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A couple of decades ago, when I was dean of online learning at Stevens Institute of Technology, a small STEM college on the Hudson with a view of mid-Manhattan, we polled our digital students about why they chose to enroll as virtual learners. Did they come to our virtual classrooms for the strength of our faculty? The quality of the program? The reputation of the college?

When we tallied the results, one reason emerged as a driving force for our online learners: They came seeking convenience.

We shouldn’t have been surprised. Noted Columbia University legal scholar, Tim Wu, has called convenience, “the [most underestimated and least understood force](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html) in the world today” and “perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.”

Of course, technology has brought new conveniences for on-campus as well as online students. Back when I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, for example, each semester I’d queue up for hours in the school gym in front of long tables with blank-faced staff to register for class. I’d fret that my longed-for Shakespeare class would close-out by the time I finally reached the front of the line.

Today, students register painlessly from their dorm, home, or anywhere with their laptop or smartphone. And that is what students now expect, since digital services have practically eliminated standing in line anywhere. Raised on apps and on-demand media, students can access almost anything, merely by keying a link. But these days colleges can be left behind in their digital services.

“Higher education has not yet figured it out,” Peggy McCready, associate vice president for IT services and support at Northwestern University, recently told me. “Service and support at universities are not up to the level of personalization we’ve grown accustomed to at the drugstore, where your prescription is refilled automatically and you’re reminded when you haven’t picked it up.”

One reason, she argues, is that colleges and universities are often radically decentralized, making the standard of service different in different campus departments and sectors. “With a more diverse student population, nontraditional students, without helpful and easily accessible tools, struggle to find resources they need to succeed.”

Inconvenience–like forcing students to rush around campus from one dean’s office to another for approvals–neither builds character nor imparts learning, but inflames exasperation with a college’s inattention to student needs. Student life is complicated and stressful enough without adding unnecessary obstacles.

“As consumers, convenience is one of students’ key expectations, but not often realized on campus,” said academic IT guru Lev Gonick, Arizona State University’s CIO, in an interview last month. “Even so, convenience is a huge and basic student expectation. Wrap-around services make students feel they are very much part of the university.”

Eighteen months ago, ASU launched a mobile app, an online one-stop-shop, helping students, not only with maneuvering campus services, but decisively providing robust student engagement. ASU students have now downloaded it 130,000 times, accessing it more than 3.4 times a day to check class schedules, navigate campus services, or see student alerts–all in the palm of their hands. Thanks to an integration with TicketMaster, it even gives students access to ASU football games.

One place on campus that has been quickest to bring in conveniences has been the library, where paper card catalogs were long ago retired for digital searching. “The importance of convenience is especially prevalent among younger generations in their studies, but is true across all demographic categories—age, gender and academic role,” concludes a [recent report](http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-library-in-life-of-user.pdf.) from OCLC, the giant library technology cooperative.

And for plenty of students, college is just not possible unless it is made convenient enough to fit into the limited time and space they have to devote to studies. That’s especially true for students working full-time jobs, for parents caring for children and for others who cannot just hop into their cars and drive off to a campus.

That’s why online programs at colleges have also been a leader in focusing on convenience, and why [more than a third](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-11-06-higher-ed-has-now-split-into-dual-economies-online-and-traditional) of the nation’s students are now online.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that digital replacements for onerous tasks will be simpler or easier to use. Just recently, it took me more than 20 minutes, with several failed attempts, to submit student grades to an awkwardly designed online form that would have been a snap with just pencil and paper. And no one is spared the frustration, waiting while rudely long irritating tunes keep you on hold, attempting to right some trivial, but hostile digital error. Flaws in online convenience can turn into a nightmare of dysfunction.

There are those who think that convenience is just an expensive trick, exploited by capitalism to circulate commodities faster than ever to increase profit. Like Sirens in The Odyssey, consumerism seduces our desires–envy, fame, or happiness, and love–compelling our keyboard fingers to click-open our credit cards faster than ever.

“Making things easier isn’t wicked,” [argues Wu](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html). “On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.”

For scholars and academic leaders who encourage young minds to explore philosophy, science and other heady pursuits, focusing on student convenience may seem a foolishly trivial detour from what matters most. Yet ignoring convenience could send college students fleeing to more accommodating places that pay more attention to what they need.

And we owe our students convenience for the respect it represents, the sanity it embraces and the kindness it demonstrates. And for some colleges that face falling enrollments, becoming more convenient may be key to survival—just like the shops along my street that have been threatened by Amazon and other online options.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-01-13-why-the-convenience-university-will-rule-higher-ed

The university is often portrayed as a place where young men and women loaf freely on a soft, grassy quad under a noble bell tower. Lecture halls and dormitories circle them, busy with faculty members and students coming and going on campus.

Hovering over this idyllic image is the online campus, where students rarely, if ever, set foot on manicured lawns. Digital students study at home or while commuting to and from work, often late at night after the kids are asleep.

Before the invasion of the internet, the university comprised a secure, single identity; now—with about a [third of college students online](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/11/07/new-data-online-enrollments-grow-and-share-overall-enrollment)—the American college is bifurcated.

When I first entered the virtual university a couple of decades ago as dean of online learning at Stevens Institute of Technology, I imagined, apart from instruction, that online and on campus in most respects would be pretty much the same. Surprisingly, just over twenty years later, things didn’t turn out that way in practice. Like fraternal twins, online and in-person campuses are the same, but different.

Delivery methods are hardly the only difference between face-to-face and virtual instruction. A deeper look reveals strikingly different economies and cultures, student populations, status of faculty members, curriculum, infrastructure and even tuition.

## Different Students and Faculty

Work represents the principal difference that separates digital from face-to-face students. Online, about 80 percent work full or part time. In glaring contrast, just 25 percent of residential students work full time, a [key economic difference](https://www.learninghouse.com/web-ocs2019-infographic/) that sets them apart from most academic consequences that follow. It’s A Tale of Two Cities, with mostly middle-class, 18-year-olds taking freshman seats on campus, while adult men and women (often more women than men), many married with children at home, occupy most virtual slots.

And online students are more likely than on-campus students to be the first in their families to go to college.

In other words, the digital university welcomes older, working, nontraditional learners who gravitate to online degrees to overcome workforce obstacles that prevent many without a degree from earning their fair share in today’s often-bewildering, post-industrial economy.

“The fastest growing population in higher education is adult learners, now comprising nearly half of the total learner population. Working professionals have vastly different needs than those of the traditional student,” said Nelson Baker, dean of professional education at Georgia Tech in an American Council of Education [report](https://www.acenet.edu/News-Room/Pages/University-Leaders-Raise-Concerns-About-Adapting-to-Market-Forces-Reshaping-Higher-Education.aspx) last month, acknowledging that college leaders are uneasy over the inability of conventional higher ed to respond effectively to fierce market forces. Baker is also the new president of UPCEA, the association for professional, continuing, and online education.

Online faculty members, too, are not drawn from the same pool as those on campus.

