Class No-Action Lawsuits
Higher education has tied itself in a Gordian knot. And, not a single Alexander the Great in sight.
University classes are being taught online during the coronavirus shutdown, and likely will be online for the foreseeable future.
However, many students view online education as inferior, while colleges claim that online classes meet the standards of face-to-face education. Online and face-to-face classes are not the same except in one sense: the tuition for both remains the same.
As of May 4th, students have filed class action lawsuits against at least 26 colleges and universities for the inadequacy of online education. Banished from their campuses and classrooms, students are suing to recover payments for tuition, room and board, and other campus services. These are essentially classroom no-action suits: Courts will have to decide which has more value, classroom teaching or online education.
A freshman suing Drexel University in Philadelphia told ABC news that online classes have little interaction between students and professors. The freshman said:
You just feel a little bit diminished. It's just not the same experience I would be getting if I were at the campus.
A Boston University student’s lawsuit said:
Some professors are simply uploading pre-recorded videos that offer no student/teacher interaction, and in some instances, professors are simply posting assignments online with no video at all.
Universities are responding by painting lipstick on the pig. For example, Michigan State issued a statement with a baffling double-negative twist:
We don’t negate that this has been a difficult time for our university, especially for our students. The school has taken on new costs to move instruction online. We have maintained our commitment to providing meaningful and robust learning experiences at no additional cost to our Spartans.
“We don’t negate…” indicates how confused administrators are. And, what are “meaningful and robust learning experiences”?
Online graduate and undergraduate degrees have been hyped by for-profit corporations for roughly 20 years. Beginning in 2008, a new business enterprise began to emerge: online program managers (also known as OPMs). With names like 2U, HotChalk, and iDesign, these new online education firms began to partner with reputable, non-profit universities. The for-profit online manager, operating under the university’s name, organizes the online platform, recruits students, and markets the program. The degree is issued by the big-name university, while the online program manager takes 60% of the tuition and remains unknown.
In 2010, USC signed a contract with the online managing company 2U to offer a Master of Social Work degree online for the same price as the regular classroom degree. The online courses are taught by lower paid adjuncts working without campus offices. As Marilyn Flynn, then dean of the School of Social Work in 2010, said:
This is a cash cow. Universities are struggling to find a business plan that works. And I was very aware that we would have a dramatic increase in revenue from this.
Universities of all shapes and sizes are milking the cash cow — Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, NYU, UC Berkeley, UNC Chapel Hill, Northwestern, Syracuse, Rice, and USC, to name just a few. But you won’t see the names of any online management firms in the course catalogue — they prefer to be “invisible” to the public. However, the online management business is growing, estimated to be an $1 billion industry in 2020.
The $1 billion comes from students who are paying on-campus tuition and going into debt for their education.
In January, Trump’s Department of Education released proposed regulations to sweep away the Obama era regulations that provided some student protections. The Trump regulations would allow schools to outsource more than 50% of its programs to private companies, and would allow federal aid to programs that have no student/teacher interaction.
Over the years, the online management businesses, Big Tech, and for-profit online schools have trumpeted online learning as the future of education at all levels. Advocates have spent billions promoting online education as equal to in-person teaching. Yet in 2019, only 15% of college undergraduates chose to take courses online.
Now, online classes are not optional. Students and teachers are living out this unexpected experiment in online learning.
Recently, Niche, a school rating service, asked 75,000 high school students to evaluate the pandemic era online education. The students were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: “I find online classes as effective as in-person classes.” Only 11% of the students agreed, while 72% disagreed.
College students rated online classes as less effective than in-person classes by a margin of two to one, according to the Niche surveys.
Once upon a time, colleges and universities claimed to be providing education for the social good, to improve our shared future, and to be a ladder for economic mobility. But now higher education is entangled in a knot of conflicting interests — students’ desire for good education at a reasonable price, the schools’ quest for profits, and online providers’ push for even greater profits.
Online classes are profitable. So, when the pandemic recedes, higher education, under pressure from Big Tech and an $1 billion online managing industry, will increase their investment in online classes. The schools will argue that, after the “success” of the pandemic educational experiment, they have too much invested not to teach online. Money will continue to dictate how education proceeds.
The mission of teaching for the social good seems to have vanished in the scramble for education profits. I attended the annual faculty meeting at Boston University’s Metropolitan College. At the top of her agenda, the dean proudly announced the increase of tuition revenue for the last year — not the number of students served or educational successes — but rather the impact on the university’s bottom line.
Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College, told the Boston Globe:
The energy, the conversation, the inspiration that takes place in a room together is essential, I think, to teaching and learning.
The classroom — the human interactions between teachers and students — is essential to a complete education.
Spencer Hagaman is finishing his junior year at Yale University in isolation with his family in California. He said, “We’re paying full tuition to get an incomplete education.”
With 26 lawsuits and growing, the courts will decide what constitutes a complete education. Will the lords and ladies of the education kingdom testify in court in favor of their students or their bottom line? Will they continue to justify the identical high tuition for both in-class and online learning by saying they are equivalent?
Maybe math isn’t a strong suit at universities anymore, but higher education should not pretend that less is more. Currently, online education is a rescue boat while we are swamped by the coronavirus. When the virus eases, let’s not replace the ship with the flimsy life raft.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.