Thursday’s announcement in Inside Higher Ed that the University of North Carolina System will spend $97 million to create an internal unit to build and manage online programs from the system’s 17 campuses for the million adult residents of North Carolina who started but did not complete college was met with mixed reactions.
Funding for the initiative is coming from pandemic recovery funds allocated to launch a nonprofit ed tech start-up. Code named Project Kitty Hawk, plans for the initiative include launching 120 new online degree programs enrolling 24,000 net new students across the system’s campuses by the 2026-27 academic year.
Part of the motivation for this launch is that half of North Carolina’s workers are eligible for employer education benefits. UNC wants to keep those learners in the state. On slide 37 of a slide deck presented to the system’s trustees, it’s noted that nearly half of the state’s online learners are enrolled with out-of-state institutions. Liberty University and Strayer University occupy the top spots in enrollment followed closely by East Carolina University and Fayetteville Technical Community College. All four of these institutions have more than 6,000 students each.
The system argues that many of their universities have partnered with Online Program Managers (OPMs) but that the terms are expensive (some OPM contracts distribute 60 percent of the tuition revenue to the OPM company). To meet the needs of a changing labor market, they need models and services that operate at scale. Universities in the system can choose to partner with the system and the costs will be much less than the cost to offer an online degree through an OPM. Degrees will be awarded by the university offering a degree through the platform.
Inside Higher Ed’s reporter, Suzanne Smalley, conducted interviews with campus leaders in the system as well as outside experts. The reaction to the announcement was mixed. Outside experts questioned how $97 million was adequate to develop 120 programs and recruit and enroll 24,000 students. Others noted that the track record for building a centralized state-operated online model has not been good.
The Texas System’s Innovation Arm was a $75 million experiment that was shuttered. Calbright College was funded with $175 million in commitments from the state of California and thus far has enrolled 900 students.
Officials at system campuses questioned how the initiative would help them grow online students. Some institutions like East Carolina have already enrolled a respectable number of online students while others like Fayetteville State University are experiencing declines in enrollment and see this as an opportunity to increase enrollments.
From my experiences in leading and building an online university from approximately 6,000 students to more than 100,000 students at its peak enrollment, this will be tough to do without consensus. Among the advantages that I had at the American Public University System (APUS) were:
- APUS operated as a single entity. Building consensus about programs was easier with one leadership team and not 17.
- It took APUS and its predecessor, American Military University, approximately a decade to build 60 degree programs and enroll approximately 6,000 students. Granted, we did not have the resources of the UNC system. However, the limited resources that we had required us to focus on meeting the needs of a specific group of students (active duty servicemembers and veterans). The UNC System is going for a much broader group, all adult learners in the state who have completed some college.
- Growing from 60 degrees and 6,000 students to 120+ degrees and 100,000 students was easier after we identified key factors in meeting the academic and career needs of our students as well as the technology required to deliver courses as well as provide student services. Again, we only had to reach consensus internally, not with 16 other teams.
- The market was less crowded, and the marketing student acquisition costs were less as well. Many schools inside and outside North Carolina offer quality online programs to North Carolina residents and tuition pricing may not be the differentiator that UNC thinks it will be.
Other issues not addressed in the article include the frequency and availability of courses. If a degree program is truly unique to a single institution, it’s likely that the frequency of the course offerings will influence overall enrollment. Adult learners want to be able to take an online course when it meets their schedule, not when it meets the university’s. If courses are going to be offered with the traditional three starts a year, the platform will never achieve the desired enrollments of adult learners.
Another issue will be the transferability of credits. I am not aware that the UNC System has reached a consensus on standardizing general education credits like the 42-semester credit hour core curriculum promulgated by the state of Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. If they haven’t, more students will walk away due to transfer credit issues.
Public institutions educate most of our nation’s college students. One of the reasons is that they are generally more affordable than non-public institutions because of subsidies provided by the state for its residents. Over the years, state institutions have developed their own brands and enrollment sources inside and outside the state. Consolidating and operating an online platform for 16 institutions won’t be impossible, but it will difficult. There are more examples of failures than successes. The UNC System will need a lot of collaboration as well as some luck to meet these audacious goals.
