CORNELL
UNIVERSITY gave Jonathan Quinn a scholarship in 1972 that covered a
little over half his $3,000 tuition at the time. It wasn't enough to
keep him in school. "I ran out of money and couldn't see racking up more
loans when I was totally dissatisfied," says Quinn, an engineering
major. He dropped out in his junior year.
Twenty-three years later, Quinn, now a 44-year-old sales manager for
an electrical equipment company, is finally getting his degree. But it
will be Cyber League, not Ivy League. Quinn is enrolled at the
University of Phoenix's on-line B.S. program.
Loaded into his traveling laptop is all his course material. He boots
up lectures and reading assignments after work, in airport lounges and
hotel rooms. "I'll have my B.S. by July 1998," says Quinn. He's majoring
in business administration. "The course- work is more meaningful than
at Cornell," he adds.
Jonathan Quinn is a pioneer in what looks like the start of a big
trend. Listen to management philosopher Peter Drucker: "Universities
won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the
traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast."
Fast indeed. Just four years ago Peterson's, the venerable college
guide, tallied 93 "cyberschools." The 1997 Distance Learning guide
includes 762. Robert Tucker, who heads an Arizona-based higher education
research firm called InterEd, keeps tabs. He estimates that 55% of the
U.S.' 2,215 four-year colleges and universities have courses available
off-site. Over 1 million students are now plugged into the virtual
college classroom, which compares with 13 million attending
brick-and-mortar schools. That number of cyberstudents will more than
tripleby the turn of the century.
A lot of people have long felt that education is too good to waste on
the young, that college should be more than just a rite of passage for
Americans. Besides offering the young an alternative means of getting an
education, cybercollege is a highly effective means of providing
continuing education in a fastchanging world. In 1972 just 28% of U.S.
college and university students were over 25. By 1980 the proportion of
older students had risen to 34%. In 1994, the last year for which
statistics are available, the proportion of older students reached 41%.
The beauty of cyberlearning is that you can pursue it while working
at a full-time job and living miles from a college. In an age when many
jobs require continuing education, cyberlearning brings it to people who
cannot afford to interrupt a career.
As the consumption of higher education has spread in the U.S., its
economic efficiency has declined. The number of college and university
students has grown 24% since 1980, but the money spent has grown three
times faster. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost of educating a
student for a year at an institution of higher learning has increased
from $5,000 to $11,000.
In good part this has been because faculty productivity has been in
steep decline. According to InterEd's Tucker, professors currently spend
less than half the time in the classroom than they did 25 years ago.
Many professors delegate teaching to graduate assistants. At a time when
American business has been brutally restructuring and raising
efficiency, colleges loftily resist change. "Despite the liberalism of
their political cultures, these are deeply conservative places that
resist change of every sort," says Bruno Manno, a fellow at the Hudson
Institute.
Nevertheless, change is coming. Though the prestige brand
universities are still besieged with applicants, smaller colleges are
feeling the pinch as families and students are less willing to go
heavily into debt to finance a college education. Over the last ten
years, some 200 college campuses have closed for good-twice the number
that shut down in the decade before.
"Market pressure is going to force educators to think about things
unconventionally," says Peter McPherson, a former commercial banker who
is now president of Michigan State University. "Every sector of business
that has gone through this struggle has always said 'we can't do it.'
That's what health care said, that's what the automobile companies said.
But the markets do work, and change does come."
In a sense cyberprograms are heirs to the correspondence schools that
date back to the turn of the century. Princeton they were not, but they
offered a low-cost education to working people. This away-from-school
schooling has been rendered far more effective by television, video-and
the Internet, with its interactive capabilities. Modern technology
brings education to the students rather than forcing students to
subsidize fancy campuses and featherbedding faculties.
Not coincidentally, it makes it possible for all students-not just
those at the fanciest colleges-to have access to the best lecturers and
the best teachers. For a parallel, consider what the movies did for
entertainment. Before movies a great entertainer could reach no more
people at a time than could be crammed into a theater or concert hall.
With movies the potential audience was increased by a factor of
thousands and perhaps millions. It is conceivable that in the future we
will have celebrity professors with incomes and audiences comparable to
those of some entertainers.
On-line education makes it possible for students all over the world
to study at prestigious U.S. schools without leaving their homes. At
Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, almost half the students at
its brand-new on-line Global Executive M.B.A. program live outside the
U.S., "commuting" by E-mail from as far away as Switzerland and Hong
Kong. These students are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of
the remote access and the prestige of a Duke degree: $82,500
(frequently picked up by students' employers), compared with $50,000 for
the regular on-campus M.B.A.
The University of Maine's Education Network reaches 9,000 students in
107 satellite classrooms, often in high schools, university centers or
office suites. Sandra Woodcock, a 21-year-old waitress, lives on the
island of Vinalhaven, off the coast of Maine. She is taking courses to
earn her associate's degree at the island's brick high school.
Woodcock watches her professors on a television screen as they
deliver their lectures. Questions are asked via a class phone. Homework
assignments are mailed to her professors, and she takes tests at the
high school, monitored by local proctors.
