A Harvard University-educated entrepreneur with doubts about the value of traditional high-cost higher education programmes has launched the ‘Ryanair’ of university instruction. Echoing the approach of the successful budget airline, StraighterLine offers no-frills courses designed by former professors at cut-rate prices. They are provided at students’ convenience and can be transferred towards degrees at other institutions. Its mainstays are basic foundation courses required by most universities, including accounting, algebra, English composition, macro-economics and statistics. Each course costs only $39 (Rs.1,794) plus $99 per month for the duration. They are delivered online and feature collaborative study groups and live tutorials, with advisers available on email.
.gif)
At a time when students with diminishing financial and temporal resources increasingly assemble their education in fits and starts, the company’s aim is to allow its customers to start, finish and work whenever and wherever they like. The model is growing quickly: although StraighterLine doesn’t disclose specific data, it says its enrolment equals that of a small university less than six months after commencing full operations.
In its first step towards internationalisation, it has just announced a partnership with Thompson Rivers University, Canada. “The same principle applies internationally, which is that universities aren’t spending more than $100 per student to deliver these introductory courses, yet they are charging up to $2,500,” says Burck Smith, StraighterLine’s chief executive officer and founder. “We are providing the same or better courses; but we are pricing closer to the actual cost of delivery.”
Unsurprisingly, established universities are not thrilled about the idea of a no-frills low-cost rival, and are in a position to thwart StraighterLine by refusing to accept its credits towards their degrees. But Smith has already partnered with 14 accredited bodies — including conventional private institutions such as Assumption College, Massachusetts, public universities such as Fort Hays State University in Kansas and online providers including Western Governors University — who have agreed to accept the company’s credits.
According to Anya Kamenetz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (2010), “the cultural appeal of the four-year degree and the grassy quadrangle is still very strong. It is presented as sort of a litmus test for middle-class students in high school”.
Yet ideas such as Smith’s are becoming increasingly popular, concedes Kamenetz, as university costs soar and the recession affects people’s willingness and ability to pay. The US for-profit higher education sector will see growth of 94 percent by 2015, compared with just 5 percent in the conventional academy, according to the higher education research and consulting firm Eduventures.
Emerging ethics crisis in academia
A slew of criminal charges, civil lawsuits, expensive legal settlements and other misdeeds by university managers and faculty in the US suggest that the ‘higher’ in higher education no longer necessarily applies to moral standards. Presidents, deans and department directors have been convicted of embezzling money from their universities and government research grants; administrators have been charged with sexually abusing subordinates; and faculty members have been indicted for falsifying credentials and sexually harassing students.
“In a time of financial pressure, we see more of a tendency towards wrongdoing,” says Neil Hamilton, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and the author of Academic Ethics: Problems and Materials on Professional Conduct and Shared Governance, which criticises universities for failing to teach ethics to doctoral students planning academic careers.
Hamilton says there’s no way to know decisively if malfeasance is on the increase, since, unlike lawyers and doctors who must be licensed and adhere to codes of ethics, academics face no standardised disciplinary process or public disclosure of ethical violations. Among the medical, legal and higher education fields, “the academic profession does the least in terms of any self-study,” says Hamilton.
Criminal prosecutors and journalists have reported a spate of cases involving university staff in the past few months. Many relate to financial offences. Recently, the former dean of the University of Louisville’s College of Education and Human Development was sentenced to five years in prison for misappropriating $2 million (Rs.9.2 crore) from government research grants meant to help inner-city schools.
Some wrongdoing relates to academic integrity. The Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences has sued a former president for falsifying documents to inflate her pay — charges she denies — and an administrator at Texas A&M University resigned after a newspaper reported he had lied about having a Master’s degree and serving as a Navy SEAL. There have also been high-level and high-profile sexual harassment allegations.
According to Hamilton, universities do too little to encourage ethical behaviour, beginning with their training of doctoral candidates. “The professoriate has chosen not to acculturate our members in a serious way into the ethics of the profession,” he says. If it acted like the legal and medical professions, he adds, “we could be keeping track, state by state, of how many complaints are being made about violations, how many have been found to have probable cause, how many went to a hearing and how many resulted in disciplinary action”.
A proliferation of crimes is likely to do little for the academy’s reputation, already tarnished by soaring costs and controversial practices such as high salaries for presidents and top administrators. “Public respect for educators is generally holding up so far. But there has been a general diminution of all the professions in terms of our respect for authority, which has decreased,” says Prof. Hamilton.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)