Physical campuses already have a growing number of part-time adjunct faculty—which now represent about three-quarters of university faculty—with a critical mass of full-time and tenured professors. But the situation online tilts far more to adjuncts, with very likely 90 percent or more in that category. Digging as hard as I could, I could not find reliable data revealing how many of them teach online. But from my own experience, and from my knowledge of hiring practices at for-profit and other schools with large online student enrollments (where little or no research is conducted), the number of full-time faculty teaching online is very thin, and at some colleges, very likely close to zero

## Hanging Discount Tags Online

Hoping to attract budget-stretched families, colleges are struggling with spiraling tuition, testing inventive ways to damp it down without going bust. With continuing pressure of ever-escalating costs at private institutions and deep cuts at state schools, bringing prices down is no easy trick. Some have tried a slight-of-hand strategy, called “[tuition resets](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/25/trustees-and-new-presidents-lead-push-tuition-resets-despite-debate-over-practices),” in which colleges announce a cut, only to roll back grants and scholarships, keeping the net price just where it was before they marketed enticing, but deceptive, lower prices. Other college leaders chase scarce philanthropic dollars to fund tuition cuts, so far with limited success.

Boxed-in on campus, some universities have [turned to virtual degrees](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-12-13-can-online-learning-help-higher-ed-reverse-its-tuition-spiral) to wriggle out of their tuition squeeze. A number of colleges have partnered with big MOOC providers, principally Coursera and edX, to offer large-scale online courses at far lower prices, in part to attract new students to their higher-priced online degrees.

Thirty-six steeply discounted master’s programs are now [available from top institutions](https://www.classcentral.com/report/mooc-based-masters-degree/) on such platforms, including from the University of Michigan, GeorgiaTech and Imperial College London, with tuition ranging from a startlingly low $8,000 to a modestly high $42,000 for a complete master’s from many notable colleges. Just the other day, Purdue University, in partnership with Kaplan and edX, [announced](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/10/02/support-kaplan-purdue-launches-low-cost-edx-degrees) three new MOOC-based engineering degrees for under $25,000.

In a surprise move, the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most-selective institutions, is offering a nearly fully online bachelor’s in applied arts and sciences, among the first of the Ivies to offer a virtual undergraduate degree. To top it off, UPenn is also extending an unprecedented discount, [cutting its online tuition](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/09/19/penn-introduces-new-online-bachelors-degree-program) by $1,000 per credit.

Admittedly, on the whole, virtual tuition is largely the same as on campus—occasionally even a bit more expensive. But MOOC-based degrees are just at the starting line of what appears to be a rush to hang discount tags on online degrees.

With enrollment in residential programs stalling, colleges have jettisoned some on-campus programs, replacing them with online delivery only. The University of Illinois Gies School of Business, housed on its flagship Urbana-Champaign campus, for instance, recently [announced](https://www.chicagobusiness.com/education/u-i-end-campus-mba-classes) that it will stop delivering its on-campus MBA, offering its fast-growing online degree instead. Enrollment in the school’s online MBA, launched in 2016, jumped from 114 initially to 1,955 today. The 98 MBA students stranded on campus must now move online to complete their degrees. Tuition for the online degree, called an iMBA, is about $22,000. The previous on-campus equivalent was priced at about $80,000.

## Different Infrastructure and Marketing Investments

A key difference between the residential campus and its online sibling is infrastructure. A conventional college requires enormous investments in soft, grassy grounds. Add security, dormitories, parking, gyms, cafeterias, heat and snow removal in winter, air-conditioning in summer—let alone classrooms, labs, and sports facilities—and the burden is often far more than what is required to support a luxury resort. Online, operating only in the air above, without a physical campus below, academic investments are limited to less than a handful of budget lines–instruction, course design and edtech software.

One of the more onerous tasks as dean of an online unit at a conventional university is to convince senior academic officers to pry open the school’s stubborn budget to pay for digital recruitment. Many high-ranking professors disdain marketing, and so they keep promotional funds locked away, thinking it vulgar to pursue enrollments too nakedly. “Our students will find us without us begging,” they often say.

With more than 130,000 mostly virtual students, Southern New Hampshire University, moved from a sleepy New England college in just 16 years to one of the three biggest universities in the U.S., alongside Arizona State University and Western Governors University. While a number of strategic steps helped the university scale up, the biggest push came from unprecedented investments in digital recruitment. Last year, Southern New Hampshire [spent $139 million on advertising and promotion](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/08/how-marketing-helped-southern-new-hampshire-university-make-it-big-online), with almost $47 million going to Google alone and just over $85 million to a media buying agency.

For years, many observers wondered when the digital revolution would overrun the university as it has commerce elsewhere. In my neighborhood in Manhattan—and in cities and towns across America—mom-and-pop shops and even national brand stores are collapsing, as if swept away by hurricane Katrina. Amazon’s indifferent digital finger has carelessly pushed most of them over. While the academic economy has not been as severely shaken yet, the recent ACE report warns that the inability of American higher ed to respond effectively may have equally disruptive consequences in the future.

It’s a case of sibling rivalry in which the digital younger child is aggressively outdoing her older, favored residential sister. The higher ed family is puzzled as to how to deal with the strain.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-11-06-higher-ed-has-now-split-into-dual-economies-online-and-traditional

Colleges and universities are struggling to keep students focussed long enough to graduate within a reasonable amount of time after they first enroll. In the U.S., only [about 60](http://web.archive.org/web/20230321045754/https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_ctr.asp) percent of undergraduates earn their degrees in six years. The rest commonly face a blizzard of troubles—added debt, poor job prospects and, in some cases, lack of self worth.

While one of the biggest causes of dropping out is [money](http://web.archive.org/web/20230321045754/https://nonprofitquarterly.org/dropout-rate-for-college-students-driven-by-inequality)—especially as the cost of college rises—that is not the only hurdle. It turns out that in ways that are not always well understood by the public, colleges themselves share a good deal of the blame.

Too often, colleges have adopted a division-of-labor approach with their recruitment and retention efforts.

There is an art and science, of course, to finding students on the internet. Recruitment officials are trained to exploit the remarkable firepower of social media, vast databases, and other highly effective digital tools. They can reach millions of prospective students just by clicking the right link and paying search engines enough cash.

But what happens when large numbers of new recruits enroll, only to trip and fall off their academic track.

A dozen years ago, when I first came to New York University as dean of online learning at the university’s engineering school, I found that a marketing vendor, hired by my predecessor, had been enrolling a surprising number of new online master’s students. Impressed, I turned to my staff, wondering how many who had signed-up had persisted. “Let’s look at the spreadsheets,” I proposed. Taken aback by results showing that of the dozens of new recruits the company had attracted, only a handful had returned for the next semester. The drop-off was shocking.

College recruiters focus on generating big sign-ups to achieve their targets. Concentrating solely on generating big numbers, recruiters tend to have little or no investment in what happens next.

Throwing everything you have at recruitment while neglecting ways of keeping students on the path to graduation is irresponsible, especially considering the debt students often take on to enter college.

## Holistic Alternative

What if new recruits’ next steps were guided by the same staff who encouraged them to sign-up in the first place? What if recruiters stayed close to apprehensive newcomers, sticking with them through orientation, helping them untangle course selection, and shepherding them through the dozens of challenges that lay ahead? What if those who struggled with students from the start of their academic journey accompanied them all the way through to commencement?

Colleges should concentrate less on enrollment efforts and more on the student’s life cycle. Introducing a holistic strategy, recruiters are given a longer-term mission than just rounding-up freshmen. Colleges need to add a crucial set of competencies to recruiters’ job description—the skills of a retention specialist.

