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Dispelling some myths about distance education in the USA

March 1, 2018 by 4 Comments

Source: WCET, via IPEDS

Taylor-Straut, T. (2018) Distance Education Enrollment Growth – Major Differences Persist Among Sectors Boulder CO: WCET, 1 March

This is another valuable analysis by the WCET of the 2016 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data that reports distance education course enrollments in the USA. This is the fourth year that IPEDS have been collecting such data, and Terri Taylor-Straut looks at some of the trends in both overall enrollment and distance education enrollment in the USA over that period.

Myth no. 1: most DE in the USA is from the for-profit universities

There are various ways to calculate this, but enrollments in for-profits such as University of Phoenix, Laureate, Kaplan, etc., constitute about 13% of all post-secondary distance education enrollments. Most students taking distance education courses in the USA take them from public institutions (70%). In fact more students take DE courses from not-for-profit private universities than from for-profits (18%). That is a change from 2012, when the for-profits had about 20% of all DE enrollments, compared with about 16% for the not-for profits.

Myth no. 2: The U.S. HE system is continuing to grow

Overall enrollments are down by 4% from 2012 to 2016. Enrollments in the public universities are down 2% over the same period. However, overall enrollments for the for-profits are down by 34%. Enrollments in the private, not-for-profits were up 2%.

Myth no. 3: DE enrollments have reached their peak

While overall enrollments are slightly down over the four years, DE enrollments increased by 17% overall, despite a drop of 22% in enrollments in the for-profits. What is really interesting is that the private not-for-profits DE enrollments were up nearly 50% over the same period. DE enrollments in the public sector increased by 20%.

Myth no. 4: Higher education in the USA is largely private

As the report concludes:

public institutions continue to educate the vast majority of students, both on campus and by distance education courses.

See chart at the head of this post for the evidence.

Comment

WCET has no intention to place value judgments on the different sectors or the results from IPEDS. I however have no such compunction (long live the border).

I draw two conclusions from these data:

  • publicly funded higher education is still the main driver of higher education in the U.S. Any attempt to weaken it by funding cuts at the state level, or by reducing student financial aid at the federal level, will have a disproportionately large negative effect on US higher education overall;
  • distance education, or probably more accurately, fully online learning, no longer is tainted with the stain of lower quality but is now increasingly accepted as a valuable addition to higher education offerings, even, or especially, by the more prestigious private, not-for-profit universities.

I will be interested in your comments (especially from across the border!)

Further reading

T. Bates (2018) Is distance education stealing on-campus students? Online learning and distance education resources, 1 February

Filed Under: Bibliography, current state of the art, national, regional and international strategies, Strategies, planning and management, United States of America Tagged With: , , , , ,

Is distance education stealing on-campus students?

February 1, 2018 by Leave a Comment

On campus – or online?

Poulin, R. (2018) Distance Ed Growth – Access is a Big Motivator, but it’s Complicated, WCET Frontiers, February 1

This post is essential reading for university and college administrators. It combines the latest U.S. Department of Education data on distance and overall enrolments with a specific survey asking institutions why online and distance education is growing so rapidly when overall enrolments in the USA are static. It therefore raises some fundamental policy issues for institutions.

For Canadian readers, while there are significant differences between the two systems, I think the findings here will be equally true for Canada, since I will show in this post that we have a similar situation with even greater expansion of online learning while overall enrolments have been largely static over the last couple of years.

Enrolments trends

USA

Phil Hill of eLiterate did an analysis of the data recently released by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics. Russ Poulin of WCET summarised this in his blog post in the table below:

Table 1: Growth in DE and overall enrolments in US Higher Education: 2012-2016

Source: Poulin, 2018, from Hill, P. and NCES

It can be seen that the number and percentage of ALL students enrolled in higher education is slightly down, but the number of students taking all courses at a distance has grown by 30.1%.

Canada

We can see a similar trend in Canada. The graph below is from Alex Usher’s One Thought blog, which in turn is derived from Statistics Canada.

Figure 1: Total enrolments by Institution Type, Canada, 2006-07 to 2015-16

Source: Usher, A. (2018) Student Numbers, One Thought to Start Your Day, January 9

It can be seen that overall enrolments in universities have been almost flat over the last four years and have declined slightly in colleges over the last two years.

