UMass System Aims to Join the Mega-University Club

The University of Massachusetts system plans to create a national online college to compete with the so-called mega-universities, according to Martin T. Meehan, the system’s president.

As Meehan outlined this week in his annual state-of-the-university speech, the college, which is still on the drawing board, would deliver online courses to adult learners in the style of — and in competition with — institutions like Liberty, Southern New Hampshire, and Western Governors Universities, which have built lucrative online programs that offer a practical, flexible, and inexpensive education to tens of thousands of students a year. UMass currently enrolls fewer than 6,000 fully online students.

Why is UMass doing this? And what are its chances of success?

It’s about money. See also: “lucrative.” Southern New Hampshire’s online program has made as much as a 35-percent profit in some years, and helped pay for a new $55-million engineering building. (Some mega-universities’ online programs make considerably smaller profits.) Liberty’s once-modest campus is in the middle of a billion-dollar expansion. Meanwhile, state support for public higher education in Massachusetts has declined by about 13 percent since 2008, when adjusted for inflation, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

It’s also about enrollment. New England is in the middle of a demographic slide that will lead to a decline in high-school graduates for a generation. That is putting enormous pressures on institutions in the region — Mount Ida, Newbury, Southern Vermont, and Wheelock Colleges have all announced in the past two years that they were closing or merging with other institutions, even though Massachusetts is the only state where a majority of students are educated at private colleges. A flagship public research university like UMass-Amherst is better positioned to weather such declines — its fall undergraduate enrollment has remained around 21,000 for several years — but a successful online program would further insulate the system from declining brick-and-mortar enrollment, and from falling tuition revenue.

Adult learners are part of its mission, too. Like the University System of Maryland, UMass already has a longstanding program aimed at older learners. Maryland transformed its University College program, established in 1947, into an online program for working adults that now enrolls about 46,000 undergraduates. UMass’s University Without Walls has been helping adults with some college credits complete degrees since 1971, and a mega-university-style online program would expand that effort.

UMass has advantages. UMass is a known quantity in its region and beyond, and that may help it recruit students who might trust the brand of an established public institution over a nonprofit or for-profit competitor. Maryland and Arizona State, Penn State, and Purdue Universities have all established successful online programs aimed at adults on the strength of their brick-and-mortar brands. (Purdue did so, somewhat controversially, by buying the for-profit chain Kaplan University and renaming it Purdue Global.)

Competing with existing mega-universities will be tough. Some of UMass’s competitors have a 10- or 20-year head start and have built commanding national brands. Michael B. Horn, a consultant on innovation and technology in higher education, expects more universities will seek mega-university status, but “there’s probably only a select number that can meaningfully enter the space.”

Mega-universities require a different way of operating — and thinking. Mega-universities’ success stems from their adopting a model that is often antithetical to how traditional colleges operate, and often created apart from usual university structures and practices. They often respond to prospective students’ inquiries within minutes, even seconds. They offer classes in ways that are convenient for students. They often embrace competency-based education. “It’s not as simple as just going online,” said Horn. “You really do have to change business models and everything. It’s probably a bridge too far for most universities.”

Being a mega-university is expensive. The existing mega-universities have spent heavily to build their programs, to create systems and supports suited to the particular needs of adult students, and to market the programs nationally. None of those things will be cheaper now than when the current mega-universities began building their programs 10 or 20 years ago. “It’s going to make it harder for a new player, or underscale players, to compete,” Horn said. And some of the profits other mega-universities see may come only with substantial scale.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.

Corrections (3/6/2019, 7:13 a.m.): This article originally said that UMass enrolls fewer than 6,000 students online. That number refers only to fully online students; the university has more than 73,000 online enrollments. The article also originally said that Southern New Hampshire University’s online program has made as much as a 50-percent profit in some years. The correct figure is about 35 percent. The text has been updated to reflect those corrections.