“Students get very close to those who recruit them,” said Lisa Bellantuono, director of graduate admissions at George Washington University School of Business, in a phone interview last week. “Then, suddenly, at most colleges, they’re cut-off from someone who knows them and passed on to others who don’t. They become just numbers in the system—totally disconnected.”

A pro at student support, Bellantuono worked closely with me at NYU’s engineering school. During her tenure there, her holistic method outperformed average retention and graduation rates at most engineering schools—on campus and online. Our students achieved a [92 percent retention rate](http://web.archive.org/web/20230321045754/https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/us-news-and-world-report-ranks-nyu-online-graduate-engineering-program-among-top-10-nation) and graduation rates of nearly 80 percent.

“Those best at propelling student retention are terrific at customer service,” Bellantuono said. “No task is too small, no question out of bounds. Their priority is to help students achieve their goals.”

In Bellantuono’s approach, recruiters engage effectively with prospective learners, and then extend their involvement beyond enrollment, offering continuing support after they sign up. In this expanded role, they help learners navigate often treacherous academic waters, guiding them through mystifying curriculum requirements, baffling financial-aid bureaucracy and obscure rules that can quickly throw students off.

These hurdles can trip up 18-year-olds, for sure, and they can derail adult students as well. And they can be even worse for first-generation learners or online students without a face-to-face connection to campus.

“Faculty members are often the most direct way to help at-risk students,” says Carl J. Strikwerda, former president of Elizabethtown College, in a recent [opinion column](http://web.archive.org/web/20230321045754/https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/09/04/faculty-must-play-bigger-role-student-retention-and-success-opinion). “No matter what else colleges and universities do for students, success in the classroom is essential.”

The answer is not to rely on faculty members alone, though a sympathetic professor or trusted academic advisors may step in from time to time to help. But faculty members are not buddies. Surely, they have other pressing obligations, principally to make sure learners absorb their lessons. Other staff should be available to make sure students stay on track.

Retention and graduation rates will rise only when higher education softens, allowing a more student-centered approach rather than allowing students to sink or swim.

This is not merely a practical solution to the nation’s retention crisis, but a socially responsible way to run the university.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2019-09-18-coupling-recruitment-with-retention-can-drive-up-graduation-rates

If you’re wondering why online learning is booming, take a look at the latest U.S. Department of Labor [data](https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/educational-attainment-of-the-labor-force/home.htm) showing heightened demand for skilled workers. Those with an undergraduate or advanced degree now represent about 40 percent of the nation’s workforce, while those with just a high school diploma have slipped in the last 25 years from more than a third to about a quarter of American workers.


Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

The graph is a vivid illustration of the present condition of economic life in America. The nation has been fiercely transformed into a post-industrial society in which accelerating technology has cast off large numbers of factory laborers, but hasn’t created enough new jobs in the service sector or in information-based roles to fill the gap.

The trend lines for those with undergraduate and advanced degrees show a steady rise in prosperity, while the lines for those with no degree sink rapidly downward. Since 2012, workers with some college or higher education now [make up the largest share](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/06/key-findings-about-the-american-workforce-and-the-changing-job-market/) of the U.S. civilian labor force.

The clear message for employees who stay in the workforce without a college degree is that their future options are limited. Eventually, they may find themselves out of work altogether. Today, about nine million Americans are unemployed, [most of them unskilled](https://www.forbes.com/sites/abbymccloskey/2015/02/18/more-than-one-in-ten-workers-unemployed-or-underemployed/#559c9ed4122b).

To escape that harsh outcome, workers without a college degree who are looking to advance must take a stab at enrolling at their nearest college campus, or turn to one of the growing numbers of online degree programs. Logistically, it is often difficult or impossible for working adults to get to traditional campuses to pursue degrees, which make those online options so attractive. Seventy percent of online undergrads and 80 percent of online graduate students [work full or part time](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-17-does-online-education-help-low-income-students-succeed). America’s thirst for a highly-skilled workforce is driving the expansion of digital learning. Recent data from the nation’s residential colleges show a decline in enrollment, while [online is surging](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-01-18-will-online-ever-conquer-higher-ed) at its fastest pace in memory.

## Post-Industrial Economy

In the last century, you didn’t need a college degree to get a decent job. A high school diploma was more than enough. In Chelsea, my neighborhood in Manhattan, an elevated railroad that fed hungry factories along the Hudson until 1980 has been [turned into a nature walk](https://www.thehighline.org/), with its steel tracks marking flower beds dancing with exotic blooms. Galleries and high-end condos have evicted assembly lines that stretched alongside the old railway. Elsewhere in the U.S., other factory neighborhoods have not been so lucky, debased by crumbling warehouses and defeated production facilities. My father, a tailor from Poland without a high school diploma, worked productively for years in a men’s clothing factory—in what was then called the “needle trades”—not far from my current apartment. Today, without a college education, but armed with his old-word mastery, his chances of earning a good living would be pretty poor.

Today’s vastly transformed economy requires workers with post-industrial skills. One [website](https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/blog/trends-and-research/2018/the-most-in-demand-hard-and-soft-skills-of-2018) recommends that the best jobs are in high-tech—cloud computing, artificial intelligence, user-experience design, natural language processing, software testing, among others. It’s a rare high school graduate who commands any of these. Luckily, college students who graduate without STEM degrees, have a chance at finding a job in the new economy if they can demonstrate other in-demand “soft skills”—creativity, collaboration, adaptability, time management, leadership. Forget driving rivets, welding, or–like my father–cutting suit patterns.

In the digital economy, not every discipline guarantees that students will get a good job upon graduation. Not every field offers robust prospects. Depressingly, enrollment in history, philosophy, literature (my major in college) and other departments has been falling for decades. Some colleges are closing liberal arts programs and a cascade of small liberal arts colleges [have gone under](https://hechingerreport.org/with-enrollment-sliding-liberal-arts-colleges-struggle-to-make-a-case-for-themselves/).

For adult workers, going to school online is not a walk in the park. Faced with on-the-job stress, family obligations and common day-to-day struggles, many have difficulty hitting the books. For those who were in school long ago, the discipline, time management and culture of academic life can be daunting. [Research on the success rate of online students](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-07-17-does-online-education-help-low-income-students-succeed) in general is mixed. Some studies report low retention rates; others say that there is no significant difference between face-to-face and virtual education. Surprisingly, recent results claim that going online [can boost student performance](https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/04/12/research-online-courses-associated-with-improved-retention-access.aspx).

Even so, for workers with a high school diploma eager to move up, the labor department trends show that studying online to earn a degree is a good bet.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-08-05-how-online-degrees-can-advance-worker-careers-in-a-shifting-economy

In a recent rush, more than half a dozen adaptive learning companies have been scooped up like M&Ms at a candy counter. One of the most notable is Knewton, [whose assets were acquired](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/07/wiley-buys-knewton-adaptive-learning-technology-company) by Wiley just weeks ago. Last year, Carnegie Learning, Acrobatiq, Knowre and Fishtree [were also swallowed](http://capstoneheadwaters.com/sites/default/files/Capstone%20Headwaters%20Education%20Technology%20Coverage%20Report%20Q4%202018.pdf) in acquisition fever. Meanwhile, ACT, the nonprofit college admission test company, earlier this year [invested $7.5 million](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/02/07/act-invests-personalized-education-platform-signaling-shift) in Smart Sparrow.

