e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Jerry Brown

  • Enrollment Implications Regarding Directive for Online Community College in California

    A month ago Governor Jerry Brown directed Eloy Oakley, Chancellor of the California Community College System (CCCS) ((Disclosure: The Online Education Initiative from CCCS is a client of MindWires. The views in this and future posts represents my independent views and not OEI’s.)) to “take whatever steps are necessary” to establish a fully-online college. At first glance this directive appears to be a solution in search of a problem, so it is worth looking beyond the headline see what is motivating this move.

    In an article from Community College Daily:

    Noting that the system has significantly expanded the number of online courses, Brown said, “I believe it is time now for our community colleges to increase even further the availability of online courses and degree programs – and make college far more accessible and affordable.”

    Reaching more students

    “The governor has been interested in realizing the promise of online education for a number of years,” Oakley said in an interview with CCDaily. He added that Brown also wants a way to reach more nontraditional students.

    “We have literally tens of thousands of working adults with some college and no credentials and a couple of million working adults who are unemployed or underemployed,” Oakley said. “This is a wonderful opportunity to reach a population that really needs a community college to achieve economic mobility.”

    The details are not yet worked out, and Oakley is pulling together a group to advise on the options available to make this directive a reality, with the recommendations due in November. Oakley’s comments clearly establish access for nontraditional students to be the ultimate driver. In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Oakley commented further:

    “Part of this is the governor’s desire to reach more students in California through a technology platform,” said Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California Community College system. “The 114 campuses are designed in a traditional manner, so we’re reaching a traditional population that is students coming out of high schools.”

    But a new online-only college could reach students those traditional brick-and-mortar campuses are currently missing — adults who are unemployed or underemployed, he said.

    To achieve these goals of reaching more working adult students, there are some real challenges to address.

    View of CCCS Enrollment Mix

    It is worth viewing the historical headcount numbers available from the Chancellor’s office, focusing on age group to get a better understanding of the status quo.

    The headcount for CCCS peaked in 2009 at 2.93 million students and has since dropped to the current 2.36 million level, a reduction of 19%. Across the state, colleges are looking for ways to increase, or at least slow the decrease, in overall enrollment.

    What is most striking in the data, however, is the shift from older students (age 25 and above, or “adults”) to younger students (age 24 and blow, or “traditional”) for the community college system, with the mix roughly reversed from 25 years ago. Chancellor Oakley and Governor Brown are right to note that the older student population is not being served well, at least if we use actual enrollment as a proxy. And the situation is getting worse, not better. However, while the majority of students in CCCS are 24 or younger, there are also a large number of older adult students. In other words, there appears to be an overlap between the students in the current 114 colleges and the target students for the new fully-online college. This will present quite a challenge for Oakley and other planners to make the following statement from the IHE interview a reality.

    “We don’t want to cannibalize the system, and we wouldn’t want to create a college to take enrollment from other colleges,” Oakley said. “Any solution would have to complement what we do, and it has to have an opportunity to share revenue with the colleges and really enhance their ability to serve students.”

    This statement is sounds good on paper and will be crucial in terms of getting at least tacit support from the current colleges to the creation of a new, full-online college. But the data shows there is not a clear and easy path to serve adult, non-traditional students without affecting existing colleges.

    National Trends

    In this situation California is not alone. The National Student Clearinghouse research for Fall 2016 shows first that community college (2-year public) enrollments have been dropping nationwide.

    And just like in California, adult student enrollment has been dropping much faster than 18-24 year old enrollment. 24 and under groups have dropped 1.0 – 2.4% per year while 25 and above groups have dropped 5.5 – 7.6% per year (see bottom two rows).

    This will be another challenge for the CCCS planning team, as there is no indication that California is screwing up while other states have the same problem figured out – the reduction in community college enrollments, particularly for adult students, appears to be a nationwide demographic trend.

    Comparison Colleges

    Assuming that the plan works out and they find new enrollment opportunities that don’t cannibalize existing college student groups, it is also worth considering how large this college might become. I pulled together the IPEDS data for several of the top-growing online undergraduate colleges ((The comparison colleges might not be exclusively online, but they have become at least predominantly online.)) to get some idea of what the best-case scenario might be in terms of enrollment growth. This data looks at fall enrollment numbers which will be lower than full-year headcount numbers.

    Once we get past the “holy crap, look at Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) growth”, there are a few observations to make.

    • We’ll have to see where SNHU goes, but there has traditionally been a ceiling to the size of online enrollment per institution of around 80,000 – 100,000. The primary exception has been the University of Phoenix that reached a quarter of a million online students back in 2010, but their enrollment has been dropping since then and are more of the exception that proves the rule. All others have peaked well under 100,000 students. Just this spring Liberty University experienced their first recent enrollment drop, leading to staff layoffs.
    • The maximum growth rate of these cherry-picked successful schools ranges from ~1,200 / year for Excelsior to ~7,700 / year for SNHU (note that Rio Salado at ~1,400 / year is the only public institution). Add to this the fact that all of these schools have been around for decades. No accreditation issues, no time-consuming establishment of core leadership team, etc.
    • There is a big difference in dealing with institutional issues and statewide issues, particularly in California. One in five US community college students in the US do so in California, and the statewide issues tend to come in large numbers. Statewide issues tend to come in hundreds of thousands while institutional issues tend to come in tens of thousands.

