Learning from low-cost private universities

Most people believe that private higher education is too expensive.  Their suggestions for reducing costs fall into two categories:

• cut unnecessary administrators and luxuries, and/or
• add very low-cost online courses.

These answers, though,are speculative.  No private institution has significantly reduced the cost to students through these methods.  In fact, it is from the most expensive and prestigious institutions that low-cost online courses are flowing.  Those schools seem unlikely to reduce tuition in the near future.

These speculative recommendations ignore the fact that there are many low-cost private non-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. The Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center generates lists of the private institutions with the lowest tuition and the lowest net costs.  What do these schools share?

1.  Most have never had expensive administrators or luxurious campuses. 
2.  Few offer online courses.
3.  They have a clear curricular focus--usually religious--and generally offer a limited set of degrees.
4. They often are subsidized by religious bodies or in the case of Berea College, a massive endowment.
5. They are resolutely local (note, for example, the large number of low-cost private institutions in Puerto Rico).  Or put another way, few have national or global aspirations.
6. Instead, their aspirations are to serve a single population, or a particular sponsoring body.
7. Many are very small.
8. They tend to have very low retention and graduation rates.
9. Many are newly created.

A healthy discussion about the cost of private higher education would take these schools into consideration.  Their track records are not spotless--many teeter on the brink of collapse, others serve their students poorly by charging them so little.  

But four characteristics of theses schools are intriguing--curricular focus, local commitments, and recent origins.  All four flow against the trend towards offering more degrees, seeking global opportunities, and banking on the prestige that flows from venerability.  But education reformers who value private, non-profit higher education might bear these characteristics of real schools in mind as they try to craft the successful institutions of the future.

Why Kevin Carey is (mostly) wrong about merit aid

Kevin Carey is one of the smartest and most eloquent education analysts in the United States. He is also mostly wrong about the uses of merit aid.

Carey's recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, "Too Much "Merit" Aid Requires No Merit," argues that a significant amount of merit aid (institutional scholarships based on academic performance) is given to students whose academic record does not merit it.  In giving such aid to the "stupid sons of the rich" (here Carey is quoting Harvard's turn-of-the-20th century president Charles W. Eliot) higher education both forces taxpayers to subsidize other students more heavily than it otherwise would and debases the meaning of the word "merit."

His article is wrapped around an anecdote about the son of friend.  The parents were intelligent and rich; the son shared his parents wealth but not their academic prowess.  Nonetheless, he was admitted to several decent private colleges, two of whom offered him a merit scholarship--in Carey's telling in order to entice his wealthy family to pay the rest of the $50,000 annual bill. The parents were incredulous, the father telling Carey, "He's never gotten a 'merit' anything before...He's not a very good student."

It is true that there are students at many institutions like the student in this story, who were indifferent academically but still qualified for merit aid. And it is true that giving such scholarships to the children of the wealthy somehow seems, well, wrong.  It is, in my experience, rarely the case that such a scholarship is given to a student only because s/he is from a rich family, though. And it is also true that the alternatives to awarding merit aid in this way are not much better, either for students or for the institution.

Think about the three pricing models that private colleges use to attract students.  In the first, the college prices tuition at what it costs to educate the student and offers almost no scholarships. In the second, the college prices tuition at roughly what the market will bear, but then provides institutional aid (almost entirely in the form of a discount) based on family need.  In the third, the college again chooses a market price, but then provides institutional aid (again, as discount) based on merit.  What happens for students and for the school?

In model one, schooling is largely available to students of middle and upper-middle class families who can afford the $15K+  that it costs to cover the costs of education.  The student body is thus from roughly the same economic strata, but of varying levels of academic preparation. Will the school be able to enroll enough  students to keep the doors open?  Only if its reputation is strong enough, its quality high enough, or its costs low enough to generate demand.  Otherwise, students have no reason to choose the school.

In model two, schooling is largely available  either to wealthy students who aren't academically strong enough to go somewhere else, or to students with significant enough need, met by need-based aid, that the cost of attending becomes affordable. Again, academic preparation varies widely, but so does the economic well-being of families.  And again, the school will struggle to enroll enough students, unless it has very generous donors whose gifts offset discount, or its reputation is so distinctive that it can attract both of its potential main audiences.

In model three, schooling is available to students with a relatively narrow range of academic preparation (those whose grades qualify them for merit under the school's criteria), and with a relatively narrow economic range as well.  The school will attract students who can afford it, who are attracted to its message, and who may be enticed by a reward for their prior academic performance.

None of these models is inherently better than another.  Schools choose them based on a mixture of their position in the marketplace, their mission, and their view of the social ends of education.

In practice, no school uses one of these pure models.  Most use a mix of models 2 and 3, supplemented by federal or state aid.  In the case of Westminster College, for example, applicants with an ACT score above 21 and a high school GPA above 3.0 earn merit scholarships. Scholarship amounts and ranges are posted publicly. Very few students below that range come to Westminster.  But at each merit scholarship level, students are also evaluated for need-based aid, some from the college, and some in the form of federal loans and Pell grants.  It is the case, therefore, that attending Westminster is actually less expensive for a student with financial need than for a student with a comparable academic background from a more prosperous family.  It is also less expensive for a student with a strong academic background, regardless of his/her economic situation, than it is for a student with a weaker academic record but the same economic profile.

These results--that the cost of school is less for needier families than richer ones, less for strong students than weak ones, and  least for needy, bright students--are defensible on social and educational grounds. But for a school that accepts these results, there are several implications. For enrollment managers, the biggest challenge is balancing the number of prosperous and less-prosperous students, and the number of academically strong and less strong students, so that the institution earns enough revenue to stay open and meet its goals of maintaining access to a quality education.

I have written critically of this practice, known as financial aid leveraging, because it makes price opaque to students and because it may not be well-founded in human psychology. It can cause academic problems as well, since the range of academic preparation can (though needn't necessarily) vary widely at leveraged schools. (That can also be the case at schools that hardly leverage at all). Further, students who are among the weakest academically at any institution are less likely to be retained.  But so are students who are needier, so leveraging is no guarantee of college success.  And for someone like Carey who is looking at higher ed as a whole, the practice raises questions about the quality of the system, since because different schools attract different pools of potential applicants, a student with a 1000 on the SAT may get merit aid at one college, but nothing at another.