Ed-tech guru Phil Hill, the MindWires partner who is widely followed on his _Phil on Ed Tech_ blog, told me in a telephone interview that most sales were made not from strength, but “from positions of weakness and need.”

In [an essay early this year](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits), I sketched what adaptive learning — which falls under the larger category of [personalized learning](https://www.edglossary.org/personalized-learning/) — is all about:

> As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines — artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics — have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice — adaptive learning. Designed to adjust in real time to each student’s prior knowledge and skill attainment, adaptive systems respond to variations in ability and diverse student backgrounds, sensitive to unique needs of each learner. Based on each student’s actions, when a student gets stuck, the system automatically suggests strategies on how to get out of it and proceed to mastery.

Recent acquisitions give long-term critics a chance not merely to smirk, but to go in for the kill. After years of predicting that adaptive was a fool’s game, with no chance of delivering on what developers promised, what better time than to kick it when it’s down? One [critical observer](https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/knewton-gone-larger-threat-remains) admits to “a certain schadenfreude.”

With the discovery of fire, believers and skeptics began their interminable heated debates over innovation. For the defense, flames cook your meals, heat your homes and fire your pots. On the attack, defeatists say they could burn everything down. And so it’s been since the web first opened ed-tech gates in the 1970s, when adaptive learning — also known in its early days as “intelligent tutoring systems” — caught the fire of pioneers who had a hunch that computers might eventually achieve the human ability to adjust individually to each learner’s struggles. In the recent adaptive industry shakeout, some vendors are still cooking; others have been snuffed out.

While not as economically momentous, say, as consolidation in the automotive industry, recent adaptive mergers and acquisitions reveal a distinctive pattern. Following a _Harvard Business Review_ analysis of corporate consolidation, adaptive systems now mark a stage at which top players own the lion’s share of the market. On the heels of [McGraw-Hill’s proposed merger with](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/05/02/cengage-and-mcgraw-hill-merge) Cengage just a few weeks ago, McGraw-Hill finds its ALEKS software, acquired just six years ago, leading the pack.

“Ultimately, a company’s long-term success depends on how well it rides the consolidation curve,” [cautions _Harvard Business Review_](https://hbr.org/2002/12/the-consolidation-curve%20analysis). “Slower \[growing\] firms eventually become acquisition targets and will likely disappear.”

The current shakeout also parallels the “disillusionment phase” of the Gartner hype cycle, a popular analysis, charting ups and downs of new technologies, coined by [Gartner, the big information technology consulting firm](https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle). In this treacherous cycle, “Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investment continues only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.”

Adaptive Learning M&A Scorecard

Brand

Company

ALEKS

McGraw-Hill Education merges with Cengage as McGraw-Hill

Knewton

Wiley

Smart Sparrow

ACT (strategic investment)

Carnegie Learning

CIP Capital

Acrobatiq

Vital Source

Knowre

Daekyo Company

Fishtree

Follett

So what’s happening? Why is the adaptive industry house cleaning now, sweeping up some early, promising start-ups?

“Companies like Knewton and others went straight into black-box algorithms, assuming mastery of what learning data actually means and how students learn,” observed Hill in an email message. “Their customers were really venture capitalists, not academic programs with real teachers and students.”

The biggest lesson is that inventing whiz-bang software is not nearly enough. To succeed, vendors must assemble an adaptive Rubik’s cube, snapping four essentials securely in place. The central one, of course, is brilliantly crafted technology, coupled with a deep reservoir of high-quality content, integrated with shrewd assessment tools, embedded with skilled teacher training at each site — all at scale to secure market share, sustainability, profits and plugged-in implementation at every campus. Not trivial.

While some were good at this or that, few pulled it all together. The biggest handicap for many is their thin content libraries. In his prescient insight, Bill Gates wrote in his famous 1996 essay, “[Content Is King](https://www.silkstream.net/blog/2014/07/content-is-king-bill-gates-1996.html),” “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet.”

One thing start-ups didn’t need was arrogance, especially trumpeting extravagant claims. In 2013, five years after Jose Ferreira launched Knewton, he [boasted in _Time_](http://nation.time.com/2013/06/06/the-adaptive-learning-revolution/) that there will be only one company in the world capable of succeeding at adaptive learning. “I think it’s going to be us because we’re so far ahead now.”

None achieved significant scale, except McGraw-Hill’s ALEKS, a math and chemistry tutoring system, and its sister product, SmartBook. ALEKS reports 4.5 million unique users in K-12 and higher ed courses. Since 2010, it has generated 8.7 billion interactions. In humanities, social sciences, science and business, the company claims 11.8 billion interactions since 2009. McGraw-Hill offers more than 800 titles for adaptive users.

It turns out that adaptive systems are neither the best thing since sliced bread nor half-baked. Like much of ed tech, adaptive research results can be ambiguous, with some saying [the software is marginally better](https://www.sri.com/sites/default/files/brochures/almap_final_report.pdf) than classroom instruction, while others [report impressive results](http://www.public.asu.edu/~kvanlehn/Stringent/PDF/EffectivenessOfTutoring_Vanlehn.pdf).

Alfred Essa, vice president of analytics and data science at Macmillan, says that “in some domains, well-designed adaptive tutors are on a par with human tutors.” A truly remarkable feat. Until recently, Essa was head of research at McGraw-Hill.

The ironic denouement is that an old-line publisher, founded at the end of the 19th century, more than 130 years ago, outwitted high-tech upstarts, countering modern corporate trends in which whiz kids leave the old guard in the digital dust. Curiously, Knewton, an adaptive falling star, is now in the hands of Wiley, another venerable publisher, founded more than 200 years ago in 1807.

Even curiouser — while there was lots of chatter about the effect on textbooks, very little attention was given to how these deals were shaking out the adaptive marketplace.

_Disclosure: The author serves on the McGraw-Hill Education Learning Science Advisory Board and is the editor of_ Virtual Teamwork _(Wiley, 2010)._

Original URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/06/12/explaining-shakeout-adaptive-learning-market-opinion

More colleges are looking to online programs for financial health these days—and even survival—as demographic changes are leading fewer students to seek traditional campus experiences.

But as many academic leaders look around for help going online, they often can’t find experts at their own institutions with the experience and skills to build a virtual campus, or to run the sophisticated marketing efforts it takes to attract students around the country and around the world. That’s why OPMs—online program managers, commercial vendors with expertise in launching and delivering digital programs—eagerly bounded in.

Thomas D’Aunno’s experience is typical of those who go the OPM route. When D’Aunno, director of the Master in Health Administration and Health Policy & Management Program at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, was hunting for the best way to launch a [new online degree](https://onlinemha.wagner.nyu.edu/#), he quickly discovered all the things he didn’t know about the logistics of running an online program. “The question was which OPM we were going to work with,” he says, “not whether we were going to work with one.” Now in its first semester, D’Aunno’s new online master’s, not only reached its initial enrollment goal, but it’s also going very well. Not incidentally, he’s learned what it takes.

On the other extreme, some institutions have decided to build their own virtual campuses without OPMs. Those include a handful of public and private institutions, including Southern New Hampshire University, Arizona State University and University of Central Florida, have seen enrollments rise markedly, now surprisingly close to—or hitting—[100,000 each](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/12/06/online-necessary-strategy-age-when-size-matters-opinion).

First at Stevens Institute of Technology and later at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where I was dean of online learning at both schools, we decided to do it ourselves, built an in-house unit, hiring experts in instructional design, digital recruitment and other virtual crafts, enrolling 30,000 online students in about 20 years.

