Okay, let me make my surprise face.
Recent discussions of online education keying off from a very thorough discussion of OPMs and their role in maintaining the high cost of higher education by Kevin Carey in a long article entitled The Creeping Capitalist Takeover of Higher Education have taken an interesting turn. As Joshua Kim writes in Inside Higher Ed, Carey gets most of the argument right on this topic. Carey uses John Katzman of Princeton Review, 2U, and most recently Noodle Partners as a central character in his story of the evolution of online learning in higher education, specifically the role of OPMs, and he reports Katzman’s surprise and disappointment at the turn of events stemming from entities he put in motion.
But the surprise is not that capitalist forces are having their way with the market for higher education; the surprise is that anyone ever thought it could be otherwise and that some believe it is a unique effect of online learning. As institutions of higher education have become more dependent on financial resources for a wide variety of reasons, they have become more intent on exploring all sources of support and acting to enhance their prospects in many quarters. Online program development is only one such avenue, though it might be the most recent addition. The unflattering portrait that Carey paints is not limited to efforts to exploit online learning programs, and that is a far more troubling problem.
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