Universities that seek to maximize profits often minimize students' education

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/19/universities-profits-minimize-student-education

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There is a for-profit wolf lurking in public higher education. That wolf is University of Maryland University College, where I have taught for nearly a decade. With an annual enrollment of 90,000 students, UMUC has a 60-year-long reputation of serving nontraditional students – those who are over 25, first-generation American, of color, low-income, and in the military – in in the US and overseas. The university says its mission is to “offer top-quality educational opportunities to adult students in Maryland, the nation, and the world.” This is hardly the case anymore.

Over the past decade, UMUC has slowly turned into a money-making venture in all but name. It is giving students with few higher education options a low-level college education, all for the sake of maximizing profit. By doing so, it is joining the likes of University of Phoenix and Kaplan University, who are also chasing the bottom-line over student satisfaction. There are other issues of profitability trumping quality education in higher education, including the intense focus on fundraising at institutions as varied as Stanford University and University of Texas-Austin. But with UMUC and perhaps other public institutions, though, this profitability focus has had an impact on the quality of teaching and learning available to students.

Last month, UMUC took its latest step towards redoing its public institution status. On 30 January, the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents approved their request for semi-autonomy within the university system. This will allow UMUC to benefit from being part of a fully accredited state university system. Those benefits include continued access to federal higher education funds, less scrutiny from college accrediting organizations and remaining a school with a good reputation (as the public often mixes up UMUC with the University of Maryland at College Park, the state flagship campus). At the same time, this semi-autonomic status will allow UMUC administration to hire, fire and address faculty and staff grievances as they please, increase tuition without the need for state approval and exempt important records like retention and graduation rates from public disclosure.

But the reasons for this move, they say, is to help UMUC “compete in a market dominated by for-profit corporations that move fast, are highly flexible, are able to employ cutting-edge business practices in real time.”

This corporate culture is enabling the university to move fast indeed – toward a place that is highly damaging to students. For one, personal intellectual development is being thrown out of the window - UMUC is becoming all about career advancement. Thanks to this new agreement, UMUC could choose no longer offer liberal arts and other kinds of courses that its partners – especially the military – might deem unimportant to a college education. Program staff and full-time faculty (who make up only 10% of all faculty at UMUC) are increasingly under pressure to devise courses that are directly relevant to jobs in fields such as cybersecurity or homeland security, two of UMUC’s relatively new and military-friendly degree programs. Without courses that encourage intellectual development, UMUC is merely training students for a single job or one career path, rather than providing skills that students can transfer to multiple jobs and careers.

Face-time between students and faculty is also going down. Take UMUC’s love for eight-week course schedules: when I began teaching here nearly a decade ago, courses were 15 weeks in length, which is typical of most US universities. By 2011, UMUC had moved to a eight-week course schedule, without adding more virtual or face-to-face course hours within this schedule. UMUC decided to water down its courses to sell the idea of an accelerated degree-earning schedule. This has been especially attractive for military students, who, after years or decades of service, would be attracted to the idea of knocking out a degree in two and a half years. Yet the system is clearly not working: overall retention and graduation rates remain low (under 30%) with this course format.

Few things are as symbolic of the poor education at UMUC as last year’s decision to abandon standard textbooks. The university announced that it wanted to offer students free textbooks to reduce the cost of taking classes. Now, all undergraduate students by the end of 2015 will use some form web-based modular summaries (web pages with short summaries of major course themes often designed by UMUC in-house) and random reference websites picked by instructional designers, program directors and librarians doing Google searches that provide general information on a course theme. These eReadings are a poor substitute for textbooks. Modular summaries provide no background materials for fully understanding course themes, and picking random websites means relying on outside sources who never intended their websites to be linked together on UMUC’s online classroom platform as a substitute for a textbook. There is simply no way to ensure a high standard of college education using resources originally designed to provide information to the general public.

Administrators never asked faculty members if this was an effective way to teach courses, and students were never asked if the cost of textbooks dissuaded them from taking more UMUC courses. The elimination of textbooks shows UMUC’s lack of commitment to college-level teaching, and puts greater pressure on faculty to dummy down their courses to meet these lower standards.

UMUC is now poised to spend more money than its typical $30 million per year on advertising to recruit students more aggressively. But all the money in the world won’t hide an inferior product – and that, sadly, is exactly what a degree at UMUC has become.