Online Degree

Geography plays a role. Published statistics this week showed that one out of every three counties in America is losing population, either to growing urban areas or more generally to the South and Southwest.

For the Sun Belt, the solution of how to support growing numbers of students seeking access to two-year and four-year college degrees had always relied upon the ability of growing state coffers to support increasing college going populations by expanding or opening new campuses. In a state like California, the numbers are daunting. At the same time, however, the deep recession has spurred sharp cutbacks and encouraged new legislation to embrace untested online experiments. Further, the growth of college-going student populations throughout the Sun Belt has overwhelmed institutional capacity.

This unmet demand provides significant opportunity for educational providers. Media attention will likely focus on how quickly courses offered through groups like Coursera will be granted accreditation. For-profit ventures will pick up some of the slack. True to their mandate, public colleges and universities (See HERE) will do what they can to recover from the deep cuts and expand their offerings and services. But these efforts will not be nearly enough.

Crisis breeds opportunity. For independent colleges and universities now wrestling with stagnant local demographics, caps on comprehensive fees, new technology driven competition, and outdated financial models that fail to support institutional vision, the great recession opened a new door. Throughout the Sun Belt, independent colleges can fill an educational delivery gap that is true to mission, expands new demographic markets, and improves the bottom financial line.

It's not that colleges and universities have not already looked to tap into more favorable demographics. Many of the large Eastern research universities have opened branches in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Some smaller institutions with excellent reputations like Emerson College in Boston (see HERE), for example, have focused on programmatic connections with film and media in Los Angeles. Others have responded to requests from Sun Belt cities and towns who desire more educational opportunities to serve their citizens and as a springboard for economic growth.

The key for independent colleges and universities will be to re-imagine how they might deliver educational services. One roadblock will be how to finance and manage the development of a distant, off-site location to serve students not traditionally part of their current admissions classes. Second, and perhaps more significant, will be how to change internal cultural perceptions about resources that might be diverted from the core educational enterprises. The argument will need to be developed carefully and structured as a mission-supported, revenue-producing vehicle to increase opportunities for faculty, students and staff.

There are ways for independent colleges to think about how to meet national education and workforce demands by re-envisioning program and pedagogy beyond the college gates. It begins by forging close alliances with Sun Belt business, cultural and civic leaders. If the re-imagining is to be successful, it must first reflect the host community's sense of self, social and economic trends, demographic analysis and aspirations. The question should be how an established institution, with accredited programs, can meet unmet need.

Once both sides agree on a common vision, agenda, goals and metrics to measure success, financing can come from a variety of sources. For the independent colleges analyzing demographics and considering expansion, it is critical that their leadership think about how they can spread risk through new combinations and partnerships. Is it possible for a consortium of Eastern or Midwest independent institutions to come together to meet educational needs in the Sun Belt by differentiating programs and services into a comprehensive package? Are there ways of working with local and state governments, industry leaders, local private donors, and others to diminish these costs further?

Independent higher education is overwhelmingly concentrated east of the Mississippi River. The growth of the Sun Belt paralleled, however, the rise of public higher education fueled by state support now diminishing. The new reality calls for fresh approaches. With the programs and delivery mechanisms already in place, independent colleges have a unique opportunity to serve new student populations and meet national educational and workforce needs. If the right combinations of institutions, program strategies, and cooperative partnerships across the board can be developed, new program strategies they inspire can emerge throughout the Sun Belt. It will take imagination, coordination, cooperation and time.

In the end, the question will be: Is independent higher education robust and entrepreneurial enough to seize the opportunity while it still can shape its future?

“I have a buddy who got a four-year bachelor’s degree in accounting who’s making $10 an hour,” Omer says. “I’m making two and a half times more than he is.”

Omer, who is 24, is one of many newly minted graduates of community colleges defying history and stereotype by proving that a bachelor’s degree is not, as seems widely believed, the only ticket to a middle-class income.

Significant numbers of community-college grads are getting better jobs, and earning more at the start of their careers than people with bachelor’s degrees, a trend that surprises even the researchers who have noticed it in wage data that has started to become more available in the last year.

“There is that perception that the bachelor’s degree is the default, and, quite frankly, before we started this work showing the value of a technical associate’s degree, I would have said that too,” says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which helped collect the numbers for some of the states that report them.

Omer’s friends with bachelor’s degrees “aren’t learning skills,” he says. “They’re just learning all this theory. I’ve got an applied degree. And I’m out there making a good amount of change.”

