To students, starting college for $99 a month sounds like a deal. To wonks wrapped up in soaring tuition and declining financial aid, it may sound like a solution.
That’s how a company called StraighterLine, which offers online, self-paced introductory courses, became a darling of the industry—at least in theory. Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation and a member of StraighterLine’s advisory board, has lauded the idea; Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, has hailed the company’s founder, Burck Smith, as a potential revolutionary.
But a revolution is hard to pull off. If StraighterLine is going to transform higher education, it needs mainstream colleges to take it seriously—and that means counting its courses for credit. In the past month, it has suffered on that front. Four of the more-established institutions that had agreed to grant credit have cut ties with StraighterLine. If colleges won’t cooperate, Mr. Smith has a plan; he’s already talking to state lawmakers, who can make them.
That’s all amid a lot of buzz about StraighterLine: invitations for Mr. Smith to appear at Harvard Business School and Washington think tanks on the left and right, articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, a place among Fast Company’s “10 Most Innovative Companies in Education” this year.
And StraighterLine has made progress. Two years old, it boasts almost two dozen courses, including English composition and calculus, and will serve as many as 4,000 students this year, four times as many as last year. It doesn’t grant degrees and so can’t be accredited, but all of its college-level courses are approved by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service, and transfer credit is still mostly automatic at the 21 existing partner colleges.
But those ranks have shrunk, with partners getting more predictable: for-profits such as American InterContinental and DeVry Universities, and adult-serving, online institutions like Charter Oak State College. The older, brick-and-mortar nonprofit universities, both public and private, are bowing out. In an industry obsessed with preserving tradition and monitoring quality, innovation can be a double-edged sword.
Assumption College, in Worcester, Mass., decided last month to end its partnership, having determined after a year that StraighterLine wasn’t a good fit. “Their mode of delivery of educational services is too far removed from our liberal-arts tradition,” a spokeswoman for the college said in a statement. Not a single student from StraighterLine, she said, had enrolled there. La Salle University, which is also dropping out, said the same.
Nor did students flock to another former partner, Fort Hays State University, in Kansas. That was the goal: using StraighterLine’s national marketing to attract prospective students, says Lawrence V. Gould, the provost. Students and faculty, fearing that teaching would be outsourced, had initially protested the contract, but only a handful of current students ever took StraighterLine courses. Fort Hays ended up awarding transfer credit to 518 of the company’s alumni; only three enrolled there. The university pulled out as a partner this month. “It just wasn’t working the way we had hoped,” Mr. Gould says.
Some students seeking credit for StraighterLine may have used Fort Hays simply as a conduit: Posts on online forums and even the company’s Web site suggest that they forwarded the university’s transcripts to other colleges, which may not have been apt to award the credit as readily.
Fort Hays’s decision to stop giving automatic credit (students can still petition the registrar) was financial. Its Virtual College program has grown to more than 7,000 students, and it wants to recruit more. “Why would we accept coursework in and not get revenue for it?” Mr. Gould asks.
The University of Akron, too, has opted to innovate by itself. Rather than stay on with StraighterLine, officials there chose last month to pursue an internal strategy for distance learning, a spokeswoman for Akron wrote in an e-mail. “We’d just prefer to do our own thing.”
Money, Brand, Mission
Those excuses frustrate Mr. Smith, 41, a smart, affable free-marketeer. Students need intro courses, says the education entrepreneur (he also started the online tutoring company Smarthinking), and he can offer them at a price closer to their true cost.
Academically, StraighterLine’s courses are as strong as any, he argues, pointing to McGraw Hill materials, ACE recommendations, and an alumni survey by an independent firm. Of 153 respondents, more than three-quarters found their courses at least as rigorous as those that colleges offer online; almost two-thirds said the same about their StraighterLine courses as compared with good old lectures.
The college partners’ dropping out is about money and reputation, not academic rigor, says Mr. Smith: “Institutions have an inherent conflict of interest.” They often won’t award credit for courses that compete with their own. And fraternizing with for-profits, no matter their quality, carries a stigma. “Colleges are worried about their brand,” he says, “as opposed to standards.”
At the same time, he claims, more colleges, without proclaiming themselves partners, are quietly granting credit for StraighterLine courses. He publishes their names on his site. The list has grown more than threefold in the past six months, to almost 175, including several community colleges, California State University campuses, and highly selective institutions.
