Hybrid College Courses Help Fill Gap

By Nicole Jewell : Guest Blogger

Online schooling has recently proven quite popular and with good cause. Many older students, stay-at-home mothers and full-time employees whose work hours cannot be adjusted to traditional school schedules, now have a higher education at their fingertips.

Some still ridicule non-traditional learning as being inferior or ‘not real’ because a proper classroom was never sat in under the direct supervision of an instructor. But does the act of sitting at a desk in class with fellow students make an education genuine, or is it the amount of work a student puts into it?

A recent trend within post-secondary arena is a ‘hybrid education’, which combines regular online engagement with traditional classroom instruction. Many community colleges, universities and technical schools are now splitting their course work over the Internet and the brick and mortar classroom.

Any questions as to the validity of the degree being awarded are dispelled by the typically once a week classroom attendance, with the remainder of homework, discussion and message board work still being dealt with at home or office on the computer.

Not everyone is as self-disciplined to manage all learning aspects outside of a physical classroom without, so the in-class time serves as a touch-base for those who need to fix their eyes on a real-life instructor, rather than a computer screen and keyboard.

Accreditation Is Key

One may wonder why online schools have such a poor reputation. It most likely stems from the fact that a decade ago, an online degree could simply be bought at the right price, without having to do any legitimate work to earn it. Although this practice is also not unheard of in traditional schools, it is much harder to verify. Most online schools, from technical and community colleges to universities, have undergone thorough strict and intense scrutiny to obtain and maintain their accredited status.

These accreditations are a huge endorsement of quality – meaning that the school is recognized by one of six regional accreditors and therefore approved by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation and the United States Department of Education – the same organizations who accredit brick and mortar schools. Naturally, such claims of validation should be verified by the prospective students and not taken on faith alone.

Each of the six regional agencies is responsible for their respective states and counties. All students need to do to check that their online school is accredited, is to follow-up this assertion with the relevant agency that services their county and state where the school is located.

If the online school is justly accredited, the distance learning degree is every bit as valid as one that comes from an institution where it’s necessary to sit and raise your hand.

Despite the strides made to accredit schools in the online sphere, there is still a stigma which suggests that online degrees are inferior to those completed in a traditional classroom.

In light of this, perhaps a hybrid education kills too birds with one stone. In the short term, it will provide students with greater scheduling flexibility, while its classroom component inspires confidence that this degree will be valued in the job market. In the long run, the hybrid education model will help to ensure that the value of an online education doesn’t get swept under the rug and dismissed as inferior.

An emerging term in university catalogs is that a course is ‘web-enhanced’ – indicating a hybrid style of learning. But not all classes touted as web-enhanced are set in that structure. For some, it means that all classes are held on campus and web-based learning is only a complementary added value. As the definition can vary from institution to institution, students should verify that nature of the class before signing up – discovering scheduling conflicts later on will be unforgiving.

By and large, the majority of the workload is web-enhanced and can even be completed in the computer lab of the attended school. While hybrid courses are not ‘learn-at-your-own-pace’, they allow for a little more structural leg room that can really complement the learning process. This kind of distance learning allows for further flexibility and convenience, while allowing students the milestone of weekly attendance in a non-virtual classroom setting.

The High Points

A hybrid education boasts several perks that a strictly online school does not. One of its biggest advantages is the ability to enjoy student organizations, clubs, teams, and a little campus life. Students can still enjoy the communal feeling and shared history of the institution. By meeting other students in person, even once a week, it’s easier to develop a sense of camaraderie, have an interactive student life and meet new people who are in your immediate area and not thousands of miles away (as can be the case with a strictly online education).

Less time spent and gas consumed by fewer commutes to school can also be considered a bonus. Online institutions also offer these benefits, as well as having more time to work on assignments.

A hybrid education can be that special blend so many are looking for. It does allow for the best of both worlds with less con and more pro. It’s especially convenient if the school you’re interested in is nearby and you have that extra spare time necessary for a commute. It can also prove to be less of a financial burden, since so many online schools charge for their round-the-clock convenience.

Nicole Jewell is a writer for the education blog at TeacherCertification.org. She can be reached at njewell(@)ethingsonline(.)com

Community College Tuition Rising Significantly

By Neil Gonzales/Oakland Tribune

Graduating from a community college – traditionally the only affordable avenue available for underprivileged students seeking higher education – is increasingly becoming out of reach for many students because of rising tuition, according to a new study. The findings by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a San Jose-based nonprofit, come as the state has increased the community college enrollment fee from $26 to $36 per unit effective this fall semester. “Yes, community college is getting harder and harder to afford,” said Kathy Blackwood, chief financial officer for the San Mateo County Community College District, adding that the fee could go up to $46 per unit in the spring if the projected revenues in the new state budget don’t materialize. (more…

Praise For USA Ed Department College Cost Calculator

By Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute/EPI Internationa

In the late 1990s, I worked for the College Board and co-directed the Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing reports.  These reports, to this day, provide educators, researchers, and policymakers with a summary of how much college and university is and what available aid, from the institutional, private, state, and federal levels exists to help students pay tuition, fees, and other assorted costs.

Back 25 years ago, the College Board listed the most expensive and least expensive colleges in America. It stopped doing so when Board membership suggested it wasn’t a very good idea to identify your membership as the most expensive in the nation.

Of course, a lot has changed since that time. Now, colleges and universities live, in part, by the Chivas Regal effect. That is, the more expensive they are, the higher their perceived value and ROI. They simply “must” be better. We know this isn’t even close to true, but people believe it. We make similar assumptions when we book hotels, buy cars, and even pay for restaurant meals. It must be better.