Kevin Carey decries financial aid leveraging also when he criticizes institutions for giving merit aid to "the stupid sons of the rich." But Carey is wrong about schools' motivation for giving merit aid to wealthy underachievers. Schools don't do it because they want to enroll more stupid sons of the rich.  We do it to enroll more bright daughters of the poor.  That goal may be worth a few thousand dollars of merit aid to a "stupid son", even for a kid whose parents don't think he deserves it.

Why "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question

Whether asked directly or implicitly, the question "Should everybody go to college?" plays a big part in current discussions about education in America.  It is lurking behind talk about access to higher education, views about it drive responses to MOOCs, it is implicit in doubts about the value of higher education, it shapes the little indignities of life in high school (as when the already poorly named SEOP--student education opportunity plan--takes on the name CCE--college and career ready--so that legislators and administrators can signal their unwillingness to take a stand on the question.)

That said, "Should everybody go to college?" is the wrong question, both because it doesn't help us think clearly about education and because it pushes to the side exactly the people who are meant to be served by that discussion--parents and students.  Here is why it is a bad question:

1. Only people on the margins can give a clear answer to it--"yes" or "no".  But even worse, everyone else has to temporize--yes in this instance, but no in that.  Such temporizing immediately turns an important conversation into an argument about definitions and categories.
2. As soon as it becomes a discussion about categories, it is actual students who disappear.  In their place are groups of students, who should follow one path or another based on the position of the person answering the question.
3. The question answerers (or at least the main voices in the debate) tend to be people who have administrative or financial, but rarely personal interest in the answer.  That is, they tend to be people with official roles in the education system facing off against people who want to change the educational system.
4. On the other hand, the question leaves the views and voices of families and students at the margin.  They don't have the financial or organizational presence to weigh in on such a big question.  Instead, they fit into a box--"You took college prep courses and got good grades and can afford college?  Well, then college is for you--move ahead."  Or, put another way, the question turns people who should actively be shaping decisions into acceptors of decisions/categories made in advance for abstract versions of them.

Is there a better question to use in its place?  I prefer, "How important is college?"  Here is why:

1. It is a question that places students and their families at the center of the discussion, because it can be answered from personal experience and belief in specific ways.
2. It is a question that is as meaningfully asked of college-goers as of non-college-goers.  After all, lots of  students in college place the importance of college below other things--family, jobs, skiing.  And lots of people who aren't in college place college high in their list of priorities.
3. It is a question that requires families and students to think about school/work/life balance.  In other words, it places college into the real lives of students rather than making college-going an activity separate from the rest of life. 
4. It is a question, the answer to which can lead to real action.  Regardless of your view on "should everybody go to college?" almost no one can do anything to move opinion one way or another.  But the question "How important is college?" has immediate and actionable (sorry, I hate that word) consequences.
5. The question moves power away from central authorities towards the level--personal, family, and community--that is most immediately effected by the decision.
6. It is a question that places educational policy and innovation--be it MOOCs, or the creation of new institutions, or financial aid, or scholarships, or admission requirements--in the service of actual human beings, instead of the other way around.  If your big thing is MOOCs, then your answer to "Should everybody go to college?" serves MOOCs.  But if your big question is "How important is college?" then you have lots of tools at your disposal to shape the answer to the actual needs and desires of actual people.   MOOCs for some, community college for others, liberal arts colleges for yet others.

Success in the shadow of giants, or, What does a school like Westminster call itself?

With the exception of schools whose fame (like Williams, Pomona, Middlebury, Dartmouth, or Brown) or location (New England and the Midwest) make their purposes automatically comprehensible to prospective students, the first thing that institutions like Westminster must figure out is what to call themselves.

By saying this I mean something more than "schools must have a name."  I mean that schools like Westminster--which receive neither state, nor church, nor investor sponsorship, and which offer neither all fields of study or a severely limited roster of academic programs--are incomprehensible without a clear self-description.

Think about the prospective student growing up in Utah, or Colorado, or Texas, or Alabama, or any other state with a very visible state university system and/or prominent church-sponsored schools. If they are religious, they understand immediately what BYU or Baylor or Gonzaga are about.  And if they are at all attentive to the news or sports, they have been exposed to state universities (particularly flagships and land-grants) since before they even considered college.  Stuart Dorsey, the President of Texas Lutheran University put it this way to me in a conversation; "For a kid growing up in Texas, the first question about higher education they ask themselves is, 'Am I a Longhorn or an Aggie?'" State schools and religious universities enter the recruiting contest with an immense advantage, since they are not only more highly subsidized, but more frequently covered, more visible, larger, more famous, and more likely to be part of the everyday life of young people than are schools like Westminster.  They are giants, not just in enrollment, but in visibility, in reach, and in influence.

In this context, a school like Westminster is not just unknown but unfathomable.  So our first challenge, before we can work with a student on fit and affordability, is to figure out how to describe ourselves.

Our traditional way of doing it--"Institution X is a small, private, liberal arts college" is almost useless, since all of those terms are either weak, confusing,  compromised, or unattached from their historical meanings.  "Small," for example, is claimed by nearly every institution in the US (just look at how they market their average class size for an example).  Further, for students today, small carries as many negative connotations (no bigger than high school, boring) as positive.  "Private" is even worse, since it requires an immediate explanation of the legal  and educational difference between for-profit and not-for-profit institutions, and a quick distancing from the University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, etc.  "Liberal Arts" carries mixed meanings, with some equating it to general education and others to traditional approaches to learning.  And "college" is similarly confusing, since major universities contain colleges, and small institutions call themselves "universities." And none of the words convey any of the things that make such institutions distinctive or innovative.

So how can a place like Westminster describe itself so as to be both accurate and attractive?  Here are a few thoughts:

• Independent. Independence conveys three facts--all important and all desirable.  Independence suggests that the institution is beholden neither to church nor state. It points to the most important component of the traditional meaning of liberal arts, that it is the education necessary for free people.  And those two points open a meaningful conversation about why the cost of an education is higher at Westminster than at a particular state university--because it is self-funding, and because its educational goals include but go beyond employment.
• Interconnected. Interconnection suggests something good both about the curriculum--that its pieces are tied together--and about the life of the community, that set schools like Westminster apart from their competitors.  Large public universities have no such interconnected community--they have at best interest groups--and private or technical institutions have no desire to make their curricula add up to something bigger than the sum of their parts.
• School of higher learning. School is a rich word, one whose etymology suggests place, independent effort, and community.  Those meanings are both more varied and more precise than "college" or "university."  And "higher learning" locates the work of the school at a level of greater complexity and meaning than other school work, and puts the focus on learning, where it belongs, rather than on the scholarly bona fides of faculty or the institution's prominence, size, or image. 