But with colleges all around us jumping into bed with OPMs, we wondered whether we were fooling ourselves. To explore whether we were making a mistake by continuing to go it alone, several years ago we invited three top OPMs to show us how each might help us launch a new online master’s degree we had in mind.

Once proposals rolled in, we consulted our finance colleagues, who cautioned us against signing up, advising us that the economic benefits we were achieving on our own far outweighed anything we might gain from a partnership.

In exchange for financing new online programs and conjuring virtual magic for your programs, OPMs commonly take about half of resulting online tuition revenue, more or less splitting the take, with some agreements calling for the vendor to receive as much as seventy percent (usually in cases where the OPM is also acting as the banker to front the money to set up the program). Our school’s finance team reminded us that on our own, we pocketed it all. Without an OPM bankrolling us, luckily, we were able to back each online semester, drawn from our own online course revenue—even topping it off with a decent surplus.

While at first, some universities may outsource online programs to help them jump digital hurdles, in the long run, many colleges that turn to OPMs, rather than build their own virtual units may end-up regretting their decision. Chances are, when online emerges as the best game in town, institutions lacking digital capabilities will be hamstrung—not knowing how to scale-up as remote learning becomes indispensable for the long-term health of higher education.

Outsourcing your institution’s digital education infrastructure could impoverish your college, leaving it hollowed out, lacking essential virtual competencies just when you will surely need them most. Partnering with an OPM is the equivalent of a patient with a serious illness popping pain killers rather than treating the underlying condition.

Of course, universities have outsourced a wide variety of tasks for years—think of food services and campus security as examples. But most of those functions are on the periphery of the university’s mission, not at its very heart.

Sure, going online isn’t cheap; but neither are science labs or football stadiums. Higher education has always found the money to support its scientists and athletes. Institutions with a clear vision find ways to finance infrastructure needed to fulfill their mission. Partnering with OPMs is an easy way out. The hard way is to go for what’s best over the long haul.

For institutions that have already signed on with commercial vendors, it may be best just to go on blithely as a temporary measure, rolling in a Trojan horse strategy, disguising your gameplan to learn all you can about how they do it, hoping eventually to mirror their skill when you’re finally on your own. Partnerships can be exploited by colleges as workshops to gain know-how, especially how to build active-learning courses or how to run a call center, among other competencies, like online staffing and budgeting. Once you get the hang of it, you’re ready to take off your training wheels.

For most colleges and universities, perhaps the biggest challenge is how to recruit virtual learners with sophisticated, web-savvy techniques that may require—at the most elaborate end—fairly advanced knowledge of machine learning and other top-of-the-line tools, especially in selecting targeted databases and bidding on ad space in search engines, which are the [most costly parts](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-09-06-forget-us-news-rankings-for-online-college-programs-google-is-kingmaker) of going online.

In other words, partnering with OPMs may not be a bad idea if your plan essentially is to hire the company as your college’s teacher, showing you how to operate in the space so you can eventually go it alone. But be careful. Make sure your agreement calls for you to own all the data your vendor collected on your behalf—especially recruitment and student information—so that you’re not left holding an empty digital bag. But also remember that commonly, OPM contracts run for a fairly long stretch, some for as many as 7 to 10 years. So if you’re thinking of keeping your learning curve fairly short—think again.

## Rising to a Challenge

Admittedly, virtual capabilities are not easy to come by, especially for institutions that have little or no experience. But, historically, universities have not backed away from assuming a powerful role in what at first appeared to be overwhelming odds. On the contrary, over time, higher education has risen to overcome some of society’s most intractable challenges. In the twentieth century, universities have conquered polio and diphtheria, among other traumatic diseases. Putting their best minds to it, there’s little doubt that higher education can learn how to manage digital recruitment expertly, too.

Then, too, some vendors have [unbundled their services](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-04-04-when-colleges-consider-outsourcing-online-programs-calculations-can-get-complicated), so if you find that your college is prepared to hire its own cadre of instructional designers, for example, to work together with faculty members to produce virtual courses, but your institution is not up for managing digital recruitment, you might find it convenient to outsource just the marketing part of the job while performing other activities in house.

OPMs may be an expedient solution if your institution has only one or two online degree programs in mind. Until recently, most vendors have been brought in to run merely one—or just a handful—of programs, rarely managing the full curriculum, with dozens, if not thousands, of online courses. Partnering with an OPM is a quick way of jumping in without having to install a full-blown unit to handle it all like we did at NYU Tandon Online.

But if your institution is sensible, accepting that online learning will be a long-term university objective, then it’s wise to perform a risk analysis, comparing the benefits and dangers of dealing with an outside vendor versus going solo.

In his widely followed blog, Joshua Kim, director of digital learning initiatives at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, insightfully [remarked](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/technology-and-learning/5-things-universities-want-opm-providers), “What we really care about is the long-term resilience of our institutions, and our ability to meet our strategic goals and to support our larger institutional missions. Online education is integral to how education is changing. Online programs provide opportunities to not only bring in new (much needed) dollars, but also to build new institutional capacities.”

This column is not an argument against commercial vendors as corporate interlopers in academic space (on which I’ve [commented elsewhere](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/08/30/bob-ubell-says-its-time-shut-down-profit-institutions)), nor is it opposed to their unorthodox contractual terms. As a matter of fact, from all reports, on the whole, top OPMs are really good at it. Most colleges are pleased with the results, even while admitting that not all marriages are happy, with a few ending-up so miserable, they get divorced. A few years ago, I visited an OPM facility of a first-rank firm and was quite impressed with their knowledgeable, sophisticated personnel and practices.

The way forward is to acknowledge that online no longer runs along academic side streets, but now occupies the main road. To succeed, higher education leaders must get some digital skin in the game and make big investments in home-grown virtual skills and infrastructure, building digital capacity to ensure the long-term viability of the university.

At stake is not just the health of online learning, but the life of higher education itself.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-04-22-for-colleges-outsourcing-the-virtual-future-is-a-bad-idea

_The author, Robert Ubell, is Vice Dean of Online Learning and the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where he headed the school’s e-learning unit, NYU Tandon Online._

For those who have defended digital education for a couple of decades, enrolling thousands of online students feels like a triumph — at first. But with a closer look, it raises concerns. Enrolling students without ensuring they can succeed is terribly unwise. … Lisa Bellantuono, now director of graduate admissions operations at George Washington University, who recently ran online student recruitment at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, is among the most astute leaders recognizing the obstacles virtual students must jump. … Bellantuono stressed the importance of hosting virtual learner orientation sessions, guiding online students on how best to navigate the often baffling system.

[_See more…_](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2019/04/10/colleges-need-go-online-must-recognize-how-different-students-are)

Original URL: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/why-online-ethical-practice

From the very start of digital education, the big question has always been: “How can students learn effectively, if they’re not face-to-face with their instructors?”

Since digital education first emerged, following the heady early days of the World Wide Web in the ‘90s, online learning faced the elusive hurdle of turning disembodied classmates and instructors into living, breathing engaged learners and teachers, with minds and hearts you can feel, know and understand; with whom you can imagine sitting together in a lecture hall.

Clever techies have stepped up to the challenge with their ingenious gadgets, transforming remote students into tangible beings with a heartbeat, devising uncanny innovations, most now surprisingly part of mainstream education, right on campus.