In the late 1990s, I had asked that we, the College Board, do it again. I thought it was important that people knew what was what. Unfortunately, my request was summarily denied: you can’t showcase “bad” information about the member colleges. I thought it was crap then; crap now.

However, this week, the US Department of Education unveiled the College Affordability and Transparency Center which does exactly what the Board used to do and what I proposed back in 1999. The site allows you to chose, by sector, the most expensive, least expensive, and lowest and highest net price (price minus all gift aid, on average) institutions in the United States.

The purpose of the tool is to allow students, parents, and others to look at the various prices of institutions around the US. Understand this: it does not tell us anything about institutional quality, perceived or otherwise. It does not tell us about ROI on the investment of a college education (as measured by average salaries and employability of graduates). That needs to happen next.

The utility of this tool is limited, but serves to provide additional transparency on the rubic’s cube of higher education. Good work, ED.

USA Education Department Puts College Costs On Line

Students and families can compare colleges’ tuitions, the pace at which they are rising and the net cost of attending each college on a new Web site the Department of Education made public, fulfilling a legislative mandate

Transitions To College:Influences Of Demograpics,Development, And Policy

Transitions to College: An In-Depth Look at the Selected Influences of Demographics, Development, and Policy
by Margaret Terry Orr , Teachers College Record On line
This article provides an overview of a set of articles in this special issue that synthesize current research and provide future directions for research, both conceptually and methodologically, on gender, socioeconomic, and language-minority differences in college transitions, as well as a review of college transitions research in the discipline of human development. It concludes with an example of policy analysis research on college transitions, focusing on 2-year to 4-year college articulation policies. These reviews provide a foundation for further research, policy making, and programmatic action to improve the college transition pathways for all youth, particularly those for whom college-going opportunities are most challenging because of demographic and economic conditions.

College Board Synthesizes Data On Young Men Of Color

A new initiative from The College Board seeks to identify existing — and needed — research around the Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, to understand the issues behind the data, and to provide an overview of the legal landscape within which solutions must be developed. The College Board has conducted an extensive data and literature review to determine what is known to date on the situation facing young men of color, and in partnership with the Business Innovation Factory, has engaged these young men directly to understand how they view their experiences, and to add their voice to the discussion of how to better meet their needs. The particular value of the literature review is that it looks at six distinct pathways that young men of color — and all students — take after high school, and for the first time synthesizes in one place the literature for males of all four minority groups: African American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic/ Latinos and Native American, and Alaska Natives. The initiative’s goal is to isolate and identify the factors that contribute either to the persistence or to the attrition of young men of color from high school to higher education.
See the initiative website: http://youngmenofcolor.collegeboard.org/home

Source : PEN Newsblast

Students Say No To 3 Year Colleges

3-year College Degree Programs Not Catching On
Several institutions have launched three-year degree programs and political leaders in at least two states, Ohio and Rhode Island, have instructed public colleges to offer accelerated degrees. But students have not responded, often because of the intense schedules that also leave less time for other campus activities. (Washington Post, 06/15/11)

Some For Profit Colleges Say Federal Regulations Will Help Them

Executives from Career Education, DeVry and Rasmussen agree that increased federal scrutiny of the for-profit sector provides an opportunity to generate competitive advantage through an increased focus on student success.
chicagotribune.com

AEI Study Highlights Strategies To Cut College Costs

Over the past two decades, the cost of a college education has risen dramatically. Tuition and fees have increased at twice the rate of inflation, rising more quickly than market goods or services and outstripping the growth in family incomes. In his new study, Opportunities for Efficiency and Innovation: A Primer on How to Cut College Costs (published by AEI’s Future of American Education Project), Oklahoma State University professor Vance Fried finds that this dramatic rise in college tuition costs is due to the ways in which traditional colleges and universities organize and allocate resources, and not due to lavish university facilities and extra student services.

“Higher education insiders sometimes point to the increasing cost of auxiliary services like student housing and big-time athletics as a major cause of large tuition increases. This is a red herring,” notes Fried. “Football, good food, and hot tubs are not the reason for runaway college spending. Rather, the root cause is the high cost of performing the instructional, research, and public-service missions of the undergraduate university.”

To identify areas ripe for cost savings, Fried creates a provocative experiment: what would it cost to educate undergraduates at a hypothetical college built from scratch? Fried concludes that undergraduate colleges should consider five major cost-cutting strategies:

1. Eliminate or separately fund research and public service
2. Optimize class size
3. Eliminate or consolidate low-enrollment programs
4. Eliminate administrator bloat
5. Downsize extracurricular student activity programs
“Rather than focusing only on the big-ticket items that tend to dominate debates about college costs, Fried argues that the real levers for increasing efficiency include rethinking student-faculty ratios, eliminating under-enrolled programs, and trimming unnecessary administrative positions,” explains Andrew P. Kelly, AEI research fellow and editor of the Future of American Higher Education Project. “His recommendations are a must-read as states look to rein in college costs.”

Vance H. Fried is the Riata Professor of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University and author of Better/Cheaper College: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Rescuing Undergraduate Education (Center for College Affordability and Productivity, 2010). His research focuses on entrepreneurship in the higher education industry, entrepreneurship and public policy, and venture capital. Before joining the faculty at Oklahoma State, Fried worked as an attorney in private practice, executive of an independent oil company, and investment banker working with small- and mid-cap companies. He is also a certified public accountant.

Advice For Students How To Complete College

Scott Swail at Educational Policy Institute provides this sage advice :