Online education isn’t immune to partisan politics


A Republican governor and a Democratic governor in 1996 teamed up to convince the leaders of 17 states to create the all-online, competency-based Western Governors University. It was as bipartisan a venture as one could hope to find in politics.

education-online-partisan-politics“It was the liberal governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, and the conservative governor of Utah, Michael Levitt, who joined forces to create this new university,” said Russ Poulin, deputy director of research and analysis for WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies. “It grew out of a joint frustration of the existing public systems in their states to meet the needs of their growing populaces and to be innovative.”

At the time, few outside of those states paid much attention to the young university and the bipartisan effort that produced it. Nearly 20 years later, WGU is now a fully accredited institution with 40,000 students – and online education as a whole is receiving more political attention than ever before.

But many of today’s politicians, observers said, may be approaching the issue along more predictably partisan lines than lawmakers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

It’s not that either of the two major parties have more appreciation for online learning than the other, Poulin said. Rather, they tend to support different forms of online learning for political reasons.

“The party divide has tended to be more along the line of higher education sectors,” Poulin said. “There are those who conflate this with a divide in the use of online because they think that online courses are offered only by for-profits institutions.”

When former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, campaigned for president in 2012, he frequently praised the for-profit Full Sail University.

The university’s CEO, Bill Heavener, gave the maximum $2,500 to Romney’s campaign and another $45,000 to the super PAC that supported Romney for president.

Full Sail offers 25 fully-online master’s and bachelor’s programs. As funding for public higher education continues to dramatically decrease, for-profit online programs are an attractive option for conservative politicians.

They fall in line with the more Republican worldview, Poulin said, that the private sector can solve problems better than the public sector — and the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has led to a bevy of free or low-cost courses coming from inside the for-profit world.

“Liberals tend to be more suspicious of the profit motive of education,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at progressive think tank the Century Foundation. “Where as Republicans tend to come at this with a pro-market bias and think more competition is better.”

When Newt Gingrich taught a MOOC at the 2012 Republican National Convention, he didn’t choose the popular nonprofit platform edX to host the course. The former House leader instead picked the lesser-known KAPx platform, created by the for-profit education giant Kaplan, Inc.

Earlier this month, speaking at Miami-Dade College, Republican senator Marco Rubio called for states to consider accrediting free online courses, like MOOCs.

“Why hasn’t our education system found a way to harness free online learning and allow it to count toward a person’s post-secondary education?” Rubio asked. “The answer is that we have a broken accreditation system that favors established institutions while blocking out new, innovative, and more affordable competitors.”

Private companies offering a cheaper, more accessible alternative to a public education — what more could Republicans ask for? Better learning outcomes for one, some skeptics argue.

Fully online programs have been heavily criticized for their low rates of completion.

Many Democrats have taken a more hybrid-friendly approach, looking for solutions to come from within traditional public institutions that generally sport better retention rates.

Even this approach might have less to do with proven results and more to do with a political bias, Poulin said.

“Democrats tend to lean toward public institutions because they should have a public-serving mission,” he said. “Not all of them act that way, but most do.”

In an article for Salon last year, writer Andrew Leonard called deeply conservative governors Rick Scott, Rick Perry, and Scott Walker “the three horsemen of the MOOC apocalypse.”

But one of the most high-profile attempts at bringing MOOCs into mainstream education has been in the liberal state of California, under its Democratic governor Jerry Brown.

At San Jose State University, a highly-touted agreement with the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity quickly fizzled when nearly half of the students enrolled in their elementary statistics MOOC failed to pass the course.

The partnership has since made a comeback of sorts, but the experience led Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun to call MOOCs a “lousy product.”

The demand for education in California is outgrowing the space and money available on its campuses, Poulin said, leading to such experiments with online learning in lieu of charging students more tuition.

“While Republicans may be more vocal in their criticisms of public higher education, the option of raising tuition and fees is becoming less palatable to both parties,” he said.

At the federal level, Julie Peller, director of federal policy at the Lumina Foundation and a former Capitol Hill staffer, said that there continues to be a lack of understanding among members of congress on both sides of the aisle as to how sophisticated online learning has become, and who it is meant to serve.

To combat the lack of knowledge, Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D, created a congressional e-learning caucus in 2011.

“There’s this thought that most participants are just coming for one or two classes, that online education is just used for shorter-term certificate programs,” Peller said, even after the caucus organized several presentations about online learning. “The number of students taking online courses, either completely or as part of a brick-and-mortar program, is not widely-known or discussed.”

Kalhlenberg said as education costs continue to rise while funding continues to disappear, politicians from both parties will keep looking to online learning as a potential solution, even as they grapple to understand its place in today’s educational — and political — landscape.

“There’s this sense that with online learning you can improve education and save money, which is something any politician from both parties will find intriguing,” he said.

 Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake.

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