Let’s start off with my favorite quote on the matter, from Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org, who says that the new legislation “appears to represent a reasonable compromise that separates the wheat from the chaff without discarding too much wheat.” What’s this mean for for-profit schools? It means that the degree mills tarnishing the industry’s good record will be getting a bit of comeuppance.

Arne Duncan Gives For-Profit Colleges a Big Thumbs-Up

For-profit schools in general–and online education specifically–get a bad rap. There’s something about not having a traditional brick-and-mortar campus that makes people think of the degree mills that promised a doctorate in a weekend for three easy payments. Those days are gone, thank goodness, but not all for-profit institutions are providing the quality of education they should be. As is usually the case, a few bad apples are making everybody else look bad.

Secreary of Education Arne Duncan understands this, fortunately. In a briefing today, he went so far as to point out that “Some proprietary schools have profited and prospered but their students haven’t, and this is a disservice to students and to taxpayers. And it undermines the valuable work, the extraordinarily important work, being done by the for-profit industry as a whole.” If that isn’t a vote of confidence for the industry as whole, I don’t know what is.

The Market Agrees: Stocks Go Up for For-Profit Schools

When they heard about this proposed legislation on Wall Street, stocks started climbing. DeVry Inc.’s stock jumped a full 13 percent, making it one of the biggest gainers for the day. Other for-profit schools saw mixed reactions today, but as it becomes clear just which schools will be affected by the new rules, things are sure to sort themselves out.

It’s estimated that if no changes are made, only 5 percent of schools would be losing their federal funding 2012. That’s a good amount of time to get things up to par and not very many schools that have to do it. During the press briefing, Duncan commented, “We want to hit the ones at the bottom, those that simply aren’t working for students. The 5 percent would frankly be the bottom of the barrel.”

What Are the New Rules?

Under the proposal, schools would be grouped into three groups, largely based on former students’ federal student loan debt and income:

• The Good (Qualify for federal aid): A minimum of 45 percent of former students are paying down the principal on their federal loans. Graduates have at most a 20 percent debt-to-earnings ratio for discretionary income and 8 percent ratio for total income.
• The Bad (Subject to enrollment limits and required to warn about high debt levels): Between 35 and 45 percent of former students are paying down their principals, and graduates have a debt-to-earnings ratios of between 20 and 30 percent, and 8 and 12 percent, for discretionary and total incomes respectively.
• The Ugly (Do not qualify for federal aid): Less than 35 percent of students are paying down the principal on their loans. And their debt-to-earnings ratio is enough to make anyone’s life uncomfortable at over 30 percent for discretionary income and 12 percent for total income.

The idea is to make the schools responsible for the claims they make about preparing graduates for careers. And it seems perfectly reasonable to me. This can only help the image of for-profit education, which will be a boon for online education.

A while back, the U.S. Department of Education did a meta-analysis of a number of studies comparing online learning and traditional, face-to-face learning. Very basically, the study found that a mix of classroom and online instruction is the most effective form of education, with strictly online education coming in second and strictly face-to-face instruction bringing up the rear–and the controversy.

Recently, a new report from the Community College Research Center challenged these findings. Perfectly timed, the report’s release coincided with the University of California’s announcement that they are seriously considering offering degrees you can earn entirely online. After reading this report and sifting through the one-sided language, I found that it does a fair job of questioning the validity of the data used in the Dept. of Ed. report. As the report goes on, though, a bias against online education becomes clear.

A Critique of the Response to the Meta-Analysis of Online Learning Studies

Let’s break it down…

Stacking the Odds: Shortening the List in Favor of Face-to-Face Instruction

First, let’s look at how the response chopped the Dept. of Education’s list down to 7 studies. From the report:

“[O]f the 23 hybrid courses that were examined in studies included in the meta-analysis, 20 required the students to physically attend class for the same amount of time that students in a face-to-face course would attend; the online portions of these courses were either in on-campus computer labs or were completed in addition to regular classroom time.”

Okay, great point there. It’s important to distinguish between hybrid programs that require time online outside of a traditional class schedule and those that are split more evenly between face-to-face and online instruction. Now, let’s keep in mind that this response isn’t trying to tackle any further claims about hybrid education–they stop here, and those last three courses that were determined acceptable aren’t mentioned again.

The response is, though, focusing heavily on online education, so they decide to weed through the Dept. of Education list to find the studies “that compared fully online courses to face-to-face courses,” of which there were 28. They focused on seven of these, saying the others were not relevant because “(1) conditions are unrepresentative of typical college courses, or (2) target populations are dissimilar to college students.” Okay, so they’re only interested in semester-long courses, not studies on shorter courses; I can get behind that one.

The target population part of this little formula for whittling down the list of studies they aim to debase, though, doesn’t sit well with me. By only looking at “those studies conducted with undergraduate or graduate students in semester-long online courses”, they ignore the “professionals outside of the college setting”, who are taking online courses because they can’t fit a traditional campus education into their schedules–a good-sized chunk of online students. This one has other implications, too. By limiting their focus to students who are in a college setting, they’re also limiting their focus to studies done in a traditional college setting (i.e., a campus college, not an online one). Why is this important? Because campus-based schools are geared towards campus education not online education–and they should be; it’s their thing. Online instruction isn’t their thing, which means that they may not have done the best job developing the online versions of the classes mentioned in the studies. So the odds are stacked against online programs from the get-go because they’re only looking at campus colleges trying something new, which becomes even more clear when they start critiquing individual studies later on.

