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.