Can online learning save American universities?

As we are coming up to one year since everything went remote, I would like to take a moment to explore how remote schooling could be used to decrease tuition costs and save American college education.

Remote learning is not new, but it hasn’t been done on this scale since the Spanish flu pandemic.  Technology has changed considerably since then.

University costs have increased 213 percent since 1988.  Wages in this period have remained more-or-less the same pushing a university education out of reach for many.  

This isn’t news.  Student loan debt is skyrocketing as universities are stripped of funding and tuition prices soar.  Many of the solutions to this crisis focus on helping those already in trouble.  They tend to overlook putting systems in place to prevent the problem from continuing to get worse.

We know education is the silver bullet.  A college education can lift a student out of poverty– but only if students graduate with minimal debt.  

Forgiving student debt isn’t enough to solve this crisis: we have to make college cheaper. 

Everything about university education is too expensive.

Some people are arguing for free tuition for one or two years.  While free tuition would certainly help a lot of students, it might still exclude poorer students.  

Living on or near campus is expensive in its own right.  Right now room and board are between $8,000 and $13,000 on average.  Many students will still have to move away from home and live near campus to attend university.  So they will have to incur living expenses.

Even if tuition is free, you still have to include books and fees into the equation.  It is likely universities will raise fees in lieu of tuition, which would bring us right back to where we are right now.

What do we do instead?

As we move solidly into the information age, we need a solution that is as accessible to the poor student who needs to stay home to help their family survive as it is to the middle-class kid who just wants to graduate without debt.

Free education for all would be one solution to this problem, but that seems an unlikely prospect in America.  Instead, I would suggest creating online-only low-tuition public schools.

Most information can be conveyed without needing to be there in person.  Many lab courses already require you to purchase your own materials.  Why can’t we give students the flexibility to get a fully accredited college education online?

What college could look like

Imagine: you wake up in your childhood bedroom, grab breakfast, and head to work.  On your lunch break, you watch a lecture for one of your classes. 

At home, you sit down for dinner with your family.  Then head upstairs to tackle your schoolwork.  Tomorrow, you have a study group meeting at the coffee shop across from work and on Friday you have a group office hour with your professor, so you want to make sure you have done all your reading/ lecture watching before then.

In a few short years, you can earn your bachelor’s degree and then get a job doing what you trained for.  In the meantime, you can work your way up to Manager or get an internship with the firm you want to work for.

Since you aren’t paying for room and board at market rates and your tuition is only $100 per credit hour, you are able to afford to buy a house when you are ready to move out of your parent’s house.  

Doesn’t that sound nice?  A whole generation of kids starting out with an education and not being kneecapped by debt.

In the UK, they have Open University.  Open University provides this same opportunity to all of its students and is one of the largest universities in the country.  

We need educated workers

It is time for the American college education system to evolve and come into the 21st century.  The systems we have in place right now are not enough to keep up with demand.  Brick and mortar colleges are struggling with increased class sizes and diminishing resources– all problems that could be solved with online education.

College is not an “experience” anymore and we need to stop treating it like it is one.  It is a quick stopover on the way to building a career, making many “classical” majors not worth the paper they are printed on.  If tuition were cheap enough to not need loans for most people, those majors could make sense again.

We need to undercut for-profit colleges and make every program available online so students can get the education they need going forward at an affordable price.  There is no reason we shouldn’t have fully accredited, cheap online education as part of public institutions.