Recognizing that you acknowledged this in what I cut, but this really isn’t the case for large sections of the population—and not just in rural areas! I live in (easily) the most densely urbanized area of my low population density state, and the local high schools have to lend out Chromebooks to gobs and bunches of students whose families legitimately can’t afford even a cheap computer at home, and many of those students are dependent on places like public libraries to provide them even basic internet access so that they can complete things like group projects using Google Docs. (And that’s high school, but such issues continue and may well increase at the postsecondary level.)
Plus, as others have mentioned, there are a bunch of college majors that quite simply don’t work remotely—they require hands-on experience. (Our local university has a baccalaureate aviation tech major, and one of the tracks within that major includes pilot certification. I would not want someone to complete that particular major remotely, you know?) And that’s even leaving aside the number of individual classes that simply don’t work remotely, presenting barriers to students completing their degrees online, because they have a limited set of options as they negotiate their path to graduation.
So yes, there are excellent 100% online options—and it’s amazing that we have them! They are still more limited and, for most students, more difficult than in-person options, however—and those drawbacks are likely to continue into the foreseeable future.
This is not an accurate statement. I spent my junior year of college in France. One option we had was to stay in a French dorm, which was about a 10-15 minute walk from the university. The beautiful thing was that we all had singles and a sink (and bidet!) in our bedrooms. But toilets and showers were down the hall. You had to bring your own toilet paper to the bathroom. The toilets did not have toilet seats, so you used your leg muscles unless you wanted to be sitting on the rim of the toilet. There was no air conditioning. There was an eating establishment next door that was only open for a couple of hours at dinner (and maybe lunch?). There was only one meal option for the day, so you took it or left it (though it was a very affordable meal, but not necessarily the tastiest). You could rent a refrigerator locker (maybe about 10"x12"x12") and keep food in there and there were 4 hot plates on each floor for residents to prepare their meals. And the cost of housing was way less than sharing an apartment in the center of town.
Having a dorm does not a residential campus make, not in Europe and not in the U.S. I suspect that the vast majority of commuter college campuses in the U.S. have dorms, and most of them are not the plush dorms with lazy rivers and extensive amenities that have become more common at popular universities.
A friend of mine was recently treated by a Physical Therapist who introduced herself with “I did most of my training online during Covid so we’re going to learn together”.
Ugh- no. Dental hygienist, PT, phlebotomy-- I don’t think it’s unrealistic for people to think that some professionals trained in an actual lab/classroom with instructors watching over their shoulder and correcting their technique in real time!
The thing is, schools with the stripped-down model do exist: they’re called community colleges.
And lo and behold, they have bloat too! The faculty are overworked and underpaid, but I personally met multiple six-figure “counselors” and administrators at my (surrogate) kid’s community college who did next to nothing, spent less than 4 hrs a day on campus, and turfed their duties to work-study students (including giving their login info to those students, thus giving them access to the entire student body’s social security numbers and etc., among other delights).
The thing is, all of those student needs that have to be met? Indeed, they are real, and funding must be allocated to meet them. But how many times have I witnessed the money being spent while the needs remain unmet? More than I have the energy to recount (and more than you all have the energy to read).
There are huge grants for cohort programs to support under-served populations. When first enrolling, (surrogate) kid tried to sign up for two of these, and couldn’t get a call or a message back from anyone about either one. For months. We finally went in and hunted down someone who could sign him up for one. Lo and behold, come the first day of class, the program was under-enrolled and the folks running it wanted to cancel the class sections and not run the program that year, while keeping the grant money. (The other program did get cancelled.) Hardly surprising that the programs are empty when they deliberately make it next to impossible to enroll! I ended up writing a Strongly Worded Email to the state-level folks for this cohort program, and the deadwood at the cc were forced to actually teach (I use the term loosely) the classes, but I was not popular with the Powers That Be for this, and neither, unfortunately, was Kid. This was par for the course, throughout his cc experience. Harvest the grant money, drop the ball, collect the salary, circle the wagons. Over and over. Legitimate needs and bloat are not mutually exclusive.
It took a couple days for me to be able to post about this painful topic, but my regional university just fired 25 staff and five faculty (for low-enrollment reasons). Two of the faculty were full-time instructors in my department—one of them was in her fourth year—so, friendly or friends with everybody. Non-selective public universities are going to experience significant pains as well.
For those who do not read the Hechinger Report article shared by @fiftyfifty1, here are some of the quotes that I found key:
Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it.
As many as one in 10 four-year colleges and universities are in financial peril, the consulting firm EY Parthenon estimates.
The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. Another decline of up to 15 percent is projected to begin in 2025.
“The only thing that’s going to fix this is enough closings or consolidations at which supply and demand reach equilibrium,” Stocker said.
Students who transfer lose an average of 43 percent of the credits they’ve already earned and paid for, the Government Accountability Office found in the most recent comprehensive study of this problem.
“We’re starting to get through to colleges and to boards that there needs to be more pre-planning, and it’s hard,” Langteau said. “It’s hard to admit when it’s time for an institution to close or to merge.’ ”
(pre-planning in terms of setting up teach-outs, transfer agreements, assistance for athletes in finding new teams, having at least one more semester open before closing, etc.)
These shutdowns also affect taxpayers, who have to absorb the cost of the federally subsidized student loans that are forgiven in some instances. Students attending ITT Tech had $1.1 billion in debt forgiven when it shut down, for instance.
New U.S. Department of Education rules take effect in July that will require institutions to report if they are entering bankruptcy or facing expensive legal judgments, and to set aside reserves to cover the cost of student loans if they go under.
The article did share the story of a woman who was attending a for-profit college in Virginia that closed. She lost all 94 of her college credits and, after a year, the feds forgave her $30k in debt. So although ITT is probably the biggest and most famous case, I don’t think it’s an isolated one.
That 43 percent credit loss statistic is kind of crazy, you know?
Even if that includes unaccredited for-profit places (where the percentage for any given student would approach 100%), there aren’t enough of those where even excluding them would move that stat down to anything approaching reasonable.
There are lots and lots of students at accredited institutions who are taking remedial/HS classes but think they are taking college courses. I’m going to guess that explains a chunk of the non-transferable credits. The hosting institution takes a look at a transcript filled with “pre-college” classes and says “nope”. And then there are the non-accredited institutions teaching “Excel and Word” (useful skills to be sure, but hardly a college level class), “Travel and Tourism Professional Ethics” (basically don’t use clients credit cards to buy yourself stuff) and “Accounting principles for small business owners” (It doesn’t take three months to learn how to fill out a form to qualify for an SBA loan or to learn what payroll taxes are).
City U. of NY community colleges enroll students in remedial and credit courses simultaneously, which I thin is an excellent idea–they can bring their queries about credit class to remedial class.
I have an academically advanced homeschool kid who is used to some degree of self-teaching and has taken the occasional online class from homeschool providers over the years. These have been good experiences. Kid has also taken several dual enrollment classes online over the past 2 years. These have had some ‘box-checking without a ton of learning’ and some ‘very, very challenging because it’s hard to self-teach college classes with minimal feedback’. It worked out OK for a kid who is motivated, capable, and accustomed to figuring things out on their own. But, I will never allow my younger to do online DE except for possibly an easy intro class like Psych 101. I would think that the frequency with which a well designed online course is taken by a student who can do what is required to do well (time management, self-study, etc) is not high.
