From the front page of today’s New York Times.

… Is it possible to learn as much when your professor is a mass of pixels whom you never meet? How much of a student’s education and growth — academic and personal — depends on face-to-face contact with instructors and fellow students?

… Kaitlyn Hartsock, a senior psychology major at [the University of] Florida, [said], “My mom was really upset about it. She felt like she’s paying for me to go to college and not sit at home and watch through a computer.”

… [Ms. Hartsock, a] hard-working student who maintains an A average, she was frustrated by the online format. Other members of her discussion group were not pulling their weight, she said. The one test so far, online, required answering five questions in 10 minutes — a lightning round meant to prevent cheating by Googling answers.

In a conventional class, “I’m someone who sits toward the front and shares my thoughts with the teacher,” she said. In the 10 or so online courses she has taken in her four years, “it’s all the same,” she said. “No comments. No feedback. And the grades are always late.”

A UCLA student writes in opposition to the proposed online UC Berkeley degree. He talked to the director of an online engineering program at UCLA.

… Christopher Lynch, director of the UCLA Master of Science in Engineering Online Program, said that distance students can get to the same level of understanding concepts as traditional students, but that the department spends much more money per student to achieve this goal.

The department hired a teaching assistant and professor as consultants to provide support for distance learners, who are unable to approach professors after lecture or go to office hours as traditional students are. This would be a similar situation for undergraduates because face-to-face interaction is an important part of the university experience.

To maintain a UC-level education, many faculty members will have to be hired for support positions, costing the university millions. If this faculty is not hired, the UC online campus will not provide a UC-level education.

He notes a variety of other disadvantages, among them:

Skipping class and cheating by having another student take an exam become easier as attendance, participation and identity verification are difficult, if not impossible over the Internet.

Another UCLA professor comments.

“This would severely hurt the reputation and prestige of a degree and call into question the (UC’s) commitment to undergraduate education,” said Robert Samuels, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Program who taught a hybrid online and offline course last spring.

According to Samuels, there are ways to incorporate technology in the classroom, but a fully online degree has no place at a prestigious research university.

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Costs more.

But only costs more if you care about maintaining quality. If you don’t care, it probably costs less.

… reaches its apotheosis.

… James Stoner, chairman of [Louisiana State University’s] political science department, recently taped three 30-minute constitutional lectures for the new “Beck University,” which was announced Monday.

… “I read [Beck’s] use of ‘university’ as ironic or kind of a TV thing,” [said Stoner].

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Read all of UD‘s posts about online education by clicking on this post’s category. Or go here.

… you can hear Tom Harkin being very indignant indeed about the scummy for-profit schools of America.

“A very sick industry.”

Harkin seems particularly scandalized by the involvement of hedge fund people in these schools. Someone should show him who’s running Brown University. And Yeshiva University.

…Hm. He seems to be under the impression that online is the poor white trash of education… He’s scathing on the subject.

I seem to be live-blogging this.

Can’t remember the exact number, but Harkin also seemed struck by the fact that the prez of some for-profit university or other made, what, fourteen billion times what the prez of Harvard makes. Something like that. Thirteen billion…

Ooh. Richard Durbin’s pissed too. For-profits rip off veterans, too. Veterans default and the schools don’t teach them shit. “How can it be fair for this kind of exploitation to continue?…. This is an absolutely unexplainable, indefensible situation!”

Harkin: “Used to be fifty percent of your students had to be campus-based. That ended in 2005. Now you’ve got the entire student body online! And look at the online dropout rates!”

Harkin: “These days a semester’s anything you want it to be. Some of these schools have semesters that are five weeks long! Keep ’em just long enough to be able to keep the money!”

Harkin: “Their mission is to grow and get profits at the expense of students… It’s the obligation of us here to provide effective government oversight and regulation… Are taxpayers dollars being used effectively?… I have grave doubts that these schools are a good taxpayer investment.”

… The result of these so-called budget pressures, as we try to educate increased numbers of students with ever-smaller budgets, is espousal by administrators of things like online education or larger class sizes or “distance” education despite evidence that these “changes” do not benefit students to the same extent as face-to-face education. For example, at one campus, administrators have encouraged faculty to teach yoked classrooms where the professor is only present in one but is broadcast to students in the other room — something tried and discarded in the ‘70s when TV teaching failed as an educational innovation.

I am regularly contacted by students at online universities seeking hands-on research experience in my lab, because it is not offered at their school and they cannot apply to graduate programs without it.

… This year I will be teaching face-to-face a class formerly taught only online. Students are grateful and tell me they hated the previous approach, that they avoid online classes whenever possible. Faculty who teach online have published studies showing that more faculty time is required to teach an online class effectively, not less, so class sizes cannot be increased even though there is no physical seat restriction.