More than two decades ago, when I was hired at Stevens Institute of Technology, as dean of web-based distance learning—a quaint title for what is now known as online learning—few tools were available to help faculty migrate their on-campus courses online. I’d send instructors off into virtual classrooms, practically on their own, with little or no support. Sink or swim. Courageously, pioneer faculty would just dive in, largely unaided by high-tech devices, making do, often in inspired ways, simply and creatively with their wits and ingenuity.

Looking back now, here are my picks for what have emerged as the most influential tools for online learning that have helped bring digital education from an experiment to a mainstream practice.

## Learning Management Systems

With learning management systems now installed at nearly all higher education institutions here and abroad, instructors can create course materials, assess student progress and generate custom exams. Students can communicate peer-to-peer and also engage instructors directly in text, voice, and video, recorded for later access or run immediately in real-time. Students enroll in courses seamlessly, with attendance and grades plugged-in to an institution’s central records automatically.

In a telephone interview, Phil Hill, edtech guru and co-publisher of the widely followed [e-Literate blog](https://mfeldstein.com/) , acknowledged that “the LMS is not only part of the university’s core infrastructure, but it also allows faculty and students to use technology creatively in the classroom.” Hill conceded that while “it’s not sexy and is often bashed, without it, students can’t get their grades or find their assignments.”

Neck and neck for the top spot in the LMS academic vendor race are Blackboard—the early entry and once-dominant player—and coming-up quickly from behind, the relatively new contender, Canvas, [each serving about 6.5 million students](https://edutechnica.com/2018/10/06/6th-annual-lms-data-update/) . The LMS market today is [valued at $9.2 billion](https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/learning-management-systems.asp).

## Digital Authoring Systems

Faced with increasingly complex communication technologies—voice, video, multimedia, animation—university faculty, expert in their own disciplines, find themselves technically perplexed, largely unprepared to build digital courses. Online places a burden on faculty they had not foreseen when they signed up for academic life.

After all, most professors started out believing they were destined to do scholarly work, perform research, publish results and teach in classrooms; but for most, teaching online was not what they had in mind.

As sophisticated digital skills—capabilities ironically found more commonly among students—became decisive, two new trends emerged. The biggest occurred when instructional designers, long employed by industry, joined online academic teams, working closely with faculty to upload and integrate interactive and engaging content.

The next big move came when instructional designers, as part of their skillset, turned to digital authoring systems, software introduced to stimulate engagement, encouraging virtual students to interface actively with digital materials, often by tapping at a keyboard or touching the screen as in a video game. Most authoring software also integrates assessment tools, testing learning outcomes.

With authoring software, instructional designers can steer online students through a mixtape of digital content—videos, graphs, weblinks, PDFs, drag-and-drop activities, PowerPoint slides, quizzes, survey tools and so on. Some of the systems also offer video editing, recording and screen downloading options. “The good news is that you don’t need to be a programmer to build high-production-value online courses,” said John Vivolo, a former NYU colleague, in a phone interview last week. “All you need is your imagination.”

Compared with the cost of running an online unit, with compensation for instructors, videographers and recruitment staff, authoring tools are a bargain.

The authoring system market is fairly modest, running under $400 million in North America, [according to one analyst](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.transparencymarketresearch.com/amp/digital-content-creation-market.html), but as digital programs continue to proliferate and as more schools turn to instructional designers, the market will surely take off.

## Adaptive Learning

As with a pinwheel set in motion, insights from many disciplines—artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, educational psychology and data analytics—have come together to form a relatively new field known as learning science, propelling advances in a new personalized practice—adaptive learning.

Designed to adjust in real-time to each student’s prior knowledge and skill attainment, adaptive systems respond to variations in ability and diverse student backgrounds, sensitive to the the unique needs of each learner. Based on each student’s actions, when a student gets stuck, the system automatically suggests strategies on how to get out of it and proceed to mastery.

Like much of edtech, research results can be ambiguous, with some saying it’s [marginally better](https://www.sri.com/sites/default/files/brochures/almap_final_report.pdf) than conventional classroom teaching , while others report [impressive results](http://www.public.asu.edu/~kvanlehn/Stringent/PDF/EffectivenessOfTutoring_Vanlehn.pdf). In the most recent annual [Campus Computing Survey](https://www.campuscomputing.net/content/2018/10/31/the-2018-campus-computing-survey), a majority of academic CIOs concluded that “adaptive technology has great potential to improve learning outcomes.”

## MOOCs

Recent virtual upstarts, MOOCs—massive open online courses—catapulted onto the global learning stage when Stanford University computer scientists Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig in 2011 came upon the bright idea of streaming their robotics lectures over the Internet. They knew it was an inventive departure, but they were taken aback when an astonishing 160,000 signed up. (The term MOOC was [coined by others](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042815007363) in 2008.)

Since then, more than 900 colleges and universities have jumped in, collectively offering more than 11,000 courses. Now in its seventh year, MOOCs crossed the 100 million learner mark, recently hitting 101 million. Of the top providers, Coursera, the Wall Street-financed company that grew out of the Stanford breakthrough, is the champion with 37 million learners, followed by edX, an MIT-Harvard joint venture, with 18 million. Launched in 2013, XuetangX, the Chinese platform in third place, [claims 18 million](https://www.class-central.com/report/mooc-stats-2018/?news_banner=b).

MOOCs deliver mostly video-streamed lectures, with some offering readings, problem sets and interactive options as well. Forums often support peer-to-peer interaction. In some conventional courses, MOOCs also supplement on-campus curricula.

At first, MOOCs were available largely free to an unlimited number of participants, but as economic realities forced vendors to reassess their unprecedented generosity, MOOCs evolved. Today, in addition to continuing to offer some course materials at no charge, learners are given a menu of paid options, from modest fees for individual access, to many thousands of dollars for a degree-granting collection of MOOCs in partnership with first-ranked schools—MIT, GeorgiaTech and the University of Illinois among them. Coursera is reportedly [nearing a valuation of $1 billion](https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-2018-revenue-140-million), which would make it a “unicorn” in Silicon Valley parlance.

MOOC critics say that streaming lectures is not terribly innovative. Just like lectures on campus, they fail to engage students in active learning, a likely reason retention rates tend to be depressingly poor, with about 85 to 90 percent exiting pretty soon after they sign-on. But with such staggering enrollments, [many more learners complete](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/education/how-the-pioneers-of-the-mooc-got-it-wrong) than are enrolled in any university.

Former Yale President Rick Levin, who served as Coursera’s CEO for a few years, speaking by phone last week, was optimistic about the role MOOCs will play in the digital economy. “The biggest surprise,” Levin argued, “is how strongly MOOCs have been accepted in the corporate world to up-skill employees, especially as the workforce is being transformed by job displacement. It’s the right time for MOOCs to play a major role.”

* * *

While these examples help animate ghosts inhabiting digital education, I may have introduced the false impression that virtual learning is just a species of technology, another edtech gadget. It turns out, however, these ingenious systems operate as the envelope in which online instruction is delivered, like paper and ink and chairs and desks in conventional classrooms.

In virtual education, pedagogy, not technology, drives the metamorphosis from absence to presence, illusion into reality. Skilled online instruction that introduces peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and other pedagogical innovations stimulate active learning. Online learning is not just another edtech product, but an innovative teaching practice. It’s a mistake to think of digital education merely as a device you switch on and off like a garage door.