Nearly 30 percent of Americans with associate’s degrees now make more than those with bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. In fact, new research into earnings shows that, on average, community-college graduates right out of school, as a group, make more than graduates of four-year universities.

The average wage for recent graduates of community colleges in Tennessee , for instance, is $38,948—more than $1,300 higher than the average wage for recent graduates from the state’s four-year institutions.

In Virginia, recent graduates of community-college occupational (see more here) and technical degree programs make an average of $40,000. That’s almost $2,500 more than recent bachelor’s degree recipients.

And while by mid-career many bachelor’s degree recipients have caught up in earnings to community-college grads, “the other factor that has to be taken into account is that getting a four-year degree can be much more expensive than getting a two-year degree,” Schneider says.

A two-year community-college degree, at present full rates, costs about $6,262, based on research by the College Board. A bachelor’s degree from a four-year, private residential university goes for $158,072.

More coverage
 •As grads seek jobs, universities cut career services
 •New pressure on colleges to disclose grads’ earnings
 •Pressed to bridge the skills gap, colleges and corporations try to get along
 •Impatient employers step in to educate prospective workers

What’s driving up the wages of community-college grads is that, in spite of persistent high unemployment, there is high demand for people with so-called “middle-skills” that often require no more than an associate’s degree, such as lab technicians, teachers in early-childhood programs, computer engineers, draftsmen, radiation therapists, paralegals, and machinists.

“A good technical-oriented associate’s degree program at a good community college is actually turning out graduates whose skills meet the needs of the regional labor market,” says Schneider, a former U.S. commissioner of education statistics.

With a two-year community-college degree, air-traffic controllers can make $113,547, radiation therapists $76,627, dental hygienists $70,408, nuclear medicine technologists $69,638, nuclear technicians $68,037, registered nurses $65,853, and fashion designers $63,170, the online website CareerBuilder.com reported in January.

“You come out with skills that people want immediately and not just theory,” Omer says.

The Georgetown center estimates that 29 million jobs paying middle-class wages today require an associate’s, but not a bachelor’s, degree.

“I would not suggest anyone look down their nose at the associate’s degree,” says Jeff Strohl, director of research at the Georgetown center.

“Sub-baccalaureate education suffers the stigma of the vocational-technical high school,” Strohl says. “That’s where other people’s kids went. People see those programs as tracking into something that’s dead end.”

In fact, he says, “It’s very clear that that perception does not hold up.”

The bad news is that not enough associate’s degree holders are being produced, even as many graduates with bachelor’s degrees appear to be ending up underemployed.

The United States ranks second among industrialized nations, after Norway, in the number of workers over 25 with a bachelor’s degree or better, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But it’s a distant 16th in the proportion of people with associate’s degrees and certificates.

Only 10 percent of American workers have the sub-baccalaureate degrees increasingly needed for middle-skills jobs, compared with 24 percent of Canadians and 19 percent of Japanese, the OECD reports.

Over the last 20 years, the number of graduates with associate’s degrees in the United States has increased barely three percent.  And while the Obama administration has pushed community colleges to increase their numbers of graduates (see here), enrollment at these schools fell 3.1 percent this year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports. Graduation rates also remain abysmally low.

Meanwhile, many people with bachelor’s degrees are working in fields other than the ones in which they majored, according to a new report by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

“We have a lot of bartenders and taxi drivers with bachelor’s degrees,” says Christopher Denhart, one of the report’s coauthors.

Still, the salary advantage for associate’s degree holders narrows over time, as bachelor’s degree recipients catch up, says Schneider.

“It’s still true, on average, that the bachelor’s degree pays off more than the associate’s degree,” he says.

Although these figures vary widely by profession, associate’s degree recipients, on average, end up making about $500,000 more over their careers than people with only high-school diplomas (see this post), but $500,000 less than people with bachelor’s degrees, the Georgetown center calculates.

As for Omer, he’s already working toward a bachelor’s degree.

“Down the road a little further, I may want to become a director or a manager, and there’s still that stereotype” about associate’s degrees, he says.

“A bachelor’s degree will get me to that point.”

Step 3: Do nothing to stem the behavior of bad actors and those who encourage them. Allow colleges and universities to raise prices and engage in rankings wars based on flawed metrics that distort the market.  Fail to require states to maintain their effort to ensuring affordability.  Allow, even encourage, private business to step into the gaps.