I just read an article from TechCrunch indicating that California is experimenting with $150 online survey courses. Aside from the issue of quality which I assume will be carefully evaluated, I think assumptions regarding the economics of such a move are misguided.
Let me explain that I work in a University Psychology department and chaired this department for many years. I am very familiar with the large survey course environment and am still teaching in such a setting. I also worked with budgets and reviewed tuition dollars generated by different departments for many years.
First, the notion that our courses are “only lecture” is inaccurate. I do lecture to 200 students. However, these students also have a weekly small group session (25) allowing discussion and requiring writing tasks.
Second, I would suggest that we teach some large courses so that our department and other departments can teach small courses. Aside from our own graduate programs in Psychology, the tuition revenues generated in Psychology make it financially possible for others to teach courses of the size say students might experience in Education, Art or English. I am picking departments at random here just to point out that the revenue generated from a 25 student class does not pay the salary of the instructor or the cost of the infrastructure and money is moved from elsewhere to cover the difference. Our department also happens to train the clinical psychologists for North Dakota which happens to be a good example of the folly of trying to evaluate efficiency on a course by course basis.. There is no way this program could be operated in what many might consider a cost-effective manner. Accreditation requirements allow us to enroll one clinical graduate student per clinical faculty member per year. So, a state either wants to prepare mental health professionals more likely to stay local or to compete to hire such professionals trained elsewhere.
There are certain economic realities that must be considered before concluding large survey courses generate too much tuition income. University budgets originate from multiple sources – tuition, grants, state allocations, and gifts. State institutions receive a smaller and smaller proportion of their budgets from their states. There is also political pressure against constantly raising tuition. Advanced students of the type we hope to attract into our clinical graduate programs and eventually to a North Dakota practice come at a price – you may have assumed they pay us. Our campus-based graduate programs all operate in this fashion.
Taking money out of the university by reducing the amount generated from large courses will have to be made up in some other ways. This might involve a reduction in staff which would also involve a reduction in the variety of other courses we offer and the diversity of expertise available to advanced students. This would seem the most serious problem in universities of moderate size. Very large institutions simply have more redundancy.
Anyway, I offer these comments just to raise awareness. It is naive to look at one category of courses and assume you have identified a way to contain costs. We could certainly go a model in which the actual cost were charged on a course by course basis. Consider what that might look like.