It is true that "Westminster College [or any other such institution] is an independent, interconnected school of higher learning" sounds odd.  But the oddness of such a sentence is a good thing, since it pushes both the speaker and the hearer to recognize the oddness of the institution, its mission, and its location in the higher education landscape.  And that is certainly better than describing the institution using words that lack clarity and accuracy.  If we are going to move out from the shadow of giant institutions, some such language is essential.

What the British can remind us about higher education funding

I've argued before that one of the ironies of American education is that K-12 and higher education work under assumptions that are both radically different and uninformed by each other.

One of the most obvious focuses on per-student funding.  In public K-12 education, per student funding is a major point of discussion.  And while there is debate about exactly how important increasing per-student spending is for student learning, it goes without saying that schools that have more funding per student are able to invest in more learning opportunities, better quality resources, and higher paid teachers than those with lower funding levels.  In short, at the K-12 level, per-student funding is about fairness and access to resources.

In American higher education, though, we rarely talk about per-student income as an important indicator of fairness.  It is true that representatives from public institutions express concern about declining state subsidies for higher education. But key rankings of colleges and universities are uncritical about the wealth amassed by major universities (public and private).  And measures of student learning--the value-added scales of the CLA for example--don't directly take into consideration per student income as a factor.  Instead, they predict performance based on student test scores.  Indeed, the main discussion that touches on per-student funding is about the cost of higher education.  Concern about rising cost is spot-on as far as it goes.  But to imagine that financial resources are unimportant for student learning (one implication of the call to reduce the cost of higher education) is to live in a fantasy world.

Enter Professor Roger Brown from Liverpool Hope University. He has calculated an index of the per-student incomes of British universities.  The disparity is huge.  Cambridge has the highest per-student income, at 65,840 pounds.  In comparison, Edge Hill's per-student income is 7,050 pounds.  (The disparity in per student net assets is even larger).

Brown makes two points about this disparity.  First, he wonders whether it is good for the nation to have such a massive range of institutional wealth, given that the well-being of the nation as a whole depends on having relatively healthy educational opportunities for all of its students.

 Second, he notes:

"...there is a basic question of fairness. The better-resourced universities generally recruit students from better-off backgrounds, including many educated at private, taxpayer-subsidised, fee-charging schools. So students who have already had the most spent on them up to the age of 18 continue to have the most spent on them, reinforcing their social and educational capital. By the same token, many of their less favoured state school-educated brethren will continue to have less available to them."

Of course British higher education differs from American higher ed in significant ways.  But certainly the range of per-student income at American colleges and universities would be wider than that at British institutions, given the larger number and more diverse missions of American institutions. But our politics contain no policy recommendations related to that disparity.  Instead, the presidential discussions about higher education share naive calls for reducing the cost of higher education and a tempest in a teapot argument about whether private banks or the federal government ought to fund federal student loans.  All the while, sources of funding flow to institutions who can bring in major philanthropic donations and research support, or who can catch the eye of venture capitalists.  

Nowhere is there a call to shift subsidies from those institutions to institutions whose missions, faculties, and student bodies guarantee that neither the philanthropic rich nor the federal-corporate research nexus will fund them in the future.  But if we hope that education will be a way for people to lift themselves out of poverty and unemployment, we should consider such a move.

What does the history of newspapers suggest about the future of higher education?

Worriers about the future of higher education sometimes suggest that American colleges and universities will follow newspapers in their rapid fall from great prominence to insignificance.  They extend the analogy one step further, arguing that it is technology that will make brick-and-mortar colleges as irrelevant as the newspaper itself.  The proof  is the rise of online course content, which has supposedly made learning free in the same way that social media has made information free.

As analogies go, this one has provoked relatively little discussion, by which I mean it is taken as an absolute falsehood or an absolute inevitability rather than an opportunity to think.  This is too bad, because a fuller look at the history of newspapers suggests a far more interesting set of opportunities for higher education than for newspapers.

Let me start with a thumbnail sketch of the history of newspapers in the US, dating back to the 19th century  (rather than the 2000s where most of these stories start).

In the 19th century, the United States was  a newspaper nation. By this I mean four things:

•  first, that the nation was awash in newspapers, with hundreds circulating in New York City alone; 
• second, that newspapers reflected the nation's political and ethnic diversity in that they spoke for particular groups or viewpoints rather than trying to objectively report news; 
•  third, that most newspapers were local or parochial in outlook, and 
• fourth that their parochialism and ideology formed a key component of the American democratic system, in the same way that local bosses, ethnic networks, and civil society did. 

Several things weakened the position of newspapers in American society and civic life in the 20th century.  The availability of information via other media (radio, TV) was one.  Another was the rise of national newspapers, both that handful of newspapers with national influence (the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and much later USA Today) and in the national perspective of local papers, whose lead stories increasingly focused on the national rather than the local.  A third was the emergence of objectivity as the goal of reporting, replacing as it did ideology.  And a fourth was the decline of major American cities, which had been home to the majority of newspapers.

The industry's response was consolidation, as represented by the emergence of investor-held major newspaper chains, and by the sharing of operations between ostensibly competing papers.  So, by the end of the 20th century and before the attack of the internet, the newspaper industry was centralized, profit-focused, homogeneous, and already in decline.

Contrary to the regular narrative, then, newspapers weren't toppled by the internet. They were toppled by consolidation, by nationalizing their viewpoint, by seeking profits for investors rather than for owners, and by failing to respond to media who had copied them. If anything, the internet re-created in electronic form the model of news that existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries--hyper-local, ideological, biased, parochial, and democratic. Radio has done the same. And TV is on the same path.

So what might this history of newspapers suggest about the future of higher education?

 First, that if higher ed is in decline, it is in decline on a path that is wildly different from that of newspapers.  Newspapers were in decline in number and readership long before the internet.  Both the number of institutions of higher education, and enrollment in college, is on the rise, and has been for some time.