Online Instruction Holds Its Own while Getting Downplayed

Now that we know how they determined which bits of data to pay attention to, let’s look at the studies in question. Keep in mind as we go through, that these are online versions of campus courses designed by professors who usually teach in a traditional, face-to-face setting. I’m not saying that courses designed to be taught online by professors experienced in that medium of instruction would be that much better, but, gosh, doesn’t it seem like that would be the case?

Comparing strictly online courses to strictly campus courses (occasionally with a hybrid or additional online version of the course thrown in), the studies found…

• Caldwell (2006): “[...] no significant differences [...].”
• Cavus and Ibrahim (2007): “The advanced-collaboration online course significantly outperformed both the standard-collaboration online and face-to-face courses [...]; there was no significant difference between the standard-collaboration online course and the face-to-face course.”
• Davis, Odell, Abbitt, and Amos (1999): “[...] no significant difference [...]“
• LaRose, Gregg, and Eastin (1998): “[...] no significant difference [...]“
• Mentzer, Cryan, and Teclehaimanot (2007): “[...] students in the online and face-to-face classes had the same test scores, but the online group was less likely to turn in assignments [...].”
• Peterson and Bond (2004): “[...] the online group still scored similarly to the face-to-face group [...].”
• Schoenfeld-Tacher, McConnell, and Graham (2001): “[...] online students showed significantly higher adjusted post-test scores [...].”

For those of you keeping score, that’s six ties and one win for online education (two if you count Cavus and Ibrahim’s advanced collaboration class). Which is why it makes total sense when the response report summarizes by saying that there was a “lack of consistent differences in outcomes between online and face-to-face.” Wait, no, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Grasping at Straws

My favorite part of this report has to be the way it clings to the following assertion [emph. added]:

In addition, eight students who had taken both an online and a face-to-face teacher education course from the two participating instructors were interviewed, and all eight felt that the face-to-face course had better prepared them for teaching.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this particular teacher education course wasn’t aimed teaching online courses. This finding only shows that a face-to-face teaching course better prepared students for face-to-face teaching, which isn’t surprising, let alone noteworthy. It’s easier to learn how to stand up in front of people and teach from someone who is standing up in front of you and teaching. The fact that the online students scored the same as their face-to-face counterparts is what should be held up as the primary finding, not that eight of the students who did both felt better prepared.

Some Notes on Another Critique of the Response to the… You Get the Idea

Education news website Inside Higher Ed wrapped up their summary of the report with this quote from John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium:

“I am exceptionally dubious of studies that tend to compare online education and on-the-ground education without even an attempt to understand the differences in the mechanisms of teaching. The jury is absolutely still out on this, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s about the delivery mechanism, but what the affordances are of the delivery.”

Bourne added that he thinks both reports in question are flawed but interesting, which seems like a great place to leave things: up in the air (at least until we get some real studies done and have those analyzed by non-biased parties).

Big changes in a field always take a while to catch on, and higher education is certainly no exception. The University of California is playing with the idea of offering “a highly selective, fully online, credit-bearing program on a large scale,” as described by UC Berkeley’s law school dean, Christopher Edley. Critics of the idea are saying that this will cheapen the value of the degrees that this institution offers; let’s take a look at just how fallacious their reasoning is, shall we?

Five-Star Degree or Fast-Food Education?

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle starts off with the following:

Taking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald’s: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you’re just as full.

The point here is definitely valid, online education leaves one “just as full” of valuable knowledge and critical thinking skills as on-campus education does. But let’s get one thing clear here, there is a huge difference between what we call fast food and healthy, delicious food that is prepared quickly and served conveniently.

If UC does this properly, the program won’t be a cheap knock-off of their campus experience; it’ll be the same high-quality degree without having to find a parking spot on campus, without having to find a cheap place to subsist near campus while earning a degree, without having to wade through a sea of freshman carrying a heavy book bag to find your cramped lecture hall. The point is that making the degree logistically easier to get doesn’t mean making it less rigorous–it’s still just as difficult to earn the degree, but students wouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do so.

Campus Education Got Served

Let us not forget the 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Education in which traditional campus education totally got served. To wit…

Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

Let’s not be one-sided about this, the study did find that hybrid programs are more effective than strictly campus or strictly online degree programs. I don’t mean to make this out to be some kind of one-size-fits-all competition that ignores the fact that different people learn differently and will excel in different types of programs. Online education won, though. Okay, okay, hybrid education won, but in the interest of polarizing the argument (a favorite American pastime), we’ll just skip over that tidbit.

Univ. of Massachusetts and Stanford: Online Degree Mills? No. Not Even a Little.

Let’s look at few other institutes of high-quality higher education and their online programs.

• UMassOnline: The University of Massachusetts has been offering undergraduate and graduate degrees online for years now. They even credit themselves as being “a leader in distance education for over 25 years” on their site.
• Stanford: One of the big names in higher education in the country, Stanford University has been offering completely online degrees since 1998. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t Stanford still a highly ranked school?

The big counter example to these programs is the one through University of Illinois, or rather the one that was offered through U of I. Their Global Campus program simply wasn’t done properly. Inside Higher Ed covered the story, quoting one professor at the school in a way that summed up the whole debacle:

The department said, ‘This is garbage, and we will not put our degree on it,’ and Global Campus said ‘We’ll offer it.’

So, to wrap things up, there is most certainly a difference between fast food and timely, convenient food. U of I tried to offer the former with a big logo on the front, and they crashed and burned–rightly so. Stanford and U. Mass are doing the latter, and they seem to being doing quite well with it, thank you very much. Which camp the University of California will fall into remains to be seen, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for them.