On the other hand, our national survey of online and distance education in Canadian post-secondary education found that over the period 2011-2015, online college enrolments outside Québec increased by 15% per annum (60% 0verall), and for all universities (including Québec) increased by 14% per annum (56% overall). The situation in the Quebec colleges (CEGEPs) was more complicated with an overall decline of 5% in online enrolments over the same period.

Are online enrolments eating the campus lunch?

Russ Poulin at WCET was gnawing away at two questions that these data raised in his mind:

  • what is driving the expansion of online/distance education when overall enrolments are flat? Access, more money, other reasons?
  • are online enrolments being achieved at the expense of campus-based classes?

So, as any good researcher would, he sent out a questionnaire to WCET member institutions and received 192 responses, including a very interesting set of open ended comments. His blog post summarises the responses and I recommend you read it in full, but the following chart gets to the essence:

Figure 2: Reasons for the growth in Distance Education

Source: Poulin, R. (2018)

What does it mean?

Here are my key takeaways:

  • it’s complex: there are several reasons for the growth of online learning: increasing access and/or greater student convenience are not mutually exclusive to increasing revenues, for instance;
  • only 19% believed the move to online learning is primarily about increasing revenues;
  • just under half said it does not affect campus-based enrolments; these are students who would not have come to campus
  • nearly two thirds reported that distance education (probably meaning online learning, the distinction was not made in the survey) is leading to more blended/hybrid options, i.e. it is beginning to impact on classroom teaching, a similar finding to ours in the national survey.

The primary reason for ‘flat’ or declining overall enrolments is demographic. There are fewer 18 year olds than 10 years ago in both countries (and if the Dreamers in the USA are kicked out, that number will go down even more). However, both international and online students, many of them older and in the work force, have helped to compensate for this demographic loss, although recently international on-campus student enrolments have decreased in the USA and accelerated in Canada, making the growth of online learning even more important for the USA institutions.

Faculty and instructors should welcome this surge in online learning, because without it, many would have lost their jobs.

Lastly, online learning is now impacting classroom teaching. This means that institutions need policies, strategies and probably some funding reallocation to support the move to blended/hybrid learning, and faculty development and training in digital learning will become even more essential. Institutions that do not move in this direction run the risk of losing enrolments and with it funding.

Isn’t it nice to see policy issues being driven by data rather than opinions? Well done, Russ and WCET.

Filed Under: Bibliography, blended learning, Canada, distant education, General, Monthly Feature, national, regional and international strategies, post-secondary distance education, Strategies, planning and management, Teaching and learning, United States of America Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Distance education on a roll in the USA

January 23, 2018 by Leave a Comment

Seaman, J.E., Allen, I.E., and Seaman, J. (2018) Grade Increase: Tracking Distance Education in the United States Wellesley MA: The Babson Survey Research Group

Boy, does that guy Jeff Seaman keep busy! Hard on the heels of quarter-backing the national survey of online and distance learning in Canadian post-secondary education, here he is with colleagues producing an even more comprehensive update on online and distance education in the USA.

There are several things though that make this report different, both from the Canadian study and previous Babson Reports:

  • first, online enrolments are now placed firmly in the context of overall student enrolments in the USA. While overall enrolments in the US higher education system have slowly declined (by almost 4% between 2012 to 2016), online enrolments have grown by about 5% over the same period. In comparison online enrolments in Canada grew by 40% in universities and by 60% in two year colleges over the same five year period, while overall enrolments grew slightly (by around 2%).
  • There are now fewer students studying on campus than at any point since 2012 in the USA. There are now over a million fewer students coming to campus in 2016 than there were in 2012.