Second, that organizations that sponsor colleges and universities--states, churches, donors, etc.--ought to oppose consolidation and homogenization, preferring instead diversity, localism, and ideology as the basis of colleges and universities.  We will certainly see declines in enrollment at some schools--rural liberal arts colleges, church schools closely tied to declining denominations, decent small schools with curricula pretty much like dozens of others.  But we will also see the emergence of new institutions, only some of which have the internet as their sole delivery model.  Witness, for example, the emergence of health and wellness-affiliated colleges and universities, set up to respond to the needs of particular industries; and sustainability-focused schools, intent on responding to our environmental crises. My guess is that the next wave of institutions will focus wholly on the new college-going demographics.  A few schools will emerge entirely online, but those who survive will find an online niche, rather than becoming the facebook of online education, particularly since there is yet to be a good business model for such types of schools.

(If I am right and that the future of higher ed is more diversity in institution type, in ideology, in content area, and in delivery, then we will also need to see a greater diversity in pricing.  Colleges tend to price themselves in narrow bands, with most state institutions of a particular type offering similar tuition charges to students, and most private institutions offering tuition in alignment with their peers.  Older schools are close to locked into this pricing model; but new schools will be free to charge what their markets bear--most of them probably less than today's norms, but some much more.)


In short, I am arguing for a decentralized, localist, less-regulated, less-objective future for higher education, both as a means of keeping the system as a whole healthy, as a way of ensuring that people who want an education can get one, and as a way of ensuring that higher education can provide the sort of civic spark that newspapers once did.

This, more than the warning that place-based schools will die in an online onslaught, is the lesson that the history of newspapers has for the future of higher education.

Does competency-based education shorten time to graduation?

Over at The Quick and the Ed, Mandy Zatynski reports on a hearing of the House Education and Workforce subcommittee about the cost-effectiveness of higher education.  There, she reports that Teresa Lubbers, Indiana's Commissioner of Higher Ed testified that competency-based education, particularly of the sort offered at Western Governor's University, shortens the time to graduation.

I am a fan of competency-based education. Westminster offers three degree programs, a Bachelor's of Business Administration, an MBA, and a soon-to-be Masters in Strategic Communication, that are all competency-based.  Student learning in these programs is phenomenal.  Students feel like they have learned deeply, and that what they learned is more relevant to their lives than what they would have learned in the traditional classroom. And where we have been able to measure learning outcomes side-by-side with traditional programs, students in our competency-based program learn at least as much as students in our traditional programs. But these programs do not, by their nature, lead students to graduate more quickly.  


The same is true for Western Governor's University.  Their IPEDS data is quite clear on this point. Only 18% of students who entered in 2005-2006 had graduated in six years, and only 25% had transferred elsewhere.  No matter how you look at it, at WGU, competency-based education  does not lead to quicker graduation, regardless of what Teresa Lubbers says.


This isn't surprising, given the students who enroll at WGU.  All courses are taught on-line, and most students are non-traditional.  Many stop and start, or take more time to complete classes because of work, family, etc.  This is WGU's market, and based on the students I know who attend there, the approach to learning matches their lives.


The take home is simple.  WGU fills a niche.  Their academic programs are well-designed; their organizational structure innovative.  But if you want to improve time-to-graduation, you've got to look elsewhere.

Why tuition-driven colleges are the future of higher education

To listen to the pundits, including such luminaries as Stanford President John Hennessy and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, tuition-driven institutions of higher education are dying. In fact, in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Hennessy said, "if you look at the vast majority of colleges in the U.S., there are way too many that are [dependent on tuition to fund their budgets]. That is not sustainable."

Let me respond.  Baloney.  In fact, it is increasingly likely that the only institutions of higher education that will survive in the future are tuition-driven, that is, schools where students pay roughly what it costs to educate them in order to get an education.  Tuition-driven schools have a pricing problem--by-and-large we have not found the equilibrium price between what a student wants to pay and what it costs to educate them.  Hennessy and Khan are correct that the use of technology might help us find that price. So might many other things, including greater specialization, clearer curricula, more straight-forward pricing, better loan options, competency-based education, and about a thousand other innovations already rolling out in higher education.

But schools like Stanford, and Khan Academy,  and your local public institution have much more than a pricing problem.  They have a business model problem.  Here is what I mean.  All three of those institutions have built business models that rely on massive and unpredictable sources of revenue to stay open.

Start with the clearest example--state institutions.  For several generations, the subsidy that states provided to state institutions, plus a moderate amount of tuition money, kept the doors of state institutions open.  But the amount of subsidy, at least in comparison to the cost of education, is in sharp decline. And it is tremendously unlikely that that subsidy will return in my lifetime.  So state schools are hunting for a new business model.  What are they turning to?  Tuition.

Consider Stanford and other highly selective research institutions, private and public.  These schools will likely survive long into the future.  But it is unlikely that they will survive as schools dedicated to educating students.  Already, in fact, the chance of enrolling at Stanford as an undergraduate is perishingly small, not because Stanford is incapable of educating more students, but because education isn't its business model.  Instead, its future depends on donations from alumni and wealthy fans, effective management of its endowment, and the ability to capture research contracts from the federal government and corporations.  That is, Stanford is a foundation, an investment firm, and an R&D contractor.  There are almost no existing schools who, not being in the Stanford  category already, are likely to be able to follow that business model in the future.

Finally, think about Khan Academy.  Its mission is to provide a "free world-class education to anyone anywhere."  Except, of course, that the education is not free.  Students simply do not pay for it.  Instead, the cost is borne by investors, and donors, and advertisers who hope that running ads on YouTube sites associated with Khan Academy will drive traffic to their businesses.  It may be that Khan Academy can survive and prosper with a business model reliant almost entirely on subsidies.  But I doubt that the future of higher education lies with such a model.

(Please note that I am not arguing that the waning of state subsidies for education is necessarily a good thing.  It indicates a weakening of our sense of common purpose, of the notion that I am better off when my neighbor is well and wise, and of the idea that communities in the United States protect their futures by educating their young. That weakening is sad indeed.)

Which returns us, again, to tuition as a model of educational funding.  There is a certain logic to paying tuition, since it aligns exactly with what we do elsewhere.  Buying a snowcone involves exchanging money for a product.  So does buying a shirt.  When purchases are very expensive (as with cars, health care, and houses), industries arise to help buyers manage costs and avoid shocks.  Variety of quality and services emerge so there is a continuum of options available to purchasers. And subsidies arise on the margins of the industry to help those who need the thing obtain it at a reasonable cost.

