A Much-Needed Challenge To Low-Quality Universities
Like global warming, the growth of online higher education is the kind of trend whose steady progress will ultimately change the world. Just take a look at the latest numbers: The annual Sloan Consortium report on online education in the United States was released last week, finding that 6.1 million American college students took at least one online course in Fall 2010 (that’s a half million more than 2009) and that nearly one-third of all college students are learning online now (up from less than 10 percent in 2002). And the transformative advances of our higher education entrepreneurs—showcased last month in Philadelphia at the annual higher education technology conference EDUCAUSE—are evident to anyone who bothers to look.
But you would have trouble finding any of this acknowledged in our elite media, or in the halls of power in state capitals and Washington, D.C. As the world changes rapidly around them, many of our top thinkers and policymakers are out of touch, living in a world where most people graduate from high school at age 18, move into a dorm in August, and emerge with a bachelor’s degree four years later. It’s a misunderstanding that cuts across political parties and ideologies, to the detriment of all well-intentioned reformers. But it’s progressives who ought to be most sensitive to the urgency of the situation. After all, the greatest victims of their ongoing myopia are the country’s least fortunate students.