But class sizes are increased and faculty thus are forced to teach less effectively. This kind of experience is being ignored by administrators because they care more about the efficiency of instruction than its quality. Then when professors point out these things, we are accused of resisting fundamental change, as if we have a collective personality flaw that makes us too rigid to recognize good ideas or “inevitability.” …

I hear you, baby.

A professor at a public university in California prefers to go unnamed in an Inside Higher Education piece about the poor white trash of education, online classes. The writer points out that among the spectacular advantages of online is that graduation rates at some schools improve markedly with them. This is largely because students can get a friend or family member who knows the material to take the course for them; or because the overworked person running the show isn’t very rigorous.

… But I mean I hear you when you complain that distance devotees call people who say the obvious out loud – these courses are dreck – rigid, flawed, regressive… Oh yeah.

You forget to mention the other thing, though – the thing for-profit distance devotees say about you and me: Elitist slime! You’re slamming the door to self-improvement shut in the face of people who have no option but to take out enormous loans they can’t pay back in order to sit at home and talk to a screen! That’s the only form of higher education available to these people, and you’re denying it to them!

Yeah. UD‘s heard them all. All the beautiful claims made for the superiority of a total separation between two human beings as one of them tries to learn something.

You know what that person learns? She learns that legitimate schools won’t accept her expensive credits from for-profit online schools.

Let’s think about what might be in the mind of schools that consistently reject her credits. Let’s take our time…

Actually, we can do this fast. Reread this post’s headline.

… provision of food content (grilled cheese sandwich), UD read a letter in the New York Times about the provision of course content:

To the Editor:

… [W]e should be extremely wary of the move toward online education…

People cheat. All the time. Sure, they cheat on campus, but it is extraordinarily easy to cheat online. The easiest way is to simply have someone else do the course for you. Another way is by searching for information while taking a test.

… If the company or university is going online to save money, you bet it will try to cut corners as much as it can. That means a noninteractive, bottom-of-the-line course, with students able to cheat easily.

We are truly on the race to the bottom…

Diana Lambert

Bottom-of-the-line, race to the bottom — As you know, UD has for years called online the poor white trash of education. I believe the letter writer is getting at the same idea.

Or think about it this way: When all the university’s doing is providing course content in the quickest, most efficient fashion, students feel quite comfortable providing, in return, exam content in the very same way. Students are responding in kind to the pointed disdain for students, and for education, that online represents. It’s a right back at ya situation.

With online, everybody gets an A for contempt.

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Online’s bold new idea: We’ll save money by not educating our students.

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Hey, and here’s another problem on the horizon: Presidents of online universities make like forty million dollars a year. Eventually, presidents of massive public universities which have become almost entirely online will start demanding commensurate compensation.

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UD thanks Dennis.

This blog was born just as asynchronous (to use the pretentious word its advocates like) courses became the rage in American universities. University Diaries has chronicled the immense and ongoing public relations effort to make these cheesy offerings seem legit. Click on the category Poor White Trash for details.

Or just start with this detail, something that won’t surprise anyone who has thought even a little about the technology that has come to define America’s for-profit universities, and which even schools like Berkeley are considering.

…The researchers did everything from making students sign an e-mail course contract to placing personal phone calls to make sure they were on top of their class material, according to the study, which will be published in the International Journal of Management in Education in October. Students exposed to the strategies dropped out as frequently as those who were not, the authors said.

“We called them at home, sent them emails, quizzed them on the syllabus and made other efforts to try to engage them,” said Elke Leeds, an associate professor of information systems at Coles and one of six study authors, in a press release issued by the school…

And gee, nothing worked. Wonder why.

Wanna wait for the next round of studies on that one? Or wanna read the next paragraph?

Babe, you can’t even verify the identity of the person taking an online course. You can’t verify the identity of the professor giving the course. We’re in the twilight zone. Where are we? Who are we? Who took the midterm? Who gave the midterm?

Drift, drift, drift… I’m melting… Life is but a dream…

Okay so call the student! Put in a call! Place an actual personal phone call! Hellohello? Actual person? Here is another actual person. Come back! Why are you fading? Why are you dropping out….?….. Helloooo?… O tell me all about why you faded. I want to know all about why you faded…

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Do not stand at your phone and forever weep.
I am not there; I make no peep.
I am a thousand courses that blow.
I am the students who nothing know.

I’m the dumbass emoticon on your screen.
An eager mind unheard and unseen.
The nightmare end of a bookkeeper’s dream.
The evil spawn of a cost-cutting scheme.

We are the students who might have shone.

Think of everything we’ve missed!
We are not there. We don’t exist.

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Ooh la la!

From its symbiotic relationship with shady online for-profit colleges [Background on the for-profit scandal here.] to its plan to make itself an online school, the University of California at Berkeley is moving smartly along the path to self-prostitution.