    What this points to is that for a new fully-online institution to get to some meaningful level of enrollment (let’s say 20,000) in the same ballpark as these comparison schools, I estimate it would take a full decade at the least. This is the reason, by the way, that Mitch Daniels and Purdue University made the Kaplan University deal even though Kaplan’s enrollments are dropping. Daniels did not want to wait a decade to get to meaningful enrollment numbers for an online college serving working adults – if everything works out, within a year Purdue will have a fully-online institution serving 30,000+ working adults. That is a big if, by the way.

    None of this analysis is to argue that CCCS should not try to establish a fully-online college. The goal of better serving nontraditional populations – adult students with and without jobs – is worth pursuing on its own merits.

    The numbers do argue, however, for a realistic view on the challenges they face:

    • Fighting against national demographic trends for adult students of community colleges;
    • Trying to avoid cannibalizing enrollment from existing California Community Colleges;
    • Having the patience to support the schools while it take years to grow to a size with meaningful enrollment levels; and
    • Accepting that best case this approach probably recovers less than 10% of the enrollment drop since 2009.

    I would hope that the CCCS planning efforts take the hard numbers into consideration when searching for different options to satisfy the governor’s directive.

  • Re:Booting CA Higher Education: My First Thoughts

    As expected, the 20 Million Minds-sponsored event was fascinating and information-packed. Kudos to the foundation for setting up such a rich and, I think, important meeting. In fact, I’m still digesting it, and may need to write several posts to lay out my thoughts once the dust settles. But I do want to get my initial thoughts down while they are fresh. In particular, underneath all the head nodding and apparent agreement, there were some strikingly divergent ideas about the future of higher education that are worth spelling out in some detail.

    (more…)

  • California Discusses Cost and Effectiveness in Higher Education

    On the heels of the passage of a historic tax increase to cover deficits in the California higher education system, the UC system is apparently already warning that they may need to raise tuition again. In response, Governor Jerry Brown has called for action and discussion about rising tuition costs, and in particular, to discuss how getting more aggressive with online education might help the cost situation. The Los Angeles Times characterized it this way:

    “In order to meet the needs going forward without constant large tuition increases, there will have to be different ways in which people learn and people teach,” Brown said.

    He told the regents — and they quickly agreed — to invite industry leaders in free online education, such as the Udacity website, to the January meeting to discuss how UC can more aggressively get into the digital classroom.

    Brown said he wanted those talks to be “not in the gilded tones of academia but in the harsh reality of the marketplace and technologies.”

    In response this call, the 20 Million Minds Foundation is sponsoring a conversation about controlling rising costs while maintaining (or improving) quality in the California public higher education systems from 9 AM to 2 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday, January 8th. More information, including the full agenda and the webcast sign-up form, can be found on the home page of 20mm.org.

    This event has the potential to be impactful for a variety of reasons. First, the folks who are organizing the event were directly involved with California’s new law to fund the creation of 50 open textbooks for higher education. Their involvement by itself means it is likely to be an interesting event. Second, it comes at a critical moment in California’s funding situation. Something has to change. Third, it’s California. What happens there matters, both because the state is so big and because it has been a model for quality public higher education. Californians still have a great deal of civic pride invested in that idea of themselves (which may be why Governor Brown was able to pass the tax increase). And finally, with the MOOC hype at its apex, previously unthinkable technology-driven changes to large, conservative prestige schools are suddenly not only thinkable but positively trendy.

    It turns out that e-Literate will have its own little part in this grand drama. Our very own Phil Hill will be both a speaker and the moderator of several panels. I will have the privilege of participating on one of the panels. Never having been at an event like this before, I will be fascinated to see how it all plays out. Obviously, various folks will be coming with different agendas. From my personal perspective, while I’m not a big believer in the role of the “harsh reality of the marketplace” as a driver for educational policy, I do think the harsh reality of student debt burdens should motivate a sense of urgency. And I think there is a huge opportunity for a long overdue rethink of how we approach education. Fellow panelist Candace Thille from CMU’s OLI has said it well:

    “Rather than using information technology to mimic or scale typical classroom teaching methods, I hope the participants will begin to discuss how to use emerging technologies to effectively re-engineer the teaching and learning process as a whole.  We have the opportunity to address large-scale societal issues in higher education while simultaneously making progress in our fundamental understanding of human learning.

    Another issue we need to address is balancing institutional competition and collaboration.  Many higher education pundits believe that the competitive nature of American higher education is a key reason that many American research universities are the best in the world. However, pursuing innovation in teaching and in education research are areas in which, I believe, we can make progress more rapidly through a better balance between competition and large-scale collaboration.”

    If the conversation can get beyond a zero-sum political tug-of-war between disruptive xMOOC companies and traditional academic institutions to a genuine dialog about new possibilities, then this could turn out to be a big deal. But as I said, I’ve never been to anything like this before and I’m frankly not sure what to expect. It will be interesting.