So I can imagine a future with a much greater range of prices (as opposed to quite inexpensive state institutions and quite expensive private institutions) and services in higher education.  And I can imagine a future where there are some state subsidies for some students.  But the thing I am most certain for is that more and more people will pay for their own educations.

The end of financial aid leveraging?

Nearly every institution of higher education in the US leverages financial aid.  That is, we all give different amounts of aid to different students to encourage them to attend our institutions. The practical impact for students is that classrooms, like airplanes, hold customers who are paying radically different amounts for the same seat. The result for campuses, at least in theory, is that the institution realizes as much revenue as possible while still filling its class with qualified students.

There is solid research in behavioral economics, and plenty of lived experience to suggest that financial aid leveraging has worked in the past.  But my sense is that it may not work well into the future.  Here is why.

Our ability to leverage financial aid depends on a set of beliefs among students and their parents:

1.  a general assumption that higher education is a good value and a specific belief that the particular institution where a student will enroll is worth the cost,
2.  a willingness to pay money (or to borrow money) to make up the difference between aid and cost of attendance, 
3. a willingness to overlook the fact that each student pays a different amount for the same education, a difference based largely on the student's prior academic performance (and slightly on their actual need).

The institution has to have a different set of beliefs:

1. that students will come even if pricing is unclear,
2. that the particular model of financial aid leveraging is both financially and morally defensible,
3. that the model of leveraging maintains or improves the overall quality of students at the campus,
4. that the class of interested students will be academically and financially varied enough so that students who pay a lot are numerous enough to subsidize those who pay little.

It is fair to say that every one of the assumptions above is under question right now.  One need only consider the move of major research universities into online learning, the uproar about student loans, the explosion of parent appeals of financial aid packages, the outrageous financial aid packages given to  top academic students (who, of course, usually come from families with greater means to pay for higher education), and the changing demographics of new college-going students--to recognize that the landscape that once supported leveraging is radically changed.

Schools have two options to respond--they can stay the course, hoping that while the national mood undermines the assumptions behind financial aid leveraging their own markets will be willing to go along. Or they can move, as a first step, towards clarity in pricing while they figure out exactly what their education is worth to the families who want to buy it.  

Option two demands something more than  changing tuition, particularly for small institutions. It demands that we re-calibrate where we stand in the market and who are the students who are most likely to succeed at the college.  Gone are the days when small colleges could get by on a pitch about small class sizes and an academic program that looks a lot like that offered at big universities.

The most important fact about the future of higher education

Many things will be true about higher education; only some of those things will be important. If your school is concerned about the future of higher education, it must both figure out what makes a fact important (in my book important facts are those that, if acted upon, have the potential to change the whole institution), and which important facts your school wants to focus on.

The most important fact about the future of higher education is this: all students will be transfer students.  By this I mean two things: first, that an increasing proportion of students will approach an institution bringing transcripted credits with them, and second, that even more students will bring expertise with them that they have learned outside traditional institutions, but which must be transferred into their new campus if that campus is to be true to the student's learning and aspirations.

Here are several ways in which the fact that all students will be transfer students will transform higher education:

1. Traditional measures of success for access, retention, and graduation, will become obsolete. If most students bring credit with them, there is no such thing as a "freshman class," retention will not be controllable (since students will move easily among several institutions), and four-year graduation rates will mean very little, since few campuses will provide the entirety of a student's education.
2. The idea of a curriculum will be unstable. Curricula rely on students taking courses in sequence, or at least in an order required by the institution.  But transfer students will not join an institution with the same academic backgrounds, and so therefore won't want (or shouldn't want) to take courses in sequence.  Curricula must look like networks, not lines, and learning must include opportunities to make meaning of learning outside of a standardized sequence of courses.
3. The freshman year will be less important.  For the past two decades colleges and universities have focused on improving the first-year and placing distinctive programs in it.  But given the increasing number of students coming with credit and knowledge of varying sorts, the first year will be much less important than the last year, presumably the only time when most students at an institution will be able to have a common experience.
4. The most important skills for faculty will be aggregation, meaning-making, and certification, not teaching, learning, research, or any other currently popular aspects of pedagogy. It will fall to faculty to work with students to help them aggregate their prior learning from a variety of institutions and sources, make meaning out of it, add to that store of knowledge, and then certify that that knowledge adds up to something that can be carried along.
5. Colleges and universities will specialize more than ever before. If students are transferring knowledge and credits from many sources, only those institutions with identifiable specialties will be able to stand out among standardized options.
6. The most important alliances between institutions will be among unlike, not like, institutions. Currently nearly every alliance--athletic conferences, consortia, lobbying groups, faculty development networks, etc.--are among similar institutions.  Westminster is part of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of institutions of similar size and programming.  The University of Utah has just joined the Pac-12 to be with schools more like it. But in a transfer world, schools will want to ally themselves with a network of differing institutions in order to maximize learning for (and revenue from) students.  We will see more formal alliances between community colleges and liberal arts colleges, research universities and teaching institutions, so that within a network of schools a student can get all the learning s/he desires, and individual campuses can contribute specific things of value to the learning of particular students.

Where are the entrepreneurs for community colleges?

It is basic economics that when demand outpaces supply, prices rise.  The rise in prices signals to entrepreneurs that profits are available, and so they enter the market.  So this report detailing the shortage of space at community colleges, on the heels of stories about the collapse of state systems of higher education, the precipitous decline in enrollment growth at for-profits, and the rise everywhere in tuition rates, ought to signal to entrepreneurs that the time is ripe to provide a top-quality education to prospective community college students.

I've argued before that private liberal arts colleges could move successfully into this space.  They already have accreditation, and excellence in the sorts of general education courses that community college students need.   K-12 systems could move into that space as well, since they, more than anyone else, know what 18-year olds who have struggled in high school need in order to move ahead.  And tech entrepreneurs could build online community colleges, drawing on the best content out there and bundling it with the sort of support that community college students need to succeed.

It is a shame that while the prestigious colleges and universities roll out campuses around the globe chasing international dollars, or combine to offer their courses ( but not their degrees) online for free, there is little attention to reaching students in the US who could benefit from the sort of education that community colleges offer--important, basic courses built for students who want to learn but who are not well-served by 4-year institutions.

That challenge is one that ought to set entrepreneurs and educators with a passion for the opportunity that education provides, hard to work.  It is not every day when one can do well by doing good.  But this is that time.