  • As of Fall 2016, there were 6,359,121 students taking at least one distance education course, comprising 31.6% of all higher education enrollments. So online and distance students have been shoring up student enrolments in the USA over the last five years.
  • 83% of distance students are taking undergraduate courses and 17% post-graduate courses.
  • There are wide variations between the different HE sectors in the USA, both in terms of overall enrollments, and also distance education enrollments. Overall enrollments grew modestly in the public and private not-for-profit institutions over the four years but declined dramatically in public two year colleges (down 14%) and even more so in the private, for profit sector (down 32% and 40% respectively for four year and two year colleges).
  • For-profit institutions have seen their total distance education enrollments decrease during these time periods. These changes of course occurred before the Trump election and reflect the impact of the Obama administration’s regulatory efforts. It will be interesting to see how things change if at all during the Trump administration.
  • The majority of distance education students in the USA (69%) are in public institutions.
  • Distance education is generally local. The vast majority (84%) of students taking exclusively distance courses enrolled at public institutions are located in the same state as the institution.
  • Distance education is not international in the USA: In Fall 2016, there were only 45,475 students located outside of the United States taking exclusively distance courses. This represents only 1.5% of students taking exclusively distance courses, and only 0.7% of all distance education students.
  • Students enrolled in distance education remain highly concentrated in a relatively small number of institutions. Almost half of distance education students are accounted for in just 5% of institutions: the 235 institutions that represent only 5.0% of the higher education universe command 47% (2,985,347) of the student distance enrollments. The top 47 institutions, representing only 1.0% of all institutions, enroll 22.4% (1,421,703) of all distance students. This is very different from Canada, where distance education students are much more evenly distributed across almost all institutions.
  • There are wide variations between the different U.S. states. The report provides a breakdown of online enrolments for each state.
  • The study identifies the 50 institutions with the most distance education enrollments. The top seven are:

  • The enrollment data for this report uses information from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database.  IPEDS is a national census of postsecondary institutions in the U.S., which represents the most comprehensive data available. No such comprehensive post-secondary education data are publicly available in Canada.

This report indicates the value of an openly accessible national system of tracking online and distance education enrolments. Institutions must provide the data, especially as it influences federal state aid to students. Once such data are made publicly available, there are opportunities for all kinds of analyses to be made. The value though is that this is just part of a national program of data collection on higher education enrolments. We are nowhere close to matching this in Canada.

Filed Under: Bibliography, current state of the art, distant education, Events, General, national, regional and international strategies, publications, Strategies, planning and management, United States of America Tagged With: , , , ,

Corruption in higher education: a wake-up call

July 31, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Staff at Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia were accused of taking bribes to admit students to its Medical School

Staff at Pavol Jozef Safarik University, Kosice, Slovakia have been accused of taking bribes to admit students to the Medical School

Daniel, J. (2016) Combatting Corruption and Enhancing Integrity: A Contemporary Challenge for the Quality and Integrity of Higher Education: Advisory Statement for Effective International Practice: Washington DC/Paris: CHEA/UNESCO

Daniel, J. (2016) Lutter contre la corruption et renforcer l’intégrité : un défi contemporain pour la qualité et la crédibilité de l’enseignement supérieur: Déclaration consultative pour des pratiques internationales efficaces Washington DC/Paris: CHEA/UNESCO

Those of us working in online learning are often berated by academic colleagues about the possible lack of integrity in online learning due to issues such as plagiarism, diploma mills, or ‘easy’ qualifications lacking rigorous academic process. Such cases do occur, but having read this document, it seems that the more traditional areas of higher education are prone to far more egregious forms of corruption.

Where do we find corruption?

At the end of this report, there is a list of references chronicling corruption in higher education in Australia, China, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, and the USA. And those are just the ones who have been recently caught.

The report puts it bluntly:

This Advisory Statement is a wake-up call to higher education worldwide – particularly to quality assurance bodies. HEIs [higher education institutions], governments, employers and societies generally, in both developed and developing countries, are far too complacent about the growth of corrupt practices, either assuming that these vices occur somewhere else or turning a deaf ear to rumours of malpractice in their own organizations.

What kinds of corruption?

You name it, it’s in this report. In fact, the report describes 29 different kinds of corrupt practices. Here are just a few examples:

  • giving institutions licenses, granting degree-awarding powers, or accrediting programmes in return for bribes or favours.

  • altering student marks in return for sexual or other favours.

  • administrative pressure on academics to alter marks for institutional convenience.

  • publishing false recruitment advertising.

  • impersonation of candidates and ghost writing of assignments.

  • political pressures on higher education institutions to award degrees to public figures.

  • publication by supervisors of research by graduate students without acknowledgement.

  • higher education institutions publishing misleading news releases or suppressing inconvenient news.

Who is sounding the alarm?

Although the writer of the report is Sir John Daniel, a fellow Research Associate at Contact North, and former Vice-Chancellor, the Open University, Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO and President of the Commonwealth of Learning, the report draws on meetings of expert groups from the following organizations:

  • UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)
  • the International Quality Group of the US Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA/CIQG).

