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A recent report in the Chronicle of Higher Education lays bare a reality that is too often invisible to students, parents, and legislators: That colleges and universities spend radically different amounts on instruction.
According to the figures reported, Arizona State spends $7,830 on instruction for each of its 103,530 students. Southern New Hampshire, in contrast, spends $1,224 and Western Governors, $1,980. Put another way, Southern New Hampshire’s per student instructional spending is just 16 percent of ASU’s, and WGU’s just 25 percent.
Remember, this is spending on instruction, not athletics, information technology, research, development, or construction and maintenance. The figures “include wages and benefits to faculty and staff members who teach students at the institution, but they do not include costs that fall under the separate category of ‘academic support,’ like course development and academic administration.”
To be sure, the online providers may — or may not — spend large sums developing instructional materials. In the early days of MOOCs, UT Austin and Harvard spent as much as $100,000 per course to cover design and production costs, platform development, and creation of interactive, simulations, and other instructional tools. Online providers may also incur large expenses on the technical and support staff to manage and support their programs.
In practice, however, many of the lowest spenders trim instructional expenditures steeply by substituting adjuncts, coaches, and graders for full-time expert faculty, standardizing courses and assessments, narrowing the curriculum to a relatively small number of fields, and teaching fully or primarily online to a large numbers of students. These institutions also devote astonishing sums to advertising and recruitment.
- Despite significant differences in facilities, range of majors, student services, and, above all, access to professors, the gap in tuition and fees between the mega online providers and public urban and regional comprehensive universities is much less than one would expect. These mega providers are pricing what the market will bear — just as privates and some public universities do.
- At most traditional institutions, a full course load is a significantly better financial value than a part-time load, and at many institutions is comparable or even cheaper than the online providers’. In short, students should think long and hard about whether flexibility is worthwhile, especially as they will forgo many of the benefits of a residential educational experience.
- Those students who place a premium on convenience and flexibility and a job-focused curriculum do not, in general, receive the financial benefits one might expect from the mega online providers. Indeed, in many cases they pay a premium for a stripped down academic experience.
