Some holiday cheer as the calendar year winds down:
The College of Saint Rose has seen its enrollment decline by 15 percent since 2008. In an attempt to balance its budget, it has eliminated twenty-three academic programs. More than ten percent of its full-time faculty are slated for termination. Programs scheduled for closure include bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, religious studies, sociology, geology, Spanish, and economics.
Burlington College continues to teeter on the edge of abyss, for reasons I discussed in August and December of 2014. Burlington’s full-time undergraduate enrollment shrank by one-third from fall 2014 to fall 2015, to 123 students. The college has announced a $2,000 reduction in tuition for the next academic year. In reality the college is just cutting its discount rate in the hopes that a lower sticker price will appeal to a larger number of potential students. Unfortunately these are the same people who have the greatest need for financial aid.
Meanwhile Arizona State University (ASU) and edX have reported a few of the results from the inaugural year of their MOOC-based Global Freshman Academy. Of the 34,000+ people who registered for the Academy’s three MOOCs, only 323 are now eligible for earning academic credit. Some people might say that a completion rate of less than one percent makes the initiative a massive failure. But it’s highly doubtful that the majority of the people who registered for the MOOCs did so to obtain academic credit. It’s also unlikely that the MOOC participants on average were as motivated as the typical student on campus. It could even be the case that many of those who registered for the MOOCs were not as academically prepared for college-level courses as the average ASU first-year student.
As I’ve written previously, I see MOOCs as an extremely low-cost, low-risk, and convenient alternative to much of what happens in many university classrooms. ASU and edX are starting small, gathering data, and iterating. Soon they will be offering a full year’s worth of college courses at a price that is less than half of what Burlington College and College of Saint Rose are charging.