The surprising thing is that while these innovations began life online, many crossed over into our analog sphere, productively available to students and faculty on campus, too.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-02-20-online-learning-s-greatest-hits

Classic economic theory predicts that when demand falls, so do prices. But when it comes to the price of college in the past few decades, it’s been just the other way around.

As [data](https://www.educationdive.com/news/is-free-tuition-the-writing-on-the-wall-for-college-as-a-personal-expense/532666/) from the National Student Clearinghouse Center shows, tuition has escalated even as enrollments fell.


Red line is college cost. Black line is enrollment. Source: National Student Clearinghouse Center

The dispiriting result is that half of all low-income high school graduates, cowed by sticker shock, don’t even bother to fill-out applications to go to college. A [report](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/25/study-finds-drop-percentage-low-income-students-enrolling-college) by the American Council on Education concludes: “The rapid price increases in recent years, especially in the public college sector, may have led many students—particularly low-income students—to think that college is out of reach financially.”

Responding to the challenge, a few universities are finally reversing course or slowing tuition increases, either stepping on the breaks or tossing-out tuition altogether. One of the most dramatic examples comes from NYU’s Medical School which [recently ended](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/17/nyu-scholarships-cover-medical-school-tuition-doctors-debt-continues-raise-concern) its $55,000 yearly tuition, at a cost to the school of about $24 million annually.

When I first came across this striking news, I hesitated to even imagine that NYU’s action might be a harbinger. But after digging into recent news reports, I discovered that NYU’s move was not an outlier. A handful of colleges have eliminated fees; others have frozen tuition; and many others sliced tuition like lunch meat at a deli counter. Mills College, for example, a small San Francisco Bay area liberal arts college, [chopped $25,000 off](https://hechingerreport.org/bending-to-the-law-of-supply-and-demand-some-colleges-are-dropping-their-prices/) tuition.

## Tuition Resets

About [20 schools have reduced tuition](https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/college/T042-S003-colleges-lowering-their-tuition/index.html), from a 42 percent cut at Utica College, in New York, to 5 percent at Washington State University. I wondered if this is the start of an academic Costco movement.

Unfortunately, the reality is a bit more complicated, and not always a better deal for students. Some colleges, it turns out, are using a curious academic sleight-of-hand known as “tuition resets” to make changes that look like discounts but sometimes aren’t. That’s the argument made by [Rick Seltzer](https://www.insidehighered.com/users/rick-seltzer) in his [thorough investigation](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/25/trustees-and-new-presidents-lead-push-tuition-resets-despite-debate-over-practices) last fall of recent college pricing techniques.

In his Inside Higher Ed piece, Seltzer argued that “resets typically aren’t being used as a mechanism to cut the net price a private college or university charges—the net price being what students and their families actually pay after colleges lower the sticker price by offering grants and scholarships.” Seltzer recognized that many recent cuts are merely marketing flags, fluttering as in a used car lot, broadcasting lower prices, signaling that “an institution is affordable—a way to grab students’ attention and tell them they really can find a way to pay for a private college.” But as some colleges lower tuition, they also cut financial aid, leaving students and their families stuck with exactly the same bill as they’d pay before the misleading cut.

Tuition resets reveal that college leaders, especially at schools that are watching apprehensively as enrollments dip, are [fearful of marketplace resistance](https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-11-21-how-online-can-save-small-private-colleges-from-going-under) mushrooming—resistance that may eventually put them out of business.

## Looking to Philanthropy

Luckily, some of the discounts are real—and promising. St. John’s University, with campuses in Santa Fe, N.M. and Annapolis, Md., is cutting tuition from $52,000 to $35,000, rending a deep gash in the college’s finances. To make up for the loss, the university plans to generate $300 million in a fund-raising campaign.

“We believe the days when students and families could pay exorbitant tuition prices are gone and they aren’t coming back—nor should they—and we are placing philanthropy at the center of our financial model rather than student-derived revenue to ensure we remain strong financially as a college,” said Mark Roosevelt, college-wide president of St. John’s College and president of the Santa Fe campus, in [one report](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/09/13/st-johns-college-reduces-tuition-increase-students-access).

St. Johns is not alone in turning to philanthropy to cut or eliminate tuition. Fundraising will also make it possible for NYU Medical School to enroll students tuition-free this year. Uptown, Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons will [replace all student financial-aid packages](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-what-it-would-take-to-make-college-tuition-free-2018-10-05) with grants made possible with resources in a new fund launched with a $150 million donation.

Last year, a wealthy real-estate developer [donated](http://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/university-of-hawai-i-receives-117-million-commitment) millions to the University of Hawaii to make the institution tuition-free eventually. Donors also funded Brown University with enough cash to do away with student loans entirely. Among other institutions using philanthropy to ease tuition hikes, donations at Arkansas State University made it possible for the school to avoid a price increase this year.

The biggest news in academic philanthropy this year is the unprecedented [$1.3 billion Bloomberg gift](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2018/9/10/sharing-their-treasure-more-evidence-that-only-donors-can-prevent-tuition-hikes) to Johns Hopkins, allowing financially-strapped incoming students starting in the fall to [eliminate taking out federal loans](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/bloomberg-gives-johns-hopkins-a-record-18-billion-for-student-financial-aid/2018/11/18/8db256cc-eb4e-11e8-96d4-0d23f2aaad09_story.html?utm_term=.c436a5a58d45).

While philanthropy is one way to reverse the spiral, it’s a [tough struggle](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/04/why-the-rich-dont-give/309254/) for many.You’d think that with the top 1 percent of American households, now owning 40 percent of the country’s wealth, raising money from the super-rich would be easy. With such unparalleled deep pockets, these ultra-rich can easily make college affordable for the rest of us. But this group has proved tight-fisted—often giving away less than 2 percent of their income to charity.

## Online to the Rescue

As an online dean, over two decades my philosophical position was that there should be no difference between virtual and face-to-face education. To avoid establishing an academic class system, with online the bargain-basement poor cousin of the superior designer model on campus, colleges must set the same price, too. In my new book, [Going Online](https://www.routledge.com/Going-Online-Perspectives-on-Digital%20Learning/Ubell/p/book/9781138025325), I argued: “By and large, colleges and universities charge the same tuition on campus and online. The practice follows the principle that, if the programs offer the same content, with the same or equally qualified faculty, eventually reporting the same outcomes, there should be no difference in tuition either.” But recent examples at a few enterprising colleges have caused me to change my tune.

Eager to attract budget-minded students, online has cautiously entered the discount economy. One of the first schools to offer differential pricing, Berklee College of Music’s online tuition, for example, is set at [just over a third of the base price](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/11/berklee-college-music-defies-conventional-wisdom-low-price) for its on-campus degrees. Online tuition for its bachelor’s this academic year at nearly $60,000; That’s about 60 percent less than the more than $171,000 residential students pay in Boston.

And in an historic shift, the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s most-selective schools, announced recently that it will offer a nearly fully online bachelor’s in applied arts and sciences next year. It is among the first of the Ivies to offer a virtual undergraduate degree. (Harvard, for example, does not offer a single complete degree online, neither in its master’s nor bachelor’s programs.) In an equally surprising move for a premier institution, the university is also giving enrolled students in its new online bachelor’s an unprecedented discount—[cutting virtual education](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/09/19/penn-introduces-new-online-bachelors-degree-program) tuition by $1,000 per credit.

