A story in the Wall Street Journal this past Wednesday (July 6, 2022) talked of universities and their relationships with for-profit companies to create, teach and operate coursework, and they don’t like that practice at all.
It’s easy for me to see why.
The piece explains that the private companies work with the universities as their clients. The bulk of the tuition revenue goes to the company commensurate with the amount of work they do. The hiccup, the authors write, is that aoften the company uses university email addresses, letterhead and other means to obscure the relationship and make it seem like the university is actually doing the course.
I have NO problem with working with companies to help the universities operate the courses, but I have a huge problem with the apparent (alleged?) effort to hide that work. In our School of Media and Communication, faculty create, operate and teach the courses. We have both full-time and part-time (adjunct) faculty, the latter of whom we vet thoroughly and supervise accordingly.
Other areas of the university use companies to help market their programs; I’d love to be able to have that help! I draw the line, though at anyone selling our coursework if we aren’t the ones delivering it. The WSJ article notes that some “customers” felt deceived once they found out the universities weren’t actually teaching the classes. I’d be too!
Higher education is a tough business right now; the undergraduate “cliff”, a (mostly) resurgent economies often reduce interest in graduate programs, just as recessions increase it, and there’s an impulse again to deemphasize the value of a university education in general.
The answers to these issues, however, absolutely cannot be to a) outsource to a non-academic provider entirely, b) deceive the student into thinking that provider IS your university, and/or c) mortgage your reputation by doing “a” and “b.”
Am I being näive?
