And don’t you think someone should have told parents and their children about this before they enrolled in them?
[The] Department of Defense … ranks graduates of traditional high schools … “Tier 1” and those from [online schools] … “Tier 2” … Tier 1 graduates now make up 99 percent of all recruits for all military branches…
Those who’ve opted out of the traditional educational system just don’t stick with military service, [a military spokeswoman] said. That includes students from what she called “any computer-based, virtual-learning program.”
“Years of research and experience show recruits with a traditional high school diploma are more likely to complete their initial three years of service than their alternate credential-holding (Tier 2) peers,” Lainez said. Data collected since 1988 shows only 28 percent of graduates with traditional diplomas leave military service before their first three years in uniform, while those with non-traditional backgrounds have a 39 percent attrition rate, she said.
If you look at why many students drop out of traditional high schools and go online, you can understand why this happens. Of the two students interviewed for this Associated Press story, one was “barred from returning to his public school on a weapons violation.” The other wanted to play tennis. School was just an impediment.
Now the military is, first of all, supposed to believe that by going online – an entirely unsupervised environment – these two learned all their course content fair and square. It’s also supposed to forget the statistics that tell it exactly what you would anticipate. People who can’t stick it out in the relatively undemanding institution of a public high school are unlikely to be able to stick it out in the demanding institution of the military.
The military knows full well that online schools are incentivized to take the lowest performing, least motivated students and keep them in as paying customers until they graduate in some form or another.
Students who’ve learned that you can online your way through life are the least promising candidates for the military, where you actually have to physically show up at set times and interact with actual human beings.
So many online students say they go online because they’re shy, they have trouble speaking up, being with other people. In what way is this supposed to be attractive to the United States military?
And what makes you think your online college is any more attractive to the military? If anything, it’s less.
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…[A] review of [online education] research by the United States Department of Education in 2009 … concluded that few rigorous studies had been done at the K-12 level, and policy makers “lack scientific evidence of the effectiveness” of online classes.
The fastest growth has been in makeup courses for students who failed a regular class. Advocates say the courses let students who were bored or left behind learn at their own pace.
But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.
“I think many people see online courses as being a way of being able to remove a pain point, and that is, how are they going to increase their graduation rate?” said Liz Pape, president of the Virtual High School Global Consortium. If credit recovery were working, she said, the need for remedial classes in college would be declining — but the opposite is true.
May 14th, 2011 at 10:14AM
Dropouts have less stick-to-it-iveness. Seems logical, but it takes a great deal of research to tease it out. James Heckman of the University of Chicago has worked extensively of late on understanding what makes GED recipients, for instance, different from traditional high school graduates. Doesn’t surprise that the military might discover the same thing.
May 14th, 2011 at 10:32AM
Online schools are becoming more mainstream every day — my own public high school district has a virtual system, with calculus, biology and economics, etc. AP level courses. It’s not just for losers anymore.
The kids using online education now should not be equated with “drop-outs”. In fact, they’re probably more focused, organized, and likely to be self-starters that the kids who sit in classrooms every day.
May 14th, 2011 at 10:54AM
gassman: Statistics and studies matter, not your anecdotal assurances.
Everyone understands why online schools are so popular. The question is whether you can assure an employer, or the military, or a university admissions committee, that the kids taking those challenging AP courses didn’t cheat their way through them. I’m sorry for those students who did not cheat, but they are going to be held back in their ambitions by those who did. Online is virtually set up to encourage cheating. That, plus its isolating effects, accounts, in large part, for the disrespect institutions have for it.
May 14th, 2011 at 3:50PM
Ms. Soltan: It seems that institutions have a bias against online classes on the one hand while on the other hand they are providers/consumers of online classes.
How many of those university admissions officers are working at institutions that offer online classes and degrees? How many people on the faculty have earned Ph.Ds from online universities? And on the consumer side, doesn’t the Department of Defense know that it is a huge buyer of online education?
This is an area that is crying out for scientific study — but not using data from 1988.
May 14th, 2011 at 5:57PM
All points well-taken, gassman.
I’d say that very few people on the faculties of non-profit universities got their PhDs from online universities. As I understand it, though, many for-profit online universities hire their own graduates.
As to why so many universities offer online classes — To save money.
May 17th, 2011 at 5:27PM
You just used “online” as a verb. Love it!