When cost, quality, and access are in conflict

People who worry about the cost of higher education often argue that high cost reduces access to higher education.  That is undoubtedly true.

But it is also true that low cost limits access.  Here is how: When a good school offers a very low tuition, demand for enrollment in that school increases.  In this case, schools could do one of two things: increase enrollment or become more selective. Because schools have a limited ability to increase capacity (both because of physical plant and because low cost is almost always a result of finite subsidies from outside sources), they almost always become more selective.  And by becoming more selective, students who need access to higher education are often unable to enroll in those top-quality low-cost schools.

US News and World Reports' recent list of the 10 Least Expensive Private Colleges makes this point in spades. The top four schools in this list (which is an idiosyncratic list--it is missing Cooper Union, for example) are good schools and inexpensive.  But they are hardly accessible.

Berea College is inexpensive because its endowment--almost 800 million dollars--subsidizes a huge portion of its budget.  The BYUs that follow--Idaho, Hawaii, and Provo--get subsidies from another source.  When I was a faculty member at BYU Provo about a decade ago, the rumor was that 80% of the budget came from LDS Church funds--mostly the tithing dollars of members. I don't know if that number is correct, but it is certainly the case that BYU is inexpensive because the church pays most of the costs of attending there.

These schools limit access in two ways. First on  mission.  Berea is dedicated to serving low-income students from Appalacia, the BYUs to serving Mormons. Second, on academic preparation.  Here BYU Provo is the strongest example.  Its entering freshman class routinely has an average HS GPA of 3.75 and an ACT composite score of 28.

(BYU-Idaho has worked hard to increase capacity to be able to serve Mormons who cannot get into BYU-Provo.  It has adopted a year-round calendar, and has recently begun aggressively moving into online education. (Take a look at The Innovative University for the full glowing story. Here are my views on the book.)  In doing so it hopes to draw on volunteer faculty--retired Mormons with PhDs who will teach online for almost nothing.  Hardly a business model for the nation.)

The stories of these schools share a simple message--reducing cost doesn't necessarily help with access at all. It may, in fact, make it harder for good students to go to good schools.

Can differential pricing help reduce the cost of higher education?

From time to time colleges and universities play with a form of differential tuition pricing publicly.  Some schools  charge more for credits above a certain number to encourage students to graduate rather than hanging on and taking more and more classes.  Others charge higher tuition for certain majors--business being the most common.  And many, including Westminster, charge different rates for different graduate programs based on the willingness and ability to pay of students interested in those programs.  (So, for example, students in the MBA pay a higher tuition rate than those in the Masters of Teaching program.)

Colleges also employ differential pricing in quieter ways--providing different amounts of scholarships and institutional aid to students in order to shape the class and meet revenue targets.  And, by raising tuition each year while holding scholarship amounts steady, many schools run a differential pricing model that assumes that the longer a student is enrolled, the more that student is willing to pay to go to school.

That may be the case, but poor retention rates after the first year, and long times to graduation suggest that this model of differential pricing hurts many students.  And because schools rely on it in order to meet revenue goals (that is, their budgets are built around the assumption that the gap between tuition and aid will increase as students move through the institution, thus increasing revenue), it is a significant impediment to reducing the cost of higher education.

So what if instead of raising tuition for students each year of their enrolled period, tuition declined as a student moved through the institution?  The first year would be the most costly, but each year thereafter, tuition would decline by, say, 5% for students in that cohort.  As a result, seniors would be paying 15% less for tuition than they did as freshmen.

There are several potential benefits to this model.

• First, it allows individual institutions to reduce costs to students in a way that is predictable and fair. 
• Second, it rewards students for staying in school, and encourages experimentation in learning throughout the curriculum, rather than supporting the sort of curricular narrowing that usually takes place. 
• Third, it supports retention through the entire four-year experiment,thus providing stronger revenue.
• Fourth, it aligns revenue with expenses.  (Here I am assuming that the freshman year, with its focus on advising, counseling, mentoring, learning communities, retention, the co-curriculum, etc. costs the student more per credit hour than do upper division years.  I expect this is the case in all disciplines except the sciences where the costs of labs increases through a student's experiences.) 
• Fifth, it calls new students and their families to really engage in the first year, with the understanding that success in the first year will make the later years less expensive.
• Sixth, it changes the onus of timely graduation from the student (who often has to fight through the system to complete in four years), to the institution, who will now have an incentive to ensure that curricula make it possible for students to have significant learning while moving speedily to graduation.
• Seventh, done right, it can help colleges simultaneously earn enough revenue and reduce the costs to students of attending college.

The Washington Monthly College Guide Gets it Wrong, a Little, Twice

The best back-to-school college guide and rankings, hands-down, are at the Washington Monthly.  The rankings actually measure important things--like graduates' contribution to society--rather than wealth, prestige, and the test scores of incoming students.  And the accompanying articles are both well-informed and well-written.  (For example, this month's "The end of college admissions as we know it" should make anyone who cares about college access hopeful, even while it makes traditional admissions shops shiver...)

This month's college, guide, though, includes two articles that deserve a response.  The first, "Administrators ate my tuition" makes the argument that the on-going rise in college costs is due to bloat in the ranks of administrators, and that a solution to the problem might be, as the article's byline puts it, "Want to get college costs in line? Start by cutting the overgrown management ranks."  Three points in response:

• The growth in the ranks of administrators is due to changes in faculty roles, driven by faculty and by external stakeholders.  Faculty don't take on the day-to-day work of managing colleges and universities as much now as they used to because faculty have pushed, successfully over time, to teach and research more, and to do less administrative work.  At the same time, external bodies, including the federal government, have heightened requests for data and compliance to such an extent that without a cadre of researchers, report-writers, etc. colleges would be unable to respond to those demands.
• All administrators are not managers.  The author, Benjamin Ginsberg, seems to believe that there is little difference between an Associate Dean and an Associate Director of Student Life.  He is wrong.  At Westminster, over the past 5 years the number of full-time faculty has grown more than the number of new administrators.  And among the new administrators, only a couple actually spend their time managing.  Most spend their time programming--running environmental initiatives, leading trips to the mountains, helping students face psychological difficulties, ensuring that international students get their visas, etc.  The need for these tasks, at least at Westminster, comes from faculty, parents, and students requesting these services. And these tasks all lead to learning, something Ginsberg fails to acknowledge. At an institution like ours that has to compete to stay alive, if our key stakeholders request something, we are happy to oblige.
• If a college wants to change its faculty/administrator ratio, the first step is not to cut administrators.  It is to focus its mission.  Until a school does that, it will be impossible to carry out the work that faculty, students, parents, and regulators have demanded.  The solution, then, is to figure out how not to be all things to all people.

