The University of California is planning a new online degree program comparable in quality to its on-campus classes. It’s a good-but-not-entirely novel idea whose time is well past due, but what’s troublesome is the logic employed by the university:
Long term, the idea is to expand access to the university while saving money. Tuition for online and traditional courses would be the same. But with students able to take courses in their living rooms, the university envisions spending less on their education while increasing the number of tuition-paying students – helpful as state financial support drops.
This is an all-too-common practice in online higher education: use the online delivery platform as a method to save institutional expenditures, but keep any extra student fees cost savings to subsidize other programs. We might also call this balancing budgets off the backs of students.
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5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
5/11/2012 | In Diverse, Steve Burd comments on the Obama administration's plans to address student debt. 
5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
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I think that really gets at the fallacy of online teaching. If really done well and in a high quality manner it shouldn’t be incredibly cheaper. But if you do it right, you could save money by having students either complete their degrees faster by getting needed classes or not having to repeat gatekeeper courses. Either of those things would generate pretty big cost savings if you’re talking about courses that are big roadblocks to degree completion.
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