Loosening Standards, Widening Inequalities

The Trump administration has kicked off its latest round of higher-education deregulation with proposals to loosen key standards for online education’s full access to federal grants and loans, including the requirement that online courses must “support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor.”

However, as our recent review of the relevant research shows, there is abundant evidence that personal interaction is vital for learning, especially for students with weak academic backgrounds. The Trump proposal, though presented under the guise of promoting innovation, flexibility, and choice, would likely open the door to increased exploitation of the lower-income and older students who are drawn to fully online programs that do not require them to attend in-person classes at specific times.

Today, more than a decade after Congress allowed online colleges full access to federal student-aid programs, almost one-third of college students take courses online. Half of these students are enrolled in exclusively online programs, while the rest take at least one, but not all of their courses, online. This form of delivery is particularly prevalent in the for-profit sector: For-profit colleges enroll just 6 percent of all students, but 13 percent of students taking courses online and 24 percent of fully online students.

Despite the enrollment growth of online programs, faculty, academic leaders, the public, and employers continue to perceive the degrees less favorably than traditional ones. Successive surveys of chief academic officers by the Babson Survey Research Group indicate no increase in faculty acceptance of online education’s value and legitimacy between 2002 and 2015, but also reveal a sharp distinction between their evaluation of fully online courses and of hybrid courses, which combine technology with face-to-face interaction.

Such skepticism is prevalent among employers as well. A series of academic studies and surveys confirm a consistent pattern of negative employer responses to online degrees. As long as this perception remains, online graduates will not realize the same labor-market returns accruing to graduates of hybrid and traditional programs.

Most importantly, online students underperform. In a range of environments, the gaps in student success across socioeconomic groups are larger in online than in classroom courses. For example, rigorous studies of community-college students by researchers at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center found that the performance gaps between traditional and fully online courses were largest among males, black students, and those with low GPAs.

Students in developmental-education classes also struggle more than others with online learning. Another study of community-college students documented an increase in the gap between white and Latino students in online coursework. Similar findings have emerged from studies at for-profit institutions and at highly selective private universities. There is considerable danger that moving more vulnerable students online, which the Trump administration’s plans are likely to do, would widen attainment gaps rather than solve the seemingly intractable problem of unequal educational opportunity.

It is reasonable to believe that many of those problems would be mitigated if the courses and programs consistently incorporated the frequent and substantive interaction that is central to the learning process. No wonder then that online students frequently cite inadequate interaction with instructors as a main disadvantage of online education. Similarly, the online-education community itself has called for a stronger focus on such interactivity to address this widely recognized shortcoming.

Self-paced correspondence courses, which rely on self-learning, do not provide such interaction. These courses, which have limited access to federal grants and loans, have a long history of fraud and abuse. However, the recent rise of competency-based education, a self-paced educational model the vast majority of which is offered online, along with a high-profile federal audit of the nation’s largest competency-based provider, has contributed to calls for weakening or eliminating the requirement for regular and substantive interaction.

As we seek to improve the quality of online education and reverse its poor record in an effort to ensure that it not only serves more students but also serves them well, it is critical to use technology to supplement and strengthen the intrinsically interactive nature of teaching and learning. Otherwise, we risk blurring the line between education and self-learning and further opening the floodgates for unscrupulous for-profit colleges to prey on vulnerable students and exploit our federal student-aid programs.

We recommend an evidence-driven and responsible path forward based on three principles.

• First, do no harm. The current requirements, as clarified in the department’s guidance and applied by the inspector general in recent audits, should be preserved, if not strengthened, and vigorously enforced by both government and accreditors. This means that interaction must occur with some reasonable frequency as a required part of the program, relevant to the subject matter, and with someone who instructs or provides knowledge about the subject matter of the course and is qualified to teach.
• Second, any so-called flexibility should be rigorously evaluated before being adopted, to avoid infusing unnecessary risk into our federal student-aid programs with potentially wide-ranging implications. For example, the impact of the department’s 2014 competency-based education experiment should first be assessed before serving as the basis for policy change.
• Finally, any educational models that have difficulty complying with the existing requirements should adapt to meet the law’s provisions, not the other way around. As the evidence makes clear, it is in the best interest of online providers to pursue strategies that increase interaction, which improves quality, student outcomes and satisfaction, and employer confidence in the value of their credentials.

The administration’s proposal to loosen the requirement for regular and substantive instructor-student interaction is misguided. It will only widen the gulf between the college education available to those who arrive at the door with ample resources and strong academic preparation and those who depend on postsecondary education to create a path to productive lives.

Spiros Protopsaltis is an associate professor and director of EdPolicy Forward: The Center for Education Policy and Evaluation at George Mason University and served as a deputy assistant secretary for higher education and student financial aid during the Obama administration. Sandy Baum is a nonresident fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute and professor emerita of economics at Skidmore College.