The second, "The College for-profits should fear" is a positive article about Western Governors University.  I like WGU.  Its focus on student outcomes, and its innovative division of the work of learning among faculty and mentors (more administrators!) both saves money and can lead to better learning.  And it has blazed a trail into online learning that others ought to pay attention to.

But WGU shares two things with for-profits that don't get enough attention.  First, though tuition is low, the cost-per-credential (that is, the amount of tuition paid per degree granted) is very high. According to a recent Salt Lake Tribune article, it is around $80,000.  The article attributes it to a "statistical anomaly" but it also suggests that WGU serves many students well, but not many of them earn degrees.  This point alone is not damning--after all, the students who enroll in WGU are like the students who enroll in most-on-line programs.  They work long hours, are trying to switch jobs, and often take time off from school to solve family problems, change jobs, move, or manage life.  One of WGU's strengths, in fact, is that its students can do that.  But if an institution's goal is to get students a degree and on to life, then WGU has a ways to go.

Second, WGU, like its for-profit counterparts, has recently become a marketing juggernaut. All along I-15, the main north-south freeway in Utah, there are WGU billboards with photos of powerful Utah business and civic leaders--Harris Simmons, Board Chair of Zion's Bank, Mike Leavitt, former Utah Governor--touting WGU.  The Washington Monthly article suggests that WGU is unlike for-profits in that it doesn't spend as much of its resources on marketing as does, say, the University of Phoenix.  It appears that might be changing.

The role of consultants and vendors in enrollment management

One of the major differences between enrollment management and other parts of colleges is that enrollment management relies heavily on consultants and vendors to do its work. We develop prospects with help from one vendor, analyze data with another, use a third to develop our publications, and employ several others for smaller parts of our work.  Consultants help shape our strategy, test our messages, and improve our workflow.  And a great enrollment management consultant, Ian Symmonds, is my guide and mentor as I learn my way into this work.

None of this should be surprising.  Enrollment management is a results-driven business that relies heavily on data to make decisions. And it is a business that has changed rapidly in the last 20 years.  That change has made space in the market for businesses with specific expertise. And if those businesses can demonstrate return on investment, then it makes sense to contract with them, rather than expanding the college's fixed costs by hiring full-time employees to do that work.

One surprising thing about the field, though, is that consultants and vendors are also the source of most of the research about recruiting, admitting, funding, and enrolling students.  Compare data about enrollment management with data about the next step in the student's experience--the freshman year--to see the distinction.  Data about the views of freshmen comes out of the higher education research institute at UCLA.  The epicenter of ideas about  curriculum and retention in the first year is the first-year experience project at the University of South Carolina. And learning about the first-year emerges from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences.

By contrast, summaries of research in enrollment management are more frequently compiled by vendors, as in the case of this report put out by Noel-Levitz.  The best-known experts in the field are consultants, be it Symmonds or George Dehne. And the list-servs, best practices, and conferences are sponsored by companies who sell products and services to colleges and universities.

There are several reasons that this is the case. Enrollment management as currently practiced is new--perhaps only 20 years old.  Therefore graduate programs that produce researchers in other fields haven't grown up yet in enrollment management.  The rapid change in the field makes it possible for individuals or small consultancies to gather and distribute meaningful data.  The competitiveness of the field, with dozens of colleges battling for top students makes practitioners less willing to share information among themselves.  And the nature of enrollment management--as practice more than discipline or skill--means that campus-based professionals aren't situated in a position to make the sort of generalizations that are the basis of academic research elsewhere in higher ed.

One wonders what this means for the future of enrollment management.  Will it eventually become an academic discipline with its own literature, faculty, etc.?  Or will it leave the university entirely, and become an outsourced service in the way that food service, bookstores, and security are now?

Restoring the value of Directed Studies

A small but consistent part of my job as Dean is approving Directed Studies courses. In nearly every instance, the course is a solution to a problem in the system--a student can't graduate without taking a course that isn't offered during a particular semester, or the two courses a student needs to graduate are offered at the same time, or a student needs to re-take a course offered only by a professor with whom s/he has had a falling out. No one likes Directed Studies courses in these situations--neither the students who have to fit in an additional course in an already hectic term nor the faculty who get no compensation for offering the course.  (Not to mention that learning often stumbles in these courses because they emerge at the last minute and are built around a syllabus that assumes classroom interaction, not one-to-one discussions.)

The "solve a problem" approach to Directed Studies is fine in individual cases, but done too frequently it hides near-misses in the system.  As Catherine Tinsley et al point out in "How to avoid catastrophe" in the April 2011 Harvard Business Review, leaders are tempted to count near-misses as successes rather than as signs of potentially catastrophic break-downs. 

While Directed Studies courses don't signal the same sort of impending disaster as, say, problems at BP's Deepwater Horizon well, they do signal that the curriculum may have too many different classes in it, or that student advising fails to ensure that students move rationally through their majors, or that student demand outpaces capacity in key areas.

Now all of these problems are big and expensive and therefore perhaps better to treat with Directed Studies courses than with thorough-going changes.  But if colleges built Directed Studies into their curricula, they could actually improve student learning, deepen faculty satisfaction, customize learning to the interests of students, and support innovation.

Suppose, for example, that a college radically reduces the number of electives in a particular major.  Instead of requiring students to choose elective classes (where demand is unpredictable), the department instead requires that students take Directed Studies courses on topics of mutual interest from three faculty in the department.  In turn, faculty teaching load would include Directed Studies--perhaps 18 hours of classroom and the equivalent of 6 hours of Directed Studies (or perhaps 12 to 12 if a campus really wanted to support customization and innovation).  Finally, the demand and supply for courses would be managed on an electronic exchange--faculty posting the topics they would most like to teach about; students posting the topics they would most like to learn about--a sort of curricular dating service.

In this scenario Directed Studies courses are a benefit to the system, not the sort of melancholy task that occupies the time of Deans trying to do right by students in a system that isn't working quite right.

Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't?

