Online Degrees Not Worth the Paper They’re Not Printed On?
Posting has been a little slow around here since this is December, and you know what that means for academics. It doesn’t help that my university decided to shut off the heat in most of its buildings for two weeks to save money. So here I am, working from home, when I came across a post by Tony Karrer pointing me to this little video from Saturday Night Live. It’s not fantastic (very little SNL is these days, of course), but it does deliver an interesting message about online education, and by extension, online training.
This is certainly satire, but it does reflect a very real perception about online education. The question is, what is the cause? Is it because online education is less expensive than traditional education, and people think cheap reflects a lack of quality? Is it because online education requires less time, and people think online degree seekers are less serious about their education? Is it because people think online education simply cannot be as effective as traditional instruction, despite evidence to the contrary? And even if this is a common public perception, is it shared by the people making hiring decisions?
So then, I suppose this is the real concern: how would hiring managers rank-order the value of degrees from the following list: bachelor’s from a university, bachelor’s from a SLAC, bachelor’s from a CC, associate’s from a university, associate’s from a SLAC, associate’s from a CC, and the equivalents from online schools. As far as I know, there is no research available to answer this question… yet.
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From my experience (or rather, my husband’s, as he worked at an online university for several years) the main complaint against online universities is not really related to any of the above. Many students come away from programs completely under-prepared because the university is more interested in students’ checks clearing than whether they are learning.
Personally, I think one of the major problems with online universities is that they often victimize the economically disadvantaged. Here’s oftentimes what happened to students at my husband’s school:
-Student is accepted into a school without providing any SAT/ ACT/ GRE scores (and unfortunately, many students are simply not smart enough to hack it at a brick and mortar college, and see online universities as the next best thing)
-Student proceeds to fail out of numerous classes. However, the college does not put them on academic probation. Students are allowed to take classes as many times as necessary to pass
-Student then takes several years to graduate because of multiple retakes. Oftentimes, there is also misinformation/ poor communication about deadlines and requirements, so students oftentimes have to enroll an extra semester for some stupid administrative reason
-Student graduates with a huge debt (some had upwards of 90k by the time they finished)
-Student learns that the program was not accredited, and now is unable to get licensed/ employed with their expensive degree.
Could online education work? Sure. Can it as effective as brick-and-mortar schools? You bet. From what I hear, Fielding is a good example of a school that seems to get it right. Unfortunately, there are some really bad schools out there with unaccredited or failing programs, and the people who tend to end up in them are ones who simply don’t have the resources to know that these issues are a problem. So I think until these schools start behaving ethically and ensuring that their students are treated as students rather than cash cow, this mode of education is going to be dismissed by the greater public, and for good reason.
Online schools offered by established universities, such as Arizona State and the University of Kansas, can be excellent alternatives to not being able to get the degree you want because you cannot take the time out during the day or even night to go literally to class. One working an established 40+ hour week and then having other duties will leave very little time for travel to and from class, let alone the time spent in class – that may not be well spent depending on the teacher, issues in class, etc. I finished my bachelors online and was trying to get dual masters at the same time, one from an in-person university and one online. The online forensic psychology masters from ASU was wonderful. I put more effort into it and got so much out of it. And to get close to similar experience I would have had to move there. The in-person University had all the lovely issues of gatekeeping and discrimination by older white men /women complicated by getting sick with COVID and feels like such a waste of money right now. Depends on the school and its reputation before it offered online classes.
But that’s not a problem unique to online schools, is it? There are plenty of cash-cow for-profit (proprietary) colleges and universities as well… If there are both online and brick-and-mortar ethical and unethical schools, why trust the brick-and-mortar but not the online? Is it just because most online started out unethical and has only improved recently?
It’s fascinating to see how perceptions about online education continue to evolve, especially in the context of its comparison to traditional forms of education. Your analysis raises some thought-provoking questions about the underlying reasons behind these perceptions.