Step One:

University Regent Richard Blum has an investment firm.

… Blum Capital Partners has been the dominant shareholder in two of the nation’s largest for-profit universities, Career Education Corporation and ITT Educational Services, Inc. The San Francisco-based firm’s combined holdings in the two chain schools is currently $923 million—nearly a billion dollars. As Blum’s ownership stake enlarged, UC investment managers shadowed him, ultimately investing $53 million of public funds into the two educational corporations.

… John M. Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit education and advocacy organization in Santa Monica, Calif., comments: “It is hugely inappropriate for the University of California to invest in for-profit colleges when it should be promoting public education. And something stinks when university investments end up in companies largely controlled by a regent. To the average fellow on the street, this would seem to be a conflict of interest. It is up to Mr. Blum and the UC treasurer to explain how it could not be a conflict of interest.”…

Blum’s not talking. He’s not talking to this guy, from Sacramento News and Review, and he’s sure as hell not talking to this guy, from the Los Angeles Times.

Should an important official of what is arguably the most prestigious system of public higher education in the world also be a leading financial backer of an industry that has been coming under intense regulatory scrutiny because of persistent allegations of fraud?

Or put another way: If the chairman of the World Wildlife Fund held significant investments in, say, BP, wouldn’t people wonder exactly what he thought about how to balance environmental protection and oil industry regulation?

Step Two:

Berkeley’s not only investing public money in the for-profits; it’s modeling itself after them. Put everything online; hire whoever to teach the stuff; advertise the Berkeley brand all over town.

Its professors are rightly worried. Some of them have written a worried opinion piece for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The UC Board of Regents will discuss this week a proposal by the University of California president’s office for an ambitious plan to market UC online. The proposal entertains the vision of an eventual online bachelor’s degree that could tap new students throughout the world, from “Sheboygan to Shanghai.”

In fact, the track record for online higher education is very uneven.

Uneven? UD, as readers know, is less diplomatic. She has long called online classes the poor white trash of education. If you want to know why, click on my poor white trash category.

The Berkeley professors can see what’s coming.

[T]he university runs the risk of destroying its reputation and excellence in the name of marketing a brand.

But hey. When a major big time regent has been kissing up to the for-profits for years — when, in a way, your university has become financially dependent on the kindness of the for-profits — you shouldn’t be surprised when administrators start suggesting that Berkeley should make them its model.

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UD thanks her friend – once her student – James Elias for the initial link about Berkeley’s online venture.

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Update: “[W]hat do these investments say about Blum’s vision for higher education?” asks Michael Hiltzik, author of a long article in the Los Angeles Times about University of California Regent and zealous investor in for-profit education Richard Blum.

Let’s think about that one.

Blum represents just about the most selective undergraduate institution in the world, Berkeley. Berkeley is simply the pinnacle of higher education — and it’s public. It’s one thing for small, insanely rich Princeton to offer a great education. I mean, Princeton does, it does offer this, and it deserves all the praise it gets. But Berkeley, to the enormous credit of California taxpayers, offers something similar. And it doesn’t have the legacy profile of the Ivies. It doesn’t make lots of special room for the children of the rich and well-connected. It doesn’t create the sort of culture Walter Kirn describes here.

Berkeley is, if you ask UD, inspirational. It’s probably the closest thing we have in this country to an admissions meritocracy.

What is the investment philosophy of Berkeley’s highest-profile regent? What does that philosophy tell us about what the LA Times reporter calls his vision for higher education?

Well, I’d say it’s a vision profoundly at odds with what Berkeley has long stood for. It’s elitist and cynical. Blum’s investment strategy says the following to UD:

I’m going to generate lots of money for a few of the most highly selected students in the country on the backs of millions of ordinary citizens being ripped off by substandard institutions. It’s a winner-take-all-the-education world. Let the losers pay the price.

… runs the headline at Business Week, and this one’s worth unpacking a bit.

Almost all of the colleges and universities University Diaries writes about are non-profits. They exist not to generate money for investors, but to educate people. They need enough funds, of course, to operate on as high a level as possible; but because their primary function involves a public good – enhancing the knowledge and skills of people – they receive various and significant state and federal government subsidies and tax exemptions.

Public institutions, like Berkeley, some of whose students and faculties have taken to the streets in protest against
state cutbacks (today, March 4, is a Day of Action, and a number of large rallies representing many public schools are expected), and private institutions (even insanely rich ones like Harvard), both receive all sorts of tax breaks along with government financial support.

The furloughs Mr UD and his colleagues at the University of Maryland have experienced, and the many other signs of institutional strain that this blog has noted at virtually all American universities, have of course to do with varying degrees of withdrawal of government funds from schools under the pressure of a bad economy.

