By Professor
Doom
Already, working in higher education is a
Mcjob for many, as most professors are adjuncts, paid less than minimum wage
with no benefits. A new trend is just barely on the horizon, a trend that will make
not just the educators, but education itself, no different than what you might
find at your typical fast food franchise: questionable and irrelevant fare,
completely indistinguishable between one place and the next.
Almost all of our institutions of higher
education have an immense focus on moving coursework and classes online. While
I certainly understand “expand the market” is a key idea in achieving growth
(the primary goal of every institution), it’s been clear for a long time that
online coursework, much of it, is questionable at best. There are simply far
too many businesses that specialize in writing your papers, taking your
classes, even writing your doctoral dissertations for you that it’s obvious on
the face of it that there is wide scale fraud.
Now, because of the massive online fraud,
institutions which specialize in online coursework have a very justifiable poor
reputation. Prestigious schools have online coursework, and, yes, often, it is
more legitimate education…but one must be very careful to maintain legitimacy.
The best way, by far, is to limit the coursework—if a course or two is online,
while the other 40 courses the student takes are “traditional,” then, sure, the
degree is likely every bit as legit as a traditional degree.
At least, that’s how it works at the
prestigious schools. Trouble is, of course, that if you do things this way,
you’re not really going to get growth, all you’re doing is selling a different
kind of coursework to your already established student base, while sacrificing
a tiny amount of prestige by having online coursework.
Oberlin College, a relatively prestigious
private school, has been in this blog before, where its policies have illustrated
the eventual failure of higher education. It seems the school has figured out a
way to both expand their market by going online, while giving no risk to
themselves in loss of prestige…and again it’s by a new idea that could lead to
the collapse of higher education:
Now, there’s much to like about how the program is
set up—restricted admission and small class size are signs that they really are
trying to do this legitimately. That said, there are a number of flags here
that worry me. There’s a concept of “best practices” in higher education, and
it can become a slippery slope. “Best practices” used to cap class sizes at 25,
but schools nudged it to 30, then 40, then 60…now we have many classes taught
in massive auditoriums, with most every campus having courses with hundreds of
students in them. Now, “best practices” is used to justify classes of huge
size.
Let me focus then on the “best practices”
that are being established here, but even with the good intentions of this
program, it’s easy to see the corruption coming. First, the big highlight:
“… college credit from Oberlin College for instruction
neither delivered by the institution nor taught by its faculty members…”
The above is the biggest issue, in terms
of education. Oberlin has a prestigious reputation, but this new online program
allows Oberlin to sell out, without risking much. Should it turn out the
program is a complete fraud, Oberlin can use plausible deniability: “we had no
idea the program that enhanced our growth was just another online school scheme.”
Even worse, this allows higher education
coursework to become a franchise product. If you can get, say, Harvard course
credits, even a degree, on your transcript without even setting foot on the
campus or ever interacting with any faculty there, while someone else can get
State U course credits in much the same way, for the same price, from the same
sub-contractor, higher education will become just as bland (and subject to
debasement) as your typical fast food franchise. I know, I’m naturally
resistant to change, but I’m just not sure this trend will be a positive for
education.
While having transcripts with a school’s
name on it that have nothing to do with the school is my biggest worry, there
are few other flags that make me worry here.
Students pay $6,355 to participate in the program.
Part of that cost goes to Oberlin to cover the cost of the credit and database
use.
It doesn’t take much to do the math here,
these courses are pricey. While a
student can’t take a full time course load this way, if he did, tuition would
run around $40,000 a year. Does anyone really think the “database use” costs
are anything like this? This doesn’t make any sense, these are new students,
so…not in the database. The students are doing research and writing papers…no
cost there.
Let’s go to the next flag:
Faculty members are paid for their participation, but
Jaskol declined to say how much.
It really is embarrassing how much money
goes in to tuition, but how little goes out to the faculty. Typical adjunct pay
for a course is around $2,000, but I could see them halving, even quartering,
that pay here because of the tiny class sizes. I can totally understand why the
school is embarrassed to say how the class rakes in $25k in revenue with around
$2,000 in overhead, but they shouldn’t be, as that’s what “best practices” for
faculty pay are about now, with 90% or more of tuition costs having nothing to
do with education.
Another flag:
Faculty members reached for comment about their
participation in the program did not respond to emails prior to publication.
The “seal of silence” always scares me,
even though it’s considered best practices not to let faculty talk openly any
more. There’s no doubt that faculty here were threatened not to discuss the
program, threatened with termination if they communicated in any way about this
course. These faculty are online faculty, so you can bet they check their
e-mail very often: they would have responded if allowed to do so. What’s being
hidden? I don’t know, but with them acting like they have something to hide, I
must have concerns.
One more flag:
Wait. The dean of the college steered contracts to a
company he owns and benefits from?.
Isn't that a conflict of interest? Rumors are this was not disclosed to faculty and they are up in arms.
One reason for the incredible corruption
of higher education is administration can do anything. Time and again I’ve seen
admin rake in plenty of cash from sweetheart deals. Usually, faculty don’t have
a clue what’s going on, and figure it’s just typical mismanagement that light
bulbs cost $30 apiece or basic computers cost $2,000 each even when you buy
thirty at a time. Yeah, sure, faculty
are “up in arms”…it won’t change anything.
The creator of the program did respond to
the previous allegations (and there are a few suspicious posts in the comments
section):
This is Matthew Jaskol, the Founder of Pioneer
Academics who was interviewed in the article. Dean Elgren has absolutely no
ownership or equity stake of any kind in Pioneer Academics and has never taken
a penny of remuneration as a program advisor. Also, I don't know where you get
your "rumors", but the program was vetted through multiple faculty committees
in advance of approval.
So, maybe the Dean isn’t taking a penny
from this huge revenue stream. It won’t be direct, although I assure the gentle
reader that he’ll be rewarded indirectly for this. As far as “multiple faculty
committees,” well, I’ve been on multiple faculty committees threatened by
admin, and I’ve been on multiple committees who made a ruling, only to have
that ruling overruled to the exact opposite by admin…I don’t put much stock of
this vetting at all, and will never will put faith in faculty committee rulings
until admin is no longer in a position to unduly influence such rulings.
One more comment highlights yet another
problem with this program:
This is probably where our accreditation/QA model
obviously fails the most -- when instruction and the awarding of credit are
spread-out this much. How can Oberlin's regional accreditor verify the quality
of processes when Oberlin is no longer solely accountable?
Verify the quality of processes?
HAhahahahaha. It’s amazing how few people in higher education know that
accreditation is bogus and has long since abandoned any attempt at verifying
quality. Anyone who wishes, however, can go over accreditation policies line by line and see with his own eyes that this commenter’s
concerns are way off the mark.
Let’s look at the end game here. An
accredited school need no longer actually have faculty. If the program above
becomes widespread, an accredited school can completely sub-contract out the
entirety of their coursework, leaving the entire campus to become one large
administrative hive. Granted, this will take years, and presumably higher education
will collapse long before then. The fact that the system now allows for such
smoke-and-mirrors degrees indicates why the system must collapse soon enough.
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