fees is not being spent on student learning. Thus, lowering the FGE is politically smart in addition to being economically smart. Throwing information dumps online that, at best, merely reproduce the low levels of learning already of public concern is no one’s best interest. In fact, the rush to online instruction may turn out to be the higher education equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade—charging right into the big guns of our biggest critics. If, at best, what we accomplish through electronic instruction is simply more of what we are already doing, can a higher education equivalent of No Child Left Behind, and the resulting loss of institutional control, be far away?
Throwing a lot of courses and programs online is the Benchmark solution to the problem. Everybody is doing it and higher education administrators fear they will miss out if they do not join in. At one level this occurrence does make sense. Even if an institution winds up shooting itself in the foot, at worst it will be competing against institutions with similar holes in their feet. But this is the relative comparison. In absolute terms, the institution is really better off economically only if it generates a sufficiently high ROI on its students. The “churn and burn” approach to enrollment can be very costly. Low retention rates, churning enrollment every year, is equivalent to lighting a cigarette with recruitment dollars. Continuing to generate low FGE is also not wise politically. This situation does not mean that technology cannot improve instruction in classrooms or that online courses cannot help accomplish institutional missions. But doing so will be expensive and must combine the talents of SMEs, ID experts, and computer experts. Online learning may be the wave of the future, but this wave does not mean that the future will necessarily be bright. Making this future bright will require a major change in the way institutions of higher education approach online learning.
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