The $99/month university?

If “information wants to be free,” and we’re in the information business, what’s our long-term fate in higher education? That’s the general concern raised in this Chronicle piece.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/College-for-99-a-Month-/7898/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

I’ve passed along some articles about “Facebook University” and other “cheap” higher education options that are now out there. Here’s another one, the $99/month university called “StraighterLine.”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php

http://www.straighterline.com/

The basic idea is to offer pre-packaged Core courses in an on-line environment with various support elements (on-line tutors, web modules, an assigned advisor/professor with a Ph.D., etc.). You can take as many courses for credit as you can handle at $99/month. This is akin to what that Global Campus at Illinois was trying to do in a larger format but failed to implement.

So what happens to places like JBU if people decide to take the “cheap” courses elsewhere and transfer in all of those credits and only take the “expensive” courses at the “elite” schools? We’d probably see increasing numbers of transfers, traditional undergraduate populations skewing more toward upper classmen, fewer students living on campus, more students taking graduate courses, fewer students taking face to face degree completion programs, and more students looking for on-line options. Hmm . . . that pretty much describes our experience in the last few years. Extend these trends a bit further, and our “money making programs” in Advance, undergraduate “core,” and room/board get squeezed more and more. Another hmm . . .

Of course, what some commentators note is that places like JBU are not at all in the information business, but in the whole person development business. Whether our external constituencies will agree with us, however, is another question, and if they don’t, is higher education headed increasingly along the path already trod by the newspaper business? Aren’t you glad that we’ve started a strategic planning process in which we all get to think about such matters?