By Peter Galuszka
On these blog pages, you’ve read plenty about the supposed benefits of for-profit colleges being the wave of the future, especially if they are conduits for online instruction.
Traditional schools, we are told, are out of control with their arrogance, free-spending ways and Luddite attitudes about making their courses available on the Web. As such, they are doomed. No more ivy-covering brick walls while students read Homer on the lawn.
So, there is a cautionary tale about the University of Northern Virginia, a for-profit school that has finally been shut down after 15 years. It has failed to win accreditation for five years and is suspected of being a visa factory for foreign nationals who are supposedly students.
As UNVA founder Daniel Ho told the Chronicle for Higher Education a couple of years ago, “I can sell degrees. I can sell diplomas. But I won’t. Who’s going to supervise me, control me? Myself.”
State education regulators have audited UNVA from time to time, according to The Washington Post’s Tom Jackman, and they found such red flags as not reviewing their faculty or maintaining admission requirements for students.
Nothing appeared to involve online education directly, but the transition would be all too easy to make.
Assume you have a for-profit school with no faculty, no admission requirements and no standards. All that’s required is a credit card to buy rights to take a course. Do you really complete it? Did you pass? Did the credit card info include the degree in advance? Who knows?
These accreditation issues are at the heart of what worries reputable scholars such as Teresa Sullivan, who was momentarily forced out as president of the University of Virginia last year. Putsch plotters at the Board of Visitors had decided she was not embracing the online fad in an existential way. She replied, hey, we have online courses but someone has to mind the classroom.
So, remember this when you read all the verbiage on this blog about the Brave New World of online education. Sure, it sounds great. But the promoters offer very little in ideas about oversight so for-profit online shops won’t be diplomas mills like UNVA.
