Online programs are expanding access to education, but a survey reveals new details about the cost of that access, suggesting that students enrolled in online programs may pay higher fees than their on-campus counterparts.
The report found that, at nearly half of the 182 institutions surveyed, tuition for online students is often higher than for on-campus students. Students in some online programs may face bills that are 10 percent or more than those in parallel face-to-face programs.
The survey findings, to be released Thursday by the technology cooperative WCET and the Campus Computing Project, add national data to an issue that has bubbled up in local news reports. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper, for example, reported in July that online students at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee could pay as much as $275 above the normal tuition per course.
Yet not all programs are more expensive. The new national survey found that one-third of campuses report tuition is the same for online and on-campus students. And for one-fifth of them, online tuition is lower.
The new report also revealed that universities may levy special fees on online students that traditional students don't have to pay. Almost one-fifth impose a one-time registration fee that averages $232, for example. Students may also get hit with extra fees for course materials, technology services, and individual courses.
Kenneth C. Green, director of the study, pointed out a range of possible explanations for the higher online prices. Those include production costs, extra charges for out-of-state students, and possible lower state reimbursement rates for online courses.
"It also may be opportunistic pricing on the part of some institutions," he said.
Despite the special fees charged to their students, 45 percent of institutions said they did not know whether their program made or lost money.
The programs are often burdened by management problems. The report says colleges are "struggling to deal with the organization of their online programs."
In the past two years, nearly half of the colleges surveyed have reorganized the management of those programs. More than half expect to reorganize them in the next two years.
Part of the reason is that some programs originated from individual departments. Mr. Green compared them to Germanic states in the mid-1850s, "each one going off on their own."
"Then the campus is saying, 'Wait a second. We need to bring these together, because these have consequences for institutional planning, policy, infrastructure.'"
The report, "Managing Online Education—2009," will be made available on Thursday on the Campus Computing Project's Web site.
Comments
1. bmontgomery - October 22, 2009 at 10:17 am
Each college has to consider the infrastructure costs of delivery for on-line instruction and the support services that are available for on-line students. Costs for these services have to come from someplace.
2. gmd1057 - October 22, 2009 at 11:05 am
What does "expensive" mean, in reality? The most prestigious US bricks and mortar schools, whose full-time employees are at or near the heart of the Chronicle's target audience, charge north of 50K a year now just for tuition; a decade ago the same schools charged barely over half that. Crocodile tears over schools that are built on a fee for service basis are kind of unconvincing.
Bricks and mortar universities are for-profit, too: for the profit of the full-time employees and whatever their preferences are. Just because they are labelled "nonprofit" under the tax code doesn't make them any more "nonprofit" than (for example) a Baptist congregation is "nonprofit" to the pastor and church employees.
3. salrosario - October 22, 2009 at 11:06 am
Maybe there is an issue of scale. When a program starts and it is not serving a critical mass, the fixed costs have to be spread across a smaller constituency base. The dynamics can change as an institution recoups the initial investments, and it can spread fixed costs across a wider constituency. Institutions need to do the numbers to know where they stand. For-profit institutions do it all the time, but nonprofit ones may not be as inclined.
4. allens - October 22, 2009 at 06:51 pm
I have to suspect this is because of inadequate competition between providers. Too few colleges/universities offer online courses; once more do, and people then do more comparison shopping online, the cost will be lower, considering lower physical plant et cetera costs. The problem of inadequate state financing may well also be a problem - of course, state financing frequently comes with other problems, such as requirements to admit certain in-state students who aren't qualified.
5. samueloulrey - October 23, 2009 at 08:18 am
Tag-line summary:
Pay More for Less... Again
In response to other comments, we've been seeing more adjuncts, more foreign teaching assistants, more post-docs, soaring compensation to executives and coaches, while tenure and tenure-track people actually deigning to teach and answer the questions the texts, DVDs, etc., leave unclear have grown scarce.
6. texasmusic - October 26, 2009 at 12:26 pm
I know I was routinely charged fees for things like access to the campus medical and legal services (for example). But from 500 miles away, these are services I was not allowed to use. The medical clinical wouldn't talk to me without an in-person visit and campus legal services refused to give legal advice over the phone, despite my willingness to send whatever documentation they wanted as proof my fee-paying student status. The university, naturally, wouldn't hear of refunding these fees to me despite my inability to utilize the services for which they were paying.
7. tjoo1691 - November 11, 2009 at 12:11 pm
The bottom line is that students sign up for these online classes quicker than the f2f classes. We used to offer 1 f2f and 1 online; now, it is 3 online and 1 f2f. Students like these classes and demand them. In order to support the infastructure for online, the fee is necessary and students pay it. Although students are paying more, they are able to better manage their time and their lives, which is "priceless."