What’s causing this?

Corruption is as much about lack of ethical behaviour and rampant self-interest as about policies and practices. The report though points to two key factors that are contributing to corruption:

  • the huge appetite for higher education among the young populations of the developing world puts great pressures on admissions processes;
  • the steadily developing sophistication and borderless nature of information and communications technology (ICT) has expanded the opportunities for fraudsters in all walks of life.

What are the recommended solutions?

There are of course no easy solutions here. The report points out that there are both ‘upstream’ possibilities for corruption at the level of government and accrediting agencies, and downstream, from individuals desperate to get into and succeed within an increasingly competitive higher education system. In the middle are the institutions themselves.

The report separates its recommendations for combatting corruption then into several target areas:

  1. the regulation of higher education systems
  2.  the teaching role of higher education institutions
  3. student admissions and recruitment
  4. student assessment
  5. credentials and qualifications
  6. research theses and publications
  7. through increased public awareness

It is interesting that while the report emphasizes the importance of internal quality assurance processes within HEIs, it also notes that the more ‘mature’ an HE system becomes, the more external quality assurance agencies, such as accreditation boards and government ministries, tend to pass quality assurance responsibilities back to the institutions. The report notes that students themselves have a very important role to play in demanding transparency and whistle-blowing.

A call to action

The report ends with the following:

  • governments, quality assurance agencies and HEIs worldwide must become more aware of the threat that corruption poses to the credibility, effectiveness and quality of higher education at a time when its importance as a driver of global development has never been higher.

  • external quality assurance agencies should do more to review the risks of corruption in their work and HEIs must ensure that their IQA [internal quality assurance] frameworks are also fit for the purpose of combatting corruption.

  • training and supporting staff in identifying and exposing corrupt practices should be stepped up.

  • creating networks of organizations that are fighting corruption and greater North-South collaboration in capacity building for this purpose are highly desirable.

So next time some sanctimonious academic sneers at the academic integrity of online learning, just point them in the direction of this report.

Filed Under: accreditation, Australia, Bibliography, cheating, China, Europe, France, Germany, governance, India, measuring institutional performance, national, regional and international strategies, plagiarism, planning, policies and management - institutional, quality and quality assurance, Russia, South Africa, Strategies, planning and management, Teaching and learning, United States of America, USA Tagged With: , , , , , ,

State support for public higher education is declining in the USA

January 7, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Young Invincibles 2

Young Invincibles (2015) 2016 State Report Cards Washington DC: Young Invincibles

This is a very interesting state by state report card on the support for public higher education in the USA since the economic recession of 2008. Key results:

  • states have cut per student spending by 21 percent since 2008. Only two states spend as much as they did before the recession (Alaska and North Dakota). Six states are now spending less than two thirds of what they were spending in 2008
  • tuition and fees at both 4-year and 2-year institutions rose 28 percent since 2008 (inflation rose 14%).
  • in 2008, students and families paid approximately 36 percent of the cost of public college; in 2014 that percentage increased to 50 per cent.
  • the gap between white non-Hispanic adults and Latino adults with postsecondary degrees grew by 2.2 percentage points between 2007 and 2015

As interesting as the result is the organization that did the study. Young Invincibles is:

a national organization, representing the interests of 18 to 34 year-olds and making sure that our perspective is heard wherever decisions about our collective future are being made. We do this through conducting cutting-edge policy research and analysis, sharing the stories of young adults, designing campaigns to educate on important issue areas, informing and mobilizing our generation and advocating to change the status quo.

It can be seen that state funding of public higher education in the USA has declined significantly over the last six years, even though the economy in general has more than recovered (U.S. GDP in 2015 was $1.5 billion higher than before the recession kicked in).

This is clear evidence in the decline of political support at a state level for publicly funded higher education in the USA over the last six years. Once again it is young people who are paying the price.

In Canada we didn’t suffer as badly during and following the recession and I suspect public funding of universities is if anything slightly higher today in most provinces per capita than it was in 2008. However, can anyone give me the exact figures?

Filed Under: Bibliography, costs and benefits, national, regional and international strategies, Strategies, planning and management, United States of America, USA Tagged With: , , , ,
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