One of those on the list, Shenandoah University, confirmed giving credit to a student who took StraighterLine accounting over the summer. But officials of George Washington University were perplexed, wondering how it got on the list.
StraighterLine hasn’t verified credit decisions, Mr. Smith concedes, merely added colleges to which it has sent transcripts on students’ behalf. According to the alumni survey, 38 of 48 students who sought credit from nonpartners got it.
They can count on credit from partners like Western Governors University, where the watchword is competency. In fact, Western Governors advises unsuccessful applicants to take an online course or two from StraighterLine, Ivy Bridge College, or Rio Salado Community College, for example, and try again.
“We like to think of StraighterLine among the better valid options,” says Pat Partridge, the university’s vice president for marketing and enrollment. “It allows students to, in effect, come back to us at any time they’re ready.”
Now they have an extra incentive: a $50 tuition credit for each course, up to four, that they transfer to Western Governors. Because students can’t get financial aid to take StraighterLine courses, Mr. Partridge wanted to help offset their out-of-pocket costs. Competition doesn’t concern him. “We don’t think of students as sources of revenue. We think of students as future graduates,” he says. “We are more than happy if students come to us with more college completed.”
So is Bill Seaton, provost and vice president at Thomas Edison State College, another partner. This year at least 100 students have enrolled there with StraighterLine transcripts, he says, and they’re passing at the same rate as everybody else.
Lobbying States and Students
StraighterLine’s partners share the mission of helping self-motivated students earn degrees, quickly and inexpensively, on their own terms. If other colleges aren’t on board, Mr. Smith knows who might bring them around: state policy makers.
Over the summer he started visiting governors, legislators, and higher-education officials in a half-dozen states, which he declines to name. He shares StraighterLine’s ideas and drops some pet statistics, such as that for an introductory course, traditional colleges’ revenue per student can be $2,000, and their cost per student $100.
“The interest of governors and legislatures is obvious,” says Mr. Smith. “They want to make college as available as at low a price for their constituents as possible.” Under pressure to reach federal college-completion goals, they also want to help more students graduate.
In both pursuits, efficient, transparent credit transfer has become a focus of attention. More than two-thirds of states have passed laws intended to ease that transfer, by requiring, for example, common course-numbering systems at public colleges. Policy makers are also supporting new ways of earning credit, like prior learning assessment.
“People are looking for alternative solutions,” Mr. Smith says. “We present one of those.”
His approach at the state level is to identify barriers to credit transfer and make policy recommendations to lift them. He isn’t pushing for laws, but they wouldn’t hurt, he says. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t have legislation that said something like, ‘Colleges will adhere to ACE credit recommendations.’”
No states have made such moves yet, but they’re listening closely, says Mr. Smith. “The message is getting traction.”
Meanwhile, he is enlisting students as activists. The online guide “Getting to Yes: Asking Your School to Accept StraighterLine Credits” provides counterarguments to several reasons that colleges may decline to go along. If they keep saying no, the site tells students, “we’ll start to list these ‘unfriendly-to-transfer-student’ schools.”
Competition for students will spur more colleges to award StraighterLine credits, Mr. Smith thinks. The site even encourages a little antagonism: “Remember, colleges want you as a student. Remind them you can do your learning elsewhere.”
In an open season for tinkering with the higher-education system, services like StraighterLine will keep cropping up, experts agree. Students need flexible, lower-cost options.
Authors have labeled Mr. Smith an “edupreneur” and a “disrupter,” someone who could reshape the market.
“What they’re trying to do is useful,” says Mr. Partridge, of Western Governors. “I stop short of the word ‘noble,’ but I think they think of it as noble.”
In the coming years, he predicts, StraighterLine will adapt. “A little bit of patience and some time and further innovation will prove whether or not it’s the right model.”
21 Colleges Remain Partners With StraighterLine
As of August, the following colleges had agreed to accept StraighterLine’s online, self-paced courses for credit. Since then, the four institutions in bold have cut their ties with the company.
American College of Dubai
American InterContinental University
Ashford University
Assumption College
Capella University
Charter Oak State College
Colorado State University Global Campus
DeVry University
Excelsior College
Florida Gateway College
Fort Hays State University
Granite State College
Jefferson Community and Technical College
Kaplan University
La Salle University
Nazarene Bible College
New England College of Business
Potomac College
Thomas Edison State College
Thompson Rivers University
University of Akron
Western Governors University
Western Governors University-Indiana
Western Governors University-Texas
Western Governors University-Washington