NITLE just held a conference on the uses of technology in the liberal arts.  One key theme of the conference was that liberal arts colleges are headed for disaster because their business model is broken.  Inside Higher Ed's summary of this conference theme is full of the language of crisis.  NITLE's hope, of course, is that technology can help reduce the cost of education at these schools, and therefore save them. (Because, presumably, without liberal arts colleges people would cease to learn the liberal arts.  A questionable assumption, but the theme for another post.)

But what the article seems not to ask is this: Why are liberal arts colleges expensive when the liberal arts aren't?  After all, the lowest labor costs are to be found in liberal arts disciplines: a historian is cheaper than a finance professor; an english prof earns less than a PhD in nursing.  The liberal arts require no costly infrastructure (except for the sciences, but the goals of science in higher ed are so far from the liberal arts that they hardly belong in the same institution).  Because of the sort of practices that lead to learning in the liberal arts--discussion, writing, service-learning, group projects, etc.--it is conceivable that classes in the liberal arts could have larger enrollments than those in professional disciplines and achieve the same learning value. And because of the focus on human development in the liberal arts traditions, student support infrastructure could be less costly.

So the short answer to the question is this: Liberal arts colleges are costly because they aren't really liberal arts colleges. That is, over the years, liberal arts colleges have adopted the budgets, infrastructures, faculty roles, aspirations, and curricular specialization of comprehensive or research universities.

These things are almost impossible to put off once a school adopts them.  And so the alarms sounded at NITLE and in many other venues are likely to be true. There will be liberal arts colleges that die because students can't afford them.  But there is irony here, because once liberal arts colleges die, their place in the market could easily be filled--by liberal arts colleges.

Thinking about demand

In response to a recent post about demand for tech-enabled learning, my friend and colleague Peter Ingle wondered how much demand there is for any sort of schooling--on-line or not--among the demographic groups who are supposed to drive the open learning/tech-enabled education upswing. (His full response is here.)

His post raises two issues for me. First, the "education crisis" is nearly always seen as a problem with schools, or at least with the suppliers of education. But certainly there are characteristics on the demand side that account for the differences in educational attainment between the US and other developed nations. What are they and who is thinking about them?

Second, we need to be much more precise when we talk about demand. There are at least three types of demand in this area: demand for learning, demand for education, and demand for schooling.

Demand for learning, in my mind, is that desire to find out something interesting or useful. It tends to be short-term and idiosyncratic, but also relatively easily met. So, for example, I want to learn about trail running shoes. I go to TrailRunner magazine or IRunFar, read a review, and make a decision. YouTube makes this sort of learning easy, but so do the library, Wikipedia, etc.

Demand for schooling is that desire to attend and graduate from school with some sort of official credential. Public schools, charters, private schools, colleges and universities all try to meet this demand. It is longer-term, and less idiosyncratic since students with the desire for schooling either choose (or are led into) a particular field of study and set of courses. It is also often extrinsically motivated. On-line schools are starting to make some headway here, but they don't differ significantly from physical schools, in that they both provide the same sort of structure--formally designed learning opportunities leading to a credential. I care a lot about school reform, but I have to acknowledge that schooling will always be fraught since students have so many ways to opt out, and since the value of schooling is uncertain to many (Peter's point.)

Demand for education is, to me, the most interesting. It is the longest-term desire, one that goes well beyond the search for information to the search for meaning. It can be met outside of physical or virtual schools, and it doesn't require a diploma as evidence of achievement. But it has the most rigorous, and the most student-driven, intrinsic goals. Its outcomes are the most significant for the life of a person and her/his family, because they touch on a person's conception of self and place in the world. (The School of Life is a school meeting the demand for education.)

It is my sense that schools and open learning folks would do well to find more ways to attend to demand for education, even if it means not driving everyone to graduation. This suggests that schools and open learning ought not consider themselves in a competition. Nor should we think that one should vanquish the other. Both will fail to meet the expanded demand unless they can figure out how to meet the educational needs of the publics they serve. If it is important to the student that the educational desires are accompanied by a diploma, then good. But we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that the biggest questions and struggles of life are solved by schooling or learning. They are solved in diverse and complicated ways by people who value and seek education.

Does demographic change = demand for tech-driven education?

Yesterday I participated in a webinar called The Future of Non-Traditional Higher Education in the US (white paper version of the webinar available here.) The presenter, Nick Allen (provost emeritus and university professor at Univ. MD--University College) reiterated a common argument. It goes like this:

• higher ed faces huge demographic changes--more hispanic, first-generation, immigrant, and adult learners will be seeking higher education than ever before.
• higher ed in the US won't work for many of them because of cost and poor fit
• Web 2.0 and open learning initiatives make online or tech enabled education much simpler
• Therefore, the solution to the educational challenges raised by demographic change is providing tech-driven (as opposed to "bricks and mortar") education.

I agree that demographic and economic trends portend major changes in higher education. And I agree that Web 2.0 and open learning can do a good job of providing online educational opportunities. But I am not sure that the two will meet up. Put another way, I'm not sure that the millions of new degree seekers, be they young Hispanics or baby boomers looking for new careers, will seek that education from the purveyors of Web 2.0 learning.

Two reasons for my skepticism. The first is oft-noted: none of the major new college-bound demographic groups, as a whole, show a predilection for or success at tech-driven ed. (This of course does not hold true for individual members of these groups, and may change in the future.)

The second is that Web 2.0 and open learning folks, in my view, haven't thought about their efforts in a way that will engage those groups of students.

Among the insights of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point is that social change is driven by people playing certain roles. Mavens provide expertise, salesmen convince people to join movements for social change, and connectors build the social networks that unite mavens and salesmen on one hand, with potential joiners on the other.

The tech and open learning movements aren't thinking about themselves as part of a social movement. So they use mavens to share information in the hopes that education-seekers will find them.

If I was trying to engage potential college-goers in Web 2.0 education I would be looking for the connectors--people with on-the-ground influence and networks among members of the targeted demographic groups. And I would find ways to get my product--education--into the hands of real people so they could use it for real needs. Planning a party? Here is a way to use open learning sources to make it better. Facing a business problem? Here are cases to help you think about it. Have broader educational needs? Maybe UMUC (or any of the hundreds of other options) can work for you.

Doing it this way accomplishes two things: it meets people where they are, and it doesn't assume that huge swaths of human society will flock to open learning because of its technological cool.