Over the past ten years, many American universities have undertaken multimillion-dollar construction projects to expand their physical space. All part of the thinking that physical growth of classroom space would be needed to accommodate a growing student population. But what if the future of higher ed looks quite different? What if learning takes place primarily online in the future?
University leaders may soon find that they have wasted vast sums of money on physical space that has become obsolete–so argues Thomas K. Lindsay, Director of the Center for Higher Education at the Texas Public Policy:
As state legislatures across the country begin to entertain the annual requests by state colleges and universities for new construction funding, their members need to look beyond the immediate electoral cycle and take the longer view on the likely need, or lack thereof, of new construction for higher-education classroom buildings. Specifically, they need to ask whether, in the years that transpire between legislative approval, contract bidding, excavation, and completion of the new classroom structure – roughly three to four years – there will be any students to occupy the envisioned halls.
A sober examination of the growth in enrollment in online college courses suggests that caution is called for before we confidently declare the next new-classroom building project shovel-ready. For the last nine years, the Babson Survey Research Group, in collaboration with the College Board, has tracked online learning through surveys of over 2,500 academic leaders across the country. Its latest survey testifies that online learning has skyrocketed in the last decade.
“The rate of growth in online enrollments is ten times that of the rate in all higher education,” writes the study’s co-author, I. Elaine Allen. According to the survey’s web site, 31 percent of higher education students currently are enrolled in one or more online courses. Over 6 million students enrolled in at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, an increase of 560,000 students over the previous year. More telling still, the 10 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 2 percent growth in the overall higher education student population. Moreover, two-thirds of the higher education institutions surveyed testified that online education today has become critical to their long-term education strategy.
Online education is making its presence felt not only at the college, but also the K-12, level. Education experts Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn predict that, by 2019, 50 percent of all courses for grades 9-12 will be taken online—“the vast majority of them in blended-learning school environments with teachers, which will fundamentally move learning beyond the four walls and traditional arrangement of today’s all-too-familiar classroom.” Another prediction comes from former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. In a September 2012 speech, she declared that, “by 2015, the number of students who are taking classes exclusively in physical brick-and-mortar spaces will shrink by two-thirds.”
Read the full article at Real Clear Policy.
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