Shouldn’t YOU Be the One to Profit from an Online Education?
Posted on July 19, 2007 by David Gray
Every organization, public or private, for-profit or non-profit, knows it must at least match its costs against income. UMassOnline is a public, not-for-profit organization. But like everyone else, we have to balance the books. However, unlike some others, particularly the for-profit, online-only organizations owned by shareholders and driven to achieve results that investors expect will far exceed mere breakeven, UMassOnline's most important balance sheet item has much more to do with the value of the educational opportunity we're providing, our wealth of offerings, the currency, if you will, of our faculty, and whether or not our students who have passed a rigorous admissions standard are profiting by their experience here.
Frankly, I'm worried by what seems to me to be a growing trend of for-profit, online-only corporate opportunism. I fear a coming era during which at least some of these providers will succeed in commoditizing higher education. Among the many questions this trend raises are: What will this mean to students? What will it mean to the quality of the educational offerings? What does it imply about the standards to which the organization's faculty are held? And, if the chief objective of for-profit, online-only educational opportunists is to make money by selling to ever-larger numbers of students, then what's in store for these institutions and their "customers" when and if admission standards become increasingly irrelevant? After all, the only way a commodity provider survives and grows is to sustain and gain market share.
Does this mean that for-profit educational institutions can't be high-minded or noble? Of course not. But I am suggesting that a college or university system like UMass that offers both traditional classroom education as well as online options will be very careful and very consistent in offering traditional as well as online courses because the reputation of one will profoundly affect the reputation of the other. Traditional universities with online offerings, in other words, have much more at stake, much more to gain or lose, if they commoditize and mass-produce assembly-line degrees and certifications via an online factory driven by tuition quotas versus intelligence quotients.
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