Mega-universities could do more than change the market for students or alter the nature of faculty roles. That’s where things could get even more interesting.
A game changer?
As the author and higher-education consultant Michael B. Horn suggests, institutions like Southern New Hampshire and Western Governors “could help change the definition of quality” for online education, but only if they can show that their students are getting consistently great outcomes. “That,” Horn says, “would be a good game changer for the field.”
I think Horn is onto something. One of the biggest missed opportunities from the era when big for-profit universities dominated the online-education scene was their failure to capitalize on all the learning data they were collecting from their students. By dint of their size and sophistication, they had rich sets of data and, even several years ago, at least some rudimentary tools to analyze it.
Yet for the most part, those colleges used the information for their own proprietary purposes rather than to demonstrate, in any transparent or consistent manner, that their education models were effective. (I can imagine many readers thinking, “They never showed that because they couldn’t.” I’ll stop short of saying that. But if they had the data to prove otherwise, few shared it.)
It remains to be seen how the big nonprofit online players will approach matters. But as you might have sensed from the Southern New Hampshire story, I see a heartening early sign in the reporting on student outcomes that Western Governors has adopted. In its annual report, the university, which now enrolls more than 100,000 students, published a chart showing trends in its six-year graduation rate and a comparison to a national-average graduation rate for nonselective, nonprofit institutions.
That may not be a perfect measure. But as WGU’s president, Scott Pulsipher, told me, “even an imperfect measure, consistently tracked,” is valuable because it will show improvements or failings.
Pulsipher told me that he believes it’s important to report data on student outcomes. “You can buy awareness,” he said, “but you earn reputation.”
The things WGU measures — graduation rates, students’ debt loads upon graduation, salary boosts — are valuable but not enough. And online or not, “good” measures of academic quality are still all too elusive. (For his part, Paul LeBlanc, Southern New Hampshire’s president, says one goal he sets for his institution is that “people leave us in better financial condition than when they came in.”)
I wish I had better answers. Maybe you do. With the higher-ed landscape becoming increasingly dominated by big online operators, what are the (realistic!) measures of quality that they could be assessing and highlighting? Any other great examples of institutions that have found a way to demonstrate quality? Please send me your thoughts, and I’ll share what I hear.
As Horn puts it, we’re still “in the early innings” of the mega-university era. Certainly, institutions like SNHU and WGU could stumble, or, as with the British Open University (perhaps the first nonprofit mega-university, which was once a source of inspiration for American colleges exploring distance education), fall victim to internal and outside forces and suffer enrollment and reputational declines. But I doubt this trend will reverse itself, unless of course the institutions fail to step up to the challenge. In other words, and with apologies to Voltaire (and Spiderman), with great size comes great responsibility. The question is: How well will they take it on?
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com.
