Think of this one as a sort of companion piece to the CHE article I posted about earlier today: from Inside Higher Ed, “Revolt Against Outsourced Courses.”
Here are the opening paragraphs:
Here’s the pitch: “Can you really GO TO COLLEGE for LESS THAN the cost of your monthly CELL PHONE BILL? We can’t say that this is true in ALL cases — hey, you might have a GREAT cell phone plan. But maybe it’s your cable bill, electric bill, or your GAS bill. … The point we’re trying to make is that taking general education, required college courses just became A LOT more affordable.”
How affordable? $99 for a course. And if you take the courses offered by StraighterLine — in composition, economics, algebra, pre-calculus, and accounting — you don’t need to worry that the company isn’t itself a college. StraighterLine has partnerships with five colleges that will award credit for the courses. Three are for-profit institutions and one is a nontraditional state university for adult students. But one college among the five is more typical of the kinds of colleges most students attend. It is Fort Hays State University, an institution of 10,000 students in Kansas.
There, even as professors are still pushing to get information about StraighterLine so they can evaluate it, students have taken a look and decided that they don’t like what they see. In articles in the student newspaper and in Facebook groups (attracting debates with the university’s provost and the company’s CEO), the students argue that StraighterLine is devaluing their university and higher education in general.
“In the short term, this may save FHSU a small amount of money (although this is debatable). In the long term, this could increase the cost of a degree for current students, lower the quality of education and academic standards at FHSU, lead to unemployment for many passionate educators, and eventually cheapen the value of a degree from FHSU for both current and future alumni,” says the Facebook group created by students that has set off the discussion.
I actually find this news quite encouraging because what you have here is both faculty and students recognizing these outsourced and goofy StraighterLine “courses” for what they are: bullshit, and bullshit that is probably not actually worth the $99 per course.
And to me, this is more evidence as to why universities are not going to go away quite yet.
