Bob Scott:

If it’s not a revolution, online education is certainly an upheaval that’s going to replace a big chunk of what currently exists in the higher education world.

My view – perhaps politically incorrect – is that there are two classes of college students in this country:

1. those who can pursue largely academic interests because they are wealthy or smart enough to get scholarships,
2. and those who are mainly in need of real-world career training.

The problem is that the vast majority of students fit into the latter group, but our college and university system is designed primarily to serve the former.

We need philosophers, historians and writers in our society – but we have far more school capacity to train people in those specialties than we really need. When I attended college in the 1970’s, virtually all my friends were English or political science majors with no career goal. After graduation, most drifted into law school, which put them onto a fairly viable career track.

But things have changed. It’s much harder today to “drift” into a successful career.
Every specialty, including law, has become far more competitive and demanding
in terms of skill sets. I never cease to be amazed by magazine articles and
complaints from “Occupy” people that they can’t get a good job after spending
four years to get a degree that gives them no usable job skills whatever.

Online learning has become part of the solution to this problem by making a very wide number of associates and bachelor’s degree programs available with a sharp focus on career training and by exerting, for the first time in decades, at least some downward pressure on higher education costs.

A hot issue is that this category was initially served mainly by for-profit schools that now engender a lot of debate. But the criticism of for-profit schools overlooks two key facts:

1)     A lot of the people who need online education are not traditional college age kids, but adults returning to college, and the traditional colleges and universities has been extremely slow to address their needs.

2)     The world of the for-profit schools is changing, not so much due to government regulation (in my opinion) but because their business model is being challenged by new non-profit online schools and even some private and state schools who have finally woken up to online education.

Even within the for-profit school sector, there’s a newer group of schools who are delivering degree programs at more affordable tuition levels than what was the norm just a few years ago.

Schools like Western Governors University, an unusual non-profit school, have stepped up and made a big step into online education while keeping the price reasonable. Perhaps more importantly, we’re seeing schools like The University of Southern New Hampshire, a heretofore little-known state institution, get national attention quickly by launching big online learning programs.

Unlike such famous flame-outs as the U. of Illinois’ “global campus” a few years back, Southern New Hampshire’s initiative seems to have real legs.

There’s no way to guarantee that the quality of all online degree programs will be equal. But frankly, the same can be said of brick and mortar schools. Both the traditional colleges and the existing online schools are going to see growing competition from schools that can bring a good reputation and affordable tuition to the online degree sector – because it’s what more and more students want.