Mark E. Pittman is in many ways the quintessential student for the University of South Carolina’s new Palmetto College. At 47, he is a former Navy man, a husband, a father of three, and the principal breadwinner in his family. More than a decade after leaving behind his studies at South Carolina, he has re-enrolled—and if all goes well, he will soon become the first person in his family to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Mr. Pittman recently began studying in the university’s new Back to Carolina program, an online degree-completion option for adults who are 25 or older and previously earned at least 60 academic credits at the university. Back to Carolina is a pilot program for Palmetto College, the first offering in a much broader distance-learning effort set to begin in the fall of 2013.
With Palmetto, the first program of its kind in the state, the university sees itself as filling a gap in the availability of affordable bachelor’s degrees for South Carolinians, as well as contributing to the state’s educational-attainment and work-force goals.
More than that, the university is positioning itself to compete with for-profit institutions.
Palmetto College will offer online bachelor’s-completion programs in a variety of vocational fields, including business, criminal justice, education, and nursing, which students can pursue on their own time. It will enroll students who already hold at least 60 credits from one of the system’s largely two-year “regional” colleges, a South Carolina technical college, or an out-of-state institution, and who, for whatever reason, are unable to relocate to a four-year, or “senior,” campus to complete a baccalaureate degree.
The South Carolina system has four regional colleges, and about 500 students per year transfer to one of the four senior campuses to continue toward bachelor’s degrees. “How many are not able to relocate, that’s a different story,” says Michael D. Amiridis, the university’s provost. “That’s what we will be testing with the Palmetto College.”
“We always think of the dropout as someone who couldn’t make it, but by far the predominant reason is that someone had economic challenges or married or needed to take a job. And so we want these people to come back to the university and to complete their bachelor’s degrees,” says Harris Pastides, president of the university.
Mr. Pittman, for example, lives in Kershaw, S.C., a town of about 1,800 people. The majority of Kershaw’s workers commute out of town to their jobs, and the only site of higher education there is an off-campus center of York Technical College.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Pittman was majoring in biology at the university, first taking courses at the Lancaster campus, about a half-hour’s drive from his home, and then at the main campus, in Columbia, an hour away. After two and a half years, the pressures of studying, along with those of providing for and being able to spend time with his wife and young children, became too much, and Mr. Pittman left the university for the work force.
For the past four years he has been working at home, in order to cut out the time he spent commuting to his job at Bank of America, in Charlotte, N.C.—63 miles each way—and to spend more time with his family. Now he is also studying at home, evenings and weekends, to earn a B.A. in liberal studies, the degree that Back to Carolina is piloting this year.
“It’s certainly added to my plateful,” Mr. Pittman says. “But I’m not complaining. It’s a great opportunity, and I’m going to leverage it and take advantage of it as much as I can.”
Competitive Pricing
One of the “guiding principles” of Palmetto College is that its programs are “positioned to compete with for-profit institutions,” says a February progress report compiled by Huron Consulting Group, which worked with the university to develop the Palmetto College concept. By offering competitively priced online degrees backed by the resources of a large public institution and the university’s brand, officials hope to attract the demographic that for-profits often claim as their main market.
While for-profit colleges have been criticized for their low online-degree-completion rates, Mr. Amiridis anticipates that there won’t be a “huge discrepancy” between the graduation rates of South Carolina’s traditional campuses and those of Palmetto College. Attributing his expectation of student success to the hybrid nature of the program—the first 60 credits of study will be completed at a traditional campus and the last 60 online—he emphasizes that students will already have an academic history before enrolling in online courses.
That history will not only prepare them to perform academically but also aid in the admissions process. “We are selective, and we’re careful in the way that we select people to make sure that they have a reasonable chance of success,” Mr. Amiridis says. “I view this as an ethical responsibility, quite frankly.”
Apart from distinguishing itself through this admissions standard, Palmetto College will focus on a more specific population than that of the for-profits, he says.
“The populations that we’re trying to serve, they know us. They know the University of South Carolina. In many cases they aspire to receive a degree from the University of South Carolina,” Mr. Amiridis says. “We’re not competing with for-profit institutions. We’re not trying to take this and go nationally.”
The provost’s comments parallel the marketing principle put forward by the Huron report, which states that “techniques should be used to differentiate USC from the for-profit institutions that are heavily marketed.”
The consultants’ report is also explicit about Palmetto College’s role, concluding that at a price of $367 per credit hour, the college will become “a significant competitor to the for-profit institutions that have recently become major players in the South Carolina higher-education marketplace.”
A study done in conjunction with Huron two years ago showed that at that sample price, Palmetto College courses for students with 60 credits would cost less than 40 percent of a comparable course offered by a for-profit in the state, Mr. Amiridis says. Ultimately, administrators decided that Palmetto tuition would be comparable to that for the system’s two- and four-year campuses.
Despite its focus on former University of South Carolina students, the new college may end up competing with for-profits more directly.
“One of the things that’s going to happen is that at some point in time, Palmetto will exhaust that population,” says Bruce N. Chaloux, chief executive of the Sloan Consortium, which promotes online learning in higher education.
While the consortium recommends that institutions engage in adult degree-completion programs those previously enrolled students who had left without degrees, Mr. Chaloux says that transplants to the state or holders of credits from other universities would also be interested.
‘Catching Fire’
The creation of Palmetto College is also a move to leverage South Carolina’s regional campuses while streamlining the university system. The four regional colleges will be consolidated under the administrative umbrella of Palmetto College, which will be led by a new chancellor. Some of the colleges’ operations, like financial aid, human resources, and budget and finance will be centralized, and additional advisers will be hired to serve Palmetto students.
No staffing cuts have been announced, although Mr. Amiridis says the move may lead to “an optimization of the staffing needs.”
Ann C. Carmichael, dean of the regional campus at Salkehatchie, says the centralization of resources and personnel will empower the university’s regional colleges by allowing for “collective decision making” and leading to “more efficient use of scarce dollars.”
Palmetto College is an expansion of Palmetto Programs, an option that has allowed students at regional colleges to complete baccalaureate degrees in liberal arts or organizational leadership “synchronously,” or by attending live broadcasts of lectures held on other campuses.
“It’s almost like a natural evolution of what’s been happening,” says Sandra J. Kelly, chair of the university’s Faculty Senate. Faculty in both the senior and regional colleges have been converting courses into a synchronous online format for Palmetto Programs; those who are interested are now crafting “asynchronous classes,” or ones that students can take on their own time, for Palmetto College.
And while taking those courses, Palmetto College students can still have access to the resources of the traditional campuses, including academic and career advising, technical support, and student services. Noting that the university’s eight senior and regional campuses are spread across the state, Mr. Amiridis estimates that it would take any Palmetto College student little more than an hour’s drive to receive face-to-face help or advice.
Until now, the biggest players in the online adult-degree-completion market have been for-profit institutions, but more public universities are showing interest. In planning Palmetto College, South Carolina looked at similar programs at Pennsylvania State and North Carolina State Universities, and at the Universities of Alabama and of Wisconsin. Others are under way at colleges across the South, in Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, and elsewhere, according to Mr. Chaloux.
“This is catching fire across the region, which is a very healthy thing,” he says. “If we’re going to reach the aggressive goals that have been established across the nation” of seeing at least 60 percent of the adult population obtain higher-education credentials, “we need to develop these kinds of programs that use alternative strategies.”