I have likely provided a link to this Frontline program before, but it was recently presented again and it came at a time I was particularly sensitive to the issue of revenue and online instruction.
College Inc. is pretty much about the abuses and scams associated with online instruction. It is about online, for profit, colleges that buy in to small failing institutions to purchase accreditation and encourage students to take out government loans for their education at an inflated price – twice the cost of a public state college. Often, the degrees are not useful in obtaining employment resulting in a high loan default rate and long term credit problems for the students. We all pay and the institutions continue to profit.
Why am I sensitive? I am a departmental administrator involved in offering two online programs (a graduate MA in forensic psychology and an undergraduate BA in psychology). I understand the cost of offering such programs when instruction is part of a faculty member’s teaching load and reasonable limits are placed on class size to provide students a reasonable experience. I am also now faced with the failure of my institution to pay the department some of the money generated by these programs because students switched from campus-based to online programs and the administration failed to plan for this switch when promoting the online programs. I would like to think, in contrast to the description of online education in the Frontline special that we do it right, but this approach may be more costly than some anticipate. You cannot mass produce education. No good deed goes unpunished?