Scale is the driving force behind the extraordinary economic advantages of MOOC-based online degrees—mostly at the master’s level—that are now available at steep discounts from first-ranked schools from such providers at Coursera and edX. In 2014, Nelson Baker, Georgia Tech’s dean of professional education, launched among the very first of these. Baker recently [told me](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/education/can-moocs-cure-the-tuition-epidemic) that scale allows the school to offer its digital degree for far less than it charges residential students. Four thousand students are enrolled in the school’s online computer science master’s, with just 300 in the on-campus Atlanta program. Georgia residents pay about $20,000 per year for the residential degree, with out-of-staters paying nearly double that. Online students pay an astonishingly-low $7,000 per year for a first-class degree.

“Other universities are coming to us to learn how we’ve done it,” Baker added in an interview last month. “We open our books to them.”

In partnership with edX, GeorgiaTech will deliver [two more low-cost online masters](https://campustechnology.com/articles/2018/10/10/edx-launching-8-new-masters-degree-programs.aspx%5D)—one in analytics and another in cyber security. Seven others from University of Texas at Austin, University California at San Diego and other top schools were also announced by edX this month. Not to be outdone, Coursera, offers 12 discounted master’s, also from top institutions, with online degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, among other schools.

Efforts by just a handful of schools do not constitute a national movement to hang discount tags on academic degrees, but taken together, with the news that the nation’s knee-jerk annual rise in tuition is stabilizing, there are signs that the spiral may no longer be spinning out of control, releasing a deep sigh of relief from millions soon heading for college. Even before new online experiments and other tuition-slashing movements, the [Bureau of Labor Statistics data](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SEEB01?output_view=pct_12mths) shows a recent easing of year-after year increases, with annual growth this year at its lowest in a decade. Ten years ago, yearly hikes hovered around 6 percent. In sharp contrast, this academic year, increases tracked as low as 1.7 percent, a sure sign that institutions are getting the picture with tuition creep slowing down—heading to zero?

Reversing the tuition spiral is not going to be easy for most schools. Forces that compel colleges and universities to continue to take their annual escalator towards ever higher tuition are formidable. At public universities, the principal driver comes from the long-term withdrawal of state funds. An American Council on Education [report](https://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx) concludes, “Based on the trends since 1980, average state fiscal support for higher education will reach zero by 2059, although it could happen much sooner in some states and later in others.” At private institutions, rapidly [rising costs](https://deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/products/154626%20Final01%20Delta%20Cost%20Project%20College%20Spending%2011131.406.P0.02.001%20….pdf) are propelled by continuously swelling student services and ballooning nonacademic bureaucracies.

Still, colleges that have devoted imagination and commitment show that even with the financial stranglehold in which most schools are locked, the spiral can actually be arrested.

College leaders need to recognize that prices have shot up too far. In the next budget cycle, as they face their treacherous spreadsheets—and before they add yet another percentage point to next year’s tuition—they must act to roll back the perilous climb.

Original URL: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-12-13-can-online-learning-help-higher-ed-reverse-its-tuition-spiral/

Published November 1, 2018


In grade school, I remember sitting at my desk at P.S. 135 in Brooklyn, lips sealed, hands clasped in front of me on a wooden desktop, carved with a long, slender channel for pencils and pens; a dark, empty inkwell, splattered with black stains, inserted inches away at the far right.

The radical Brazilian pedagogical philosopher, Paulo Freire, following other exasperated education theorists—John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky and Jerome Bruner, among others—scorned the conventional classroom, making fun of my favorite teacher, Mrs. Rosenberg, for depositing knowledge in my mind as if it were a piggy bank.

Freire [ridiculed](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/171/re-envisioning-paulo-freires-banking-concept-of-education) the “empty mind, passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.” According to Freire, the “banking concept” interferes with intellectual growth by turning students into silent receptors, collectors of information, rather than engaged in active participation, building knowledge together with others.

Little has changed since Victorian times in colleges and universities in the U.S. today—except, of course, students now come to class in t-shirts and distressed jeans, never coming to school embarrassed by the social faux pas of neat jackets and blouses. But knowledge deposits into minds are still the most common way of teaching, even after the invasion of decades of teaching technologies and despite strong evidence that traditional lectures are not nearly as effective as active learning.

According to [_The Chronicle of Higher Education_](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://www.chronicle.com/article/Beyond-Lecturing/46889), the “Lecture remains the dominant or exclusive mode of teaching in many college classrooms today.” Stanford Nobel laureate Carl Wieman and Harvard’s Eric Mazur have [compared](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/eliminating-the-lecture/491135/) the lecture to learning physics to watching a marathon on TV to learn how to run.

A [recent study](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that undergraduate students in classes taught by traditional lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students whose faculty deliver active learning instruction. The paper analyzed 225 studies in a meta-analysis of undergraduate STEM teaching methods, concluding that instruction that encouraged students to participate actively, rather than as passive knowledge banks, boosted exam scores and reduced failure rates markedly.

“The change in the failure rates is whopping,” [commented](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-boring-theyre-ineffective-too-study-finds) the study’s principal author Scott Freeman of the University of Washington. “And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump \[students’\] grades from a B– to a B.”

As dean of online learning for a couple of decades, first at Stevens Institute of Technology and later at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, I championed active learning, encouraging online faculty to move away from delivering videotaped lectures only to a broader array of real-time and asynchronous on-screen and keyboard activities—peer-to-peer learning, virtual teamwork and digital gaming, among other ways of stimulating remote students to dig into what they are learning, not just passively accept instruction, like spectators at a sports arena.

But until this year, embarrassingly, I never taught online myself. “For years, I’ve led hundreds of professors to the virtual well, gratified that they’ve been responsible for instructing about 30,000 online learners, but I never got close to teaching on screen,” I confessed recently in a [column](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2018/10/17/online-dean-describes-how-he-gained-confidence-teach-virtually) in Inside Higher Ed. “I’ve been an online general who sent his virtual troops into battle but, shamefully, never fought in the digital trenches myself.”

Making-up for lost time, this spring, I spent several months working closely with an instructional designer at The New School, where I’ll be delivering an online course on recruiting and retaining virtual students in a four-course online certificate, [Designing Online Programs](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://opencampus.newschool.edu/program/online-learning/online-certificate-programs/designing-online-learning-programs-online-certificate), devising ways to interweave my seven-minute videotaped lectures with active-learning challenges.

The first of my five-week digital course at The New School will go online early next year. I’m eager to find out whether I’ve been able to put into practice what I’ve only theorized until now. In one of Yogi Berra’s inimitable, but surprisingly insightful, contradictions, he’s quoted as saying, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.”

**About the author**

[Robert Ubell](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://www.mheducation.com/learning-science/robert-ubell) is Vice Dean Emeritus at [NYU Tandon School of Engineering](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://engineering.nyu.edu/). He is the author of [_Going Online_](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://www.routledge.com/Going-Online-Perspectives-on-Digital-Learning/Ubell/p/book/9781138025325), published recently by Routledge. His website is [https://wp.nyu.edu/robertubell/](http://web.archive.org/web/20230204225018/https://wp.nyu.edu/robertubell/).

Original URL: https://www.mheducation.com/ideas/shaking-up-piggy-bank-minds.html