From Flynn’s Harp, blog by former publisher of the Puget Sound Business Journal. Thousands of low-income students who will graduate from high school in Washington State in 2012 expecting the state to fulfill a promise to make a free college education available to them represent a looming crisis of confidence for elected officials.
The 16,000 students who were part of a compact the state made with low-income kids to become the College Bound Scholarship students will thus be an additional challenge to the already critical higher-education cost and space-availability problems facing the Washington Legislature.
(The story of the higher-ed promise to those low-income kids and where fulfillment of the promise stands today merits its own column and will thus be the subject of next week’s Flynn’s Harp.)
But a proposal before the lawmakers to welcome an accredited non-profit online university called Western Governors University (WGU) into the ranks of the state’s official higher-education options could open thousands of new degree-granting opportunities to the state’s students.
Two farm kids, one who became Washington’s governor and the other who became president of Washington State University, helped create WGU in the late ‘90s out of a conviction that online higher-education would eventually be vital to this and other states.
Sam Smith, then president of WSU, was among a small group whose guidance was sought for creation of WGU. He remains today on the WGU executive committee and he has been actively soliciting support from all the state’s boards involved with higher education.
The appeal of the bill would seem obvious in that it would help address the space-and-cost crisis facing higher education without costing the state any money and would offer a low cost path for student to seek degrees in teaching, business, technology and health fields. But it could face opposition from those reluctant about education changes.
Former Gov. Mike Lowry, who was among a handful of governors who enthusiastically supported creation of WGU in the late ‘90s, describes the legislative proposal to welcome WGU as “very important for the state.”
Because WGU has neither tenured teachers nor teacher unions and student “mentors” keep their jobs based on the performance of their students, opposition to the bill is likely to come from advocates of tenure and teachers unions.
“We can’t let issues like tenure or union concerns stand in the way of students being able to get higher education,” Lowry insisted.
While WGU has about 23,000 students drawn from all 50 states, including about 1,000 students from Washington State, it operated pretty much off the radar screen until the past several years. Then it rapidly came to be viewed as a new tool for states facing mounting crises in higher education cost and availability.
The legislative proposal would treat WGU as a Washington institution. Students could use state grants at the college, and they could transfer credits from the college to public institutions.
Smith estimates that WGU, which is self-supported through tuition and operates on a competency-based model that credits students for what they’ve already learned as well as what courses they’ve taken, could handle about 8,000 more students from this state.
Smith has a vision of how the WGU program could come into play in addressing the issue of those low-income College Bound Scholarship students as well as other higher-ed pressures facing the state and its aspiring students.
At this point, the average WGU student is 36 years old and two-thirds of them have full-time jobs. Smith recognizes that WGU would need to attract more traditional-aged college students and thinks that could happen by having students do their online courses in traditional classroom settings.
Community college ranks have been swelled by 20 percent, Smith notes, because of the economy and lack of jobs. To the extent community college students find their way to the annual $6,000 cost of WGU, they’ll open spots for many of those College Bound Scholarship students at the two-year colleges.
“Looking at the future of education, we’re going to see a lot of blending of online and in-class courses with students spending part of their time on line and part of campuses,” Smith said. “This state has better physical plant than most states, particularly on the community college campuses, and thus has space where that blending could become a reality.”
Smith and Lowry could serve as poster boys to the importance of the higher-education opportunity for the state’s young people.
Lowry grew up in the Eastern Washington farming community of Endicott and had to earn enough money working on the area ranches to pay his way through WSU. He pointed out in our interview that that was possible in his day, but not now.
Smith grew up poor on a farm in the Salinas, CA, area and basically worked as a crop picker in his youth. He recalled for me once that his highest goal in life was to drive a tractor and when I offered a dumbfounded look to that, he smiled and said “the guy who drove the tractor didn’t have to walk along and pick the crop”
But once Smith was chosen to receive a scholarship to UCal-Berkeley, his future took a different course.
I have looked at the education WGU offers online, and it is nothing like what community college students need.
I teach American History at Shoreline Community College, both online and in hybrid formats. I am a very experienced college instructor who supports online education—provided it is online education that is well designed and meets the needs of the students who are enrolled in the courses. That is the sort of online education community college faculty like me and my colleagues at Shoreline CC already provide. We have been designing and teaching online curriculum specifically for community college students for a decade. And we at the community colleges know from experience that, contrary to what they would get at WGU, the students we teach need direct instruction from qualified faculty in order to succeed in any course, whether it is fully online, partly online (hybrid), or face to face.
The notion that all students can succeed in the WGU model is simply misguided. Most of the students I teach are just out of high school. These academically underprepared students have great potential to succeed in college and to transfer to four-year institutions and earn baccalaureate degrees. But they truly lack the skills necessary to succeed in the online environment WGU offers. In order to succeed in online courses—indeed, in order to succeed in any courses—the underprepared students I teach need a lot of direct instruction from me in addition to individual academic support from librarians and tutors. These are not students who can teach themselves. I literally spend hours and hours and hours each week helping my students learn how to learn, a skill that many of them apparently have never previously worked on.
I cannot stress strongly enough that the students I have taught for 10 years in the community college system are terrible candidates for self-paced online courses that do not provide active engaging daily instruction from qualified faculty. Whether these students are low-income, working, parents themselves, non-native-English speakers, lacking computer resources (more community college students than most people imagine do not have access to high speed internet or their own computers), or lacking confidence in their ability to learn, the students I see in my classrooms–both on campus and online–are unlikely to learn much of anything through the self-taught online materials that WGU offers.
The WGU proposal looks like an idea that has not been carefully thought through. What’s the benefit for the state and for students if the education WGU offers is so dramatically different from the education that community college students actually need? And why should the state of Washington outsource public education to an online university such as WGU anyway when excellent public college opportunities for online instruction are already available?
Shoreline Community College offers fabulous online courses right now. There is no reason to outsource these courses to WGU. Let the community colleges do what we know how to do well with the students we already work with.
In order to succeed in an online environment, the underprepared students we teach in the community college system need a lot of direct instruction from faculty and a lot of academic and student services support. Rather than outsourcing public education, the state should increase the capacity of community colleges to provide online instruction that is tailored to the needs of the students we have rather than encouraging those students to enroll in programs that were never designed to meet their educational needs.
Good, terrific!