Tuition for the cybercourses is roughly similar to that charged at
the University of Maine, but cyberstudents escape paying for room, board
and transportation. The University of Maine charges $119 a credit hour;
cyberlearners pay an extra $5 an hour. With 120 credits, a student can
get a cyber bachelor's degree from the University of Maine for a tuition
cost of $14,880-compare that with the $34,000 it costs to attend and
live at the university's main campus at Orono.
Like Duke, the University of Phoenix charges its cyberstudents a
premium over what it charges on-campus students. For cyberstudents,
Phoenix charges $325 a credit for its B.S. program. With 102 course
credits required for graduation, that is $33,150, about one-third the
cost of going to Yale for four years. Phoenix students who attend the
school's campus programs pay $25,000 for a B.S. degree, or about one
year's worth at Harvard.
Are conventional educators happy? Hardly. "It goes against what
Harvard stands for in terms of the learning process," huffs James
Aisner, a spokesman for the Harvard Business School. "Being together,
talking to people in the dorms or residence halls, is an essential part
of the learning process here."
Perhaps true, but if the aim is to deliver a basic product at a
reasonable price, a lot of students will willingly dispense with the
beer drinking, dating and fellowship. If education is the goal,
cyberstudents get that at a fraction of the cost of attending a
traditional Ivy League college.
Economist Milton Friedman has long advocated stripped-down college
educations. "There are many activities that have very little to do with
higher education-namely, athletics and research," he says.
Friedman doesn't think higher education should be a monopoly of
not-for-profit institutions. He argues that profitmaking businesses are
inclined to be more responsive to the customers. "Institutions," he
says, "are run by faculty, and the faculty is interested in its own
welfare. The question is why competing institutions have not grown up
which are private and for profit."
The University of Phoenix is a for-profit enterprise. It costs
Phoenix on-line $237 to provide one credit hour of cybereducation,
against $486 per hour for conventional education at Arizona State. The
big difference: teaching salaries and benefits-$247 per credit hour for
Arizona State against only $46 for Phoenix.
Arizona State professors get an average of $67,000 a year. The
typical University of Phoenix on-line faculty member is part time and
earns only $2,000 a course, teaching from a standardized curriculum.
Is Phoenix then an academic sweatshop where underpaid lumpen
intellectuals slave for a pittance? No way. All of the University of
Phoenix faculty have master's or doctoral degrees; some do research and
publish books and papers.
Like their students, most of the profs hold down full-time jobs in
the professions they teach, keeping them in touch with current issues
and trends in their specialties. Accounting courses, for instance, are
taught by practicing CPAs. Finance courses are taught by M.B.A.s. For
them, teaching is a source of extra income or stimulation.
In fighting back, the academic establishment has adopted a Luddite
approach: Stop change by smashing it. Among the establishment's most
powerful weapons is accreditation: Without accreditation schools aren't
eligible for federal aid. And, of course, conventional educators control
the nation's accrediting bodies for higher education.
Most of these new cyberschools, though, have done an end-run around
the problem because they are part of already existing, already
accredited institutions. These schools, instead of fighting change, have
decided to embrace it.
The University of Maine's faculty revolted three years ago when the
people who ran its on-line programs wanted to grant a separate degree.
The faculty won. Maine's cyberdegrees are now exactly the same as any
degree granted by its seven campuses.
How effective are on-line programs? The University of Phoenix
recently gave standardized achievement tests to a group of B.S.
graduates. It gave the same test to a group of B.S. graduates from
competing on-campus programs at three public Arizona universities.
On average, the on-line students scored 5% to 10% higher than their
traditionally educated peers and maintained that margin upon completing
their coursework. Discount this study as self-serving, but there can be
no doubt that motivated cyberstudents can learn as well as motivated
on-site students.
Economics or no, the "college experience" is highly esteemed in the
U.S., and conventional teaching in conventional colleges is not going
away. It is, however, about to get some sorely needed competition.
Especially so in adult and continuing education. Dr. Raye Bellinger, a
cardiologist who manages a seven physician practice in Sacramento,
Calif., has gone back to school without abandoning his business. He
signed up for a University of Phoenix M.B.A. over the Internet, paying
his fees by credit card.
Day one he logged on and downloaded the syllabus (textbooks available
for purchase over the Internet). He also read his professor's lecture
on technology management. A week later he handed in his first
assignment-a 13-page paper on his practice's patient management system.
"They insist that you write about things you are doing in your own
job,"says Bellinger.
He then posted his paper to a class forum and over the next several
days got responses from both classmates and his professor. Think of the
system as a time-shifting classroom where students discuss topics as
their schedules permit.
Take Janet Mize, a 47-year-old liver transplant coordinator taking
on-line courses toward a B.S. in nursing from California State
University, Dominguez Hills. "We carry on a conversation by computer and
voicemail," she says. "I feel like we're old college classmates." Mize
helped form a student nurses society-which has monthly meetings by
telephone.
Just as it helps adults who need continuing education, so
cybereducation helps students who want a college degree at lower cost.
The world changes. Education will change with it.
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