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Because our taxes support non-profit universities, we have a stake in making sure these places don’t use our money to give their presidents millions of dollars, or, like Harvard, to hoard massive endowments. Likewise, we have an obligation to keep an eye on the tax-exempt NCAA and tax-exempt universities with Division I-A football and basketball programs (indeed, many people now argue that the NCAA and these sorts of campus sports programs should lose their tax exemption).

My point is that all sorts of goodies, subsidized by the American taxpayer, come to universities, and universities expect (should expect) some level of government scrutiny (think too of Senator Charles Grassley’s many letters of inquiry to universities about possible conflicts of interest in their medical schools) and citizen scrutiny because of this.

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Things start to get muddy when we turn to America’s burgeoning for-profit university industry.

For-profits aren’t bound by the non-profit ethos which says that our primary goal is to enhance the public good. For-profits are for profits. They’re doing what they do primarily to yield as much money as they can for investors. Because of this, the for-profit story, as UD has chronicled it over the course of this blog, has featured the sort of scandals you’d expect: Brazen recruitment of any student with a pulse, almost exclusively online curricula, and a practice of lying to recruits about graduation rates and job placements. One firm “paid a $6.5 million settlement in July 2007 to the California attorney general’s office, over allegedly misrepresenting graduates’ job placement rates and salaries. It also agreed to cease enrolling students in 11 programs at nine campuses.”

Now keep in mind that for-profits get massive federal support too. Typically over eighty percent of their revenue comes from you and from me.

So let’s go back to the headline on the Business Week article: Your Taxes Supporting For-Profit Firms as they Acquire Colleges.

How does that work?

Let’s start here:

A 2006 regulatory change fostered online growth and made takeovers more attractive… That year, Congress eliminated a rule prohibiting colleges that offered more than half of their courses online from receiving federal financial aid.

Well, this blog ain’t keen on online – UD calls it the poor white trash of education – but, you know, that’s just me. Congress loves it, and has made it easier for you to make an entirely online university. (I know. Diploma mills have been at this for years. Whole other subject.)

Anyway. Okay. So you can now make a really low-cost, really profitable university. Zillions of students all over the world, a few professors doing a lot of typing (How many students does each online class contain? I dunno. A thousand?), very little physical campus to maintain… You get the picture.

But – Did I say diploma mills were a whole other subject? They’re not really. You need to differentiate yourself from them, and that means real accreditation. Which is where we reenter the Business Week story:

ITT Educational Services Inc. paid $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June. In return, the company obtained an academic credential that may generate a taxpayer-funded bonanza worth as much as $1 billion.

ITT Educational, the U.S.’s third-biggest higher education company with a market value of $3.8 billion, may increase it by 26 percent, or $1 billion, within five years because of the purchase of 1,200-student Daniel Webster in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Michael Clifford, an investor in Del Mar, California, who has participated in the acquisitions of four nonprofit colleges. At least 75 percent of new revenue would come from access to the more than $100 billion a year in financial aid the U.S. hands out to college students, he said.

Key to tapping that money is Webster’s regional accreditation, which is the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard University and helps students transfer course credits from one college to another. Daniel Webster’s accreditation was its “most attractive” feature to ITT, said Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington law firm that has long represented the company.

“Companies are buying accreditation,” said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany, who studies for-profit higher education. “You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don’t have time. They want to boost enrollment 100 percent in two years.”

Let’s look more closely at what you’re getting as a student here:

The cost of attending an ITT Technical Institute, including tuition, fees and off-campus room and board, was $26,775 in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who entered ITT’s two-year schools in 2004, 29 percent graduated. ITT derived 70 percent of its 2009 revenue from federal financial aid, according to a company filing.

Wow. Where do I sign up? You get to pay Harvard rates for flunking out of a little-known academic institution. Plus, our taxes are paying for seventy percent of the school’s revenue!

Is our government watching out for us here?

The scrutiny these new for-profits get

“doesn’t remotely satisfy the sloppiest of due-diligence requirements,” said [Barmak] Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. “There is no methodical review of who has bought the college. If the Cosa Nostra applied, you would think you’d take a look.”

But the Department of Education is on it, man!

The U.S. Department of Education, which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that new for-profit colleges can’t qualify for assistance for two years, Deputy Undersecretary of Education Robert Shireman said in a telephone interview.

Under federal regulations taking effect July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the secretary of education if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50 percent in one year.

“It’s an area that we are watching closely,” Shireman said. “It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing.”

Kind of reminds you of the SEC when it was run by Bernie Madoff, doesn’t it?

Ah oui. Especially since they’re the poor white trash of education.

You know. On-line university courses. Most of them stink, for obvious reasons.

But one thing about them — because they don’t use up classrooms and equipment and campus time in the way of courses where you see and hear other human beings, they’re cheaper, that’s for sure…