From the Chronicle of higher ed website: Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories this past week. The University of Texas’ online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. And in Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium. A Chronicle article today takes a look at how those predicaments reflect the growing pains of public online education. As programs mature, their business models have come under more scrutiny. What role should these consortia play? How should states pay for them? Or should they? —Marc Parry http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3783/the-growing-pains-of-public-online-education
I don't like the idea that online programs should be viewed as a separate "business" from the university's core offerings, with a "business model" that is expected to be self-funding. No one expects the brick and mortar portion of a public university to be 100% self-funding, why should students who attend at a distance be held to a different standard?
Here in California, the state government is experiencing significantly reduced tax revenues. Given the voters' rejection of new taxes last Tuesday, the state is looking at its biggest budget crisis since the 1930's. That means large-scale budget reductions across the board, including higher education. Student fees will no doubt be raised (again). Faculty hiring will freeze and teachers without tenure who are on semester-to-semester contracts won't be re-signed. They are inevitably going to be cutting class sections and probably even entire programs. There's going to be blood and severed body parts in the water. So how is DL going to fare? Decisions on what's expendable are going to be totally political, so does DL have the consituency, the influential advocates, necessary to keep its head attached to its shoulders? It's kind of a sad reality that many university professors seem hostile towards DL. They associate it with the University of Phoenix and with adjuncts squeezing full-timers out of cushy jobs. Few of the doctoral programs that are such a big part of professors' own self-image are conducted by DL, which seems overwhelmingly concerned with vocational degrees designed for lesser people. So I don't expect to see our educators going to bat very determinedly on behalf of DL. They are apt to see it as something that was slightly smelly anyway, that can be trimmed out of the state university budget at little cost to them and theirs. Of course, given the U. of Phoenix association, the question will inevitably be asked -- 'Why isn't our DL operation making equally obscene profits that support the rest of our more worthily academic programs?' So rather than killing all the DL programs, some of the ones offering high demand vocational subjects like business and nursing might end up being commercialized shamelessly with their tuitions being jacked up to whatever the market will bear.
