[Philip Regier] If everybody could go to an on-campus setting, they would, but that’s simply unrealistic for the vast majority of our students. Now what we’re seeing with the students who are beginning online is that type of freedom is also a huge attraction for them.
[Jon] Not all online higher education is the same. A lot of those for-profit universities are still around, and they still deliver comparatively poor results. Many turn out graduates who don’t make enough to pay off their college loans or who don t make more than adults in their states who didn’t go to college. That’s according to federal data released during the Biden administration.
[Philip Regier] Where you got your degree and what you got your degree in is going to be on your resume forever, or your LinkedIn profile, in this case. And I think very carefully about being expeditious versus being thoughtful about quality.
[Kirk] Okay, Jon, so the first piece of advice is to be careful where you take your online courses. And today you have a lot more choices, including big flagship universities and smaller private colleges with good reputations.
[Jon] Yeah, but Kirk, as with a lot about higher education, not everything is as it seems. Some of those brand-name schools actually contract with third-party providers to run their online divisions. These are called online program managers. But you might never even notice.
[Kirk] Okay, this is a really crazy hurdle for students. These online program managers are mostly for-profit. They do their own marketing and some of them hire their own faculty, even though the course says it comes from a well-known institution. So before you sign up for an online course, ask exactly who will be teaching it.
[Jon] Okay, Kirk. That’s the where, and the who. Now let’s deal with how these places teach online.
Online learners who are out there alone by themselves, they tend not to do well. That’s what happened with the early MOOCs. Good online programs now have real life people available to students who need them when they need them.
[Deb Adair] Often they’re taking these courses, you know, late at night and at odd times, and so they have to have these resources available, and those are, you now, the tutoring centers and the library materials and the other academic supports that are available.
[Jon] Deb Adair is CEO of an organization called Quality Matters. It’s a sort of seal of approval for online programs. She says you shouldn’t stop at asking simply whether or not a school has these things. Make sure you can find them.
[Deb Adair] You can’t just walk to campus and knock on a door, right? So you’re going to have to have that all spelled out.
[Kirk] Okay, Jon, so let’s talk about another important question: what to take online.
[Jon] Yeah, Kirk, I talked to Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University. It’s not only the biggest online university, it’s the country’s biggest university of any kind, with nearly 176,000 students.
I was surprised to hear Pulsipher say that not every subject can necessarily be taught well online — at least not yet.
[Scott Pulsipher] As you moved further into areas that might require project-based learning or hands-on learning or even Socratic methods, those do get a little trickier to do online. It’s really hard to teach, if you will, a technical skill that requires, like, reconstructing a particular mechanical item. So if you’re going to do mechanical engineering, that might be a little tricky to replicate, even if you were using augmented reality in an online environment.
[Jon] Of course, the most important question is whether your online education will lead to a job or a promotion, because that’s the main reason you’re doing it, right? Pulsipher says there’s a simple way to find this out.
[Scott Pulsipher] What is the employment rate of the graduates of that program? Are they employed in the field of study? What kind of income gain or data do they have with that? The other thing that you can just even search and just start to understand is, like, to what degree are graduates of different institutions employed at different employers? You can do searches like this on LinkedIn.
[Jon] Kirk, this all obviously sounds like a lot of work, but the truth is that online higher education is getting better and finding quality programs is getting easier.
[Kirk] Yeah, Jon, a lot of those online program managers are going away or their deals are being renegotiated. More schools are adding advising and office hours for their online students. Online courses are even getting smaller, which allows more personalization.
[Jon] Right, Kirk. But that brings us to a surprising reality I learned recently while working on a story about online higher ed. You’d think it would be cheaper than in-person college, right? In fact, 80 percent of Americans think online higher education should be cheaper. That was a big part of the promise of shifting online. I mean, technology has lowered the price of almost every other service that uses it.
[Kirk] But … not higher education?
[Jon] Nope! More than 8 in 10 online programs cost as much as or more than the in-person versions. And about a quarter of universities and colleges even charge an additional distance learning fee.
[Kirk] Just leave it to colleges to take a good thing and make it worse. So what’s their explanation?
[Jon] I’m glad you asked! So we’ve been talking all this season about how the number of traditional age students is going down, right?
[Kirk] The demographic cliff.
[Jon] Yeah, the demographic cliff. So a survey of online officers found that universities are using the money from their online programs to keep the lights on — to basically subsidize everything else they do.
If you look on social media, you can see how infuriating this is to students. More importantly, it’s yet another reason to keep tuning in here to get the truth about how higher education really works.
[Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report …
[Kirk] And I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH. This episode was produced and written by Jon Marcus …
[Jon] … and Kirk Carapezza.
This episode was edited by Jonathan A. Davis.
Our executive editor is Jenifer McKim.
Our fact checker is Ryan Alderman.
[Kirk] Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.
Mei He is our project manager. And head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
[Jon] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation.