I received an email from a student asking me what he could do when people state that American Military University (AMU) or American Public University (APU) are “diploma mills” or unaccredited.  I thought I would post my response.

The “myths” that AMU or APU are diploma mills or unaccredited are invalid.  In most cases, the myths are more than likely disseminated by individuals who do not care for online colleges and universities.  Faculty and staff members of accredited institutions that operate partially online or totally online have heard the negative perceptions about online education for years and have worked hard to demonstrate the evidence that supports learning in online programs.  A May 2009 study published by the U.S. Department of Education entitled Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning:  A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies stated that students learn better in online programs than in face-to-face programs .  The researchers examined over 1,000 published research papers involving online and face-to-face learners.

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I recently had the chance to read a research report titled “With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them,” published by Public Agenda with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The authors of the report surveyed over 600 young adults between the ages of 22 and 30.  The purpose of the survey was to compare the answers of students who dropped out of college to the answers of students who graduated within the three year (for community colleges) or six year (for four-year colleges) standards as measured by the U.S. Department of Education.  Jean Johnson and Jon Rochkind, along with Amber Ott and Samantha DuPont, wanted to validate the reasons why students depart from colleges before graduating and see if the students themselves offered reasons different than many of the recent research studies.

The authors point out that according to the U.S. Department of Education, only 20 percent of community college students graduate within three years and only 40 percent of four year college students graduate within six years.  In fact, only 27 percent of college students attend the traditional residential college that most people envision as the idyllic college environment.  Even more telling of the changes in college student profiles, 45 percent of students attending four year colleges reported working more than 20 hours per week and 60 percent of students attending two year colleges reported working more than 20 hours per week.

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The Delta Cost Project recently released a report titled, “Trends in College Spending: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does it Go?” The report is enlightening given the well-documented increases in college costs combined with the current financial crisis. 

The Forward to the report, written by Delta Cost Project’s Executive Director, Jane Wellman, notes that “Our country needs to increase capacity and improve performance in higher education.  We can’t allow the funding crisis to justify rollbacks in access or quality.”  The report utilizes the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data provided by all institutions of higher education to the U.S. Department of Education, but the authors admit that “private for-profit institutions, an important and growing sector in American higher education, are excluded from the fiscal analyses because of the poor quality of trend data for these institutions.” 

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The U.S. Department of Education released the findings of a meta-analysis conducted by its Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development on Friday that confirm what online educators have known for years: “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.” 

Online education has gained tremendous momentum in the last several years.  A November 2008 report titled, “Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008” published by the Sloan Consortium notes that during the fall 2007 semester, some 3.9 million students were taking at least one course online, representing a twelve percent increase over the previous year.  During the same semester, twenty percent of all college students were taking at least one course online.  An Eduventures report from November 2006 predicted this growth; that report found that half of the 2,000 potential students surveyed indicated that they would be interested in completing a degree online.

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American Public University System has focused on assessment and learning outcomes since 2004. Dr. Jennifer Stephens, our Dean of Assessment, publishes our learning outcomes on the web at http://www.apus.edu/learning-outcomes-assessment. We are committed to continuous improvement and making sure that we are providing online programs that match our students’ needs. I asked Dr. Stephens to provide me with a guest blog article summarizing the trends in accountability and our participation in the Transparency by Design initiative.

As Congress and the U.S. Education Department are placing increasing public pressure on higher education institutions to publish significantly more information about their performance, accountability initiatives are on the rise. The need for greater accountability in higher education was formally recognized in September 2006, when Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings issued the recommendations of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Included in this report is language on the requirement of higher education institutions to use standardized assessments of student learning. Met by much criticism and derided as a “one size fits all” approach by many college leaders, higher education organizations and institutions have responded by forming voluntary accountability systems. Recognizing the importance of informing students and the public about the educational value offered by their institutions, colleges and universities have committed to releasing data about student learning outcomes and other data that have not been previously published. At the annual meeting of the Higher Learning Commission in Chicago this past April, commission representatives described three major accountability initiatives:

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