The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation ...]]>

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices.

The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk about the future of the credit hour; the second featured DiSalvio's interview with Fastweb.com and FinAid.org Publisher Mark Kantrowitz about student debt; the third, DiSalvio’s interview with Lumina Foundation President and CEO Jamie P. Merisotis about Lumina’s commitment to enrolling and graduating more students from college.

In this installment of the series, DiSalvio speaks with American Council on Education (ACE) President Molly Corbett Broad about the efforts ACE is making to raise educational attainment in the U.S. and around the world.

The context

The nation’s most visible and influential association representing the presidents of U.S. accredited, degree-granting private and public universities, the ACE remains consistently at the center of federal policy debates in areas critical to higher education.

With a focus on improving access and preparing every student to succeed, ACE convenes representatives from all sectors to collectively tackle the toughest higher education challenges and to address and resolve those issues that most affect access and student success. Among those issues are disparities in access, college completion, student preparation, financial aid, student debt loads, and higher education costs, as well as persistent gaps in access to and completion of higher education by minority groups.

Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible and attainable. Providing useful insights on the transformational potential MOOCs hold for higher education and how higher education will evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years, Broad points to the efforts that ACE is making in developing the next generation of higher education leadership. 

The interview

DiSalvio: Although significant progress has been made over the past decade to put higher education within reach of all students, gaps remain in access to and graduation from college. President Obama has made college completion a cornerstone of both his higher education and economic platforms, with the goal of graduating the highest proportion of college students in the world by 2020. What role is ACE playing in responding to these gaps?

Broad: ACE has taken a leading role in advocating for and developing a variety of initiatives aimed at boosting college access and completion, including the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, which issued its report in January. Raising the nation’s education attainment rate is deeply embedded in the DNA of ACE. It has played a central role in the mission of ACE from our very founding. We were created by the nation’s leaders in 1918 as soldiers were returning from World War I to a jobless economy. We were then called the Emergency Council on Education because raising the education attainment of those veterans was an economic imperative. Again in 1942, ACE was called upon to create the alternative high school credential, the GED, to raise education attainment opportunities for those returning soldiers from World War II who had dropped out of high school to join the armed services. So by passing the GED, those veterans became eligible for the GI Bill and they went on to college and became what we refer to as the “Greatest Generation.” Since 1945, ACE has evaluated military training and experiences to determine their eligibility for credit recommendations. Later, ACE’s credit recommendation programs were extended to the workplace and to major departments of government. So it seemed quite logical for us to help create the attainment commission following President Obama’s call to restore the nation’s higher education preeminence. We’re already helping 34 states to participate in the American College Application Campaign and have created a Center for Education Attainment and Innovation within ACE. One of the greatest strengths of American higher education is the rich diversity of institutional size and mission. Consequently, our community is taking many diverse approaches to raising education attainment and to boosting the number of Americans able to gain a college degree.

DiSalvio: ACE was among a group of higher education associations that convened a national Commission on Higher Education Attainment. In its Open Letter to College and University Leaders, a blueprint was developed for a campus-level college completion campaign that is designed to prevent students from falling by the wayside as they pursue a college degree. What areas of reform and possible strategies to advance the goal of increased attainment are addressed in this document?

Broad: The attainment commission’s open letter is intended as a call to the academy from the academy, to make retention and completion a critical campus priority and to stem the unacceptable loss of human potential represented by the numbers of students who never make it to graduation. The commission raised the issue of new reforms and those already underway and urged campus leaders to consider three main areas for reform: 1) changing the campus culture to focus more on retention; 2) improving cost effectiveness and quality; and 3) making better use of data.

There is a plethora of ways institutions can go about meeting attainment goals. The open letter outlined strategies that are simply examples to guide the attainment conversation on individual campuses. It begins with assigning ownership. Presidents and chancellors must clearly assign responsibility for enhancing student retention and graduation. We urge our colleagues to give retention and completion the same level of priority that campuses afford to the recruitment and selection process in admissions. We further urge our colleagues to create a student-centered culture to improve the academic experiences and ensure faculty see student completion as a central part of their responsibility. In this way, students who need help could get ready access to appropriate campus resources, including support services for the growing numbers of nontraditional students. We also encourage institutional leaders to give credits for prior learning.

DiSalvio: Ongoing challenges remain in making higher education more accessible especially among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. ACE maintains that removing barriers to college education requires elevating student preparation, continued investment in financial aid, and greater flexibility in course delivery. In what ways is ACE committed to removing these barriers in advancing the pursuit of equal access?

Broad: Let me start with student preparation. ACE convened faculty groups from the learned societies to make recommendations on the various drafts of the Common Core standards, which will ensure high school graduates are college-ready. This, I believe, is truly an important effort and college teacher-preparation programs are now hard at work to incorporate these standards. We are seeing temptation to back away from the standards, but I believe that would be a great mistake. There is no better single strategy to improve college retention and completion than to have entering students who are well prepared to do college-level work. That is one place where ACE has invested a tremendous amount of time and effort.

I mentioned earlier that ACE was also the creator of the GED and it has been a part of our organization since 1942. In 2011, ACE and test developer Pearson VUE created a joint venture that will drive the future direction, design and delivery of the GED testing program. Beginning in January 2014, the GED test will be aligned with Common Core standards for high school graduation and offer additional learning resources and preparation materials in order to increase the number of adults who pass the GED test and go on to postsecondary education.

Another area where we are working on student preparation is our ACE College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT) and military and veterans programs that assist adult learners and student veterans in speeding their path to a degree.

ACE also plays a central role in advocating for a strong system of federal financial aid that helps extend access to higher education to all students. Our institutions, despite significant financial pressures, are working hard to hold down college costs and to provide generous financial aid to those in need. In partnership with a number of higher education associations, ACE works with the tax-writing committees of Congress in support of higher education tax provisions, including tax credits that support tuition, as well as several kinds of education saving programs and the tax deduction for charitable giving.

I also want to mention our work on the Fisher case heard recently by the Supreme Court. ACE filed an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas at Austin. ACE has long advocated for the ability of our institutions to consider race and ethnicity as one factor when constructing a diverse student body, one where individual talents and personal interests, background, academic skills, and geographic origin all can play a role.

DiSalvio: In what could be a major step toward bridging the gap between massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the college credit system, the ACE has reviewed and made credit recommendations for five Coursera MOOCs. If some colleges decide to grant credit for those courses, the council's recommendations could go a long way toward helping students who complete MOOCs gain valuable college credits. How could this raise education attainment in the U.S. and around the world?

Broad: I believe MOOCs hold the promise of extending to students, including minority students and adult students around the world, greater access to high-quality education on their own timetable. We are seeing a growing number of post-traditional students enrolled in American higher education who are not full-time, first-time students coming to college right after high school.

The Coursera and Udacity MOOCs that we have recommended for credit are part of ACE’s overall MOOC evaluation and research initiative. This is a small but important part of ACE’s broader push to expand prior learning assessment. Of course, the decision to utilize MOOCs or accept those credits in transfer is one made by each institution on a case-by-case basis.

We have created a Presidential Innovation Lab that will offer opportunities for leaders in higher education, both those who are producers of MOOCs and those who are skeptics, to engage in some proactive thinking about this new learning space. We believe this effort will help us guide a national dialog about potential new models that can help close persistent attainment gaps not only among the young, but also among older students and low-income students. The outcome of the Presidential Innovation Lab will be shared widely with the ACE membership, the press and policymakers.

I also believe prior learning assessment is an area where we are seeing new ideas for raising education attainment. Many of our member institutions are asking questions about courses outside traditional degree programs—whether they can help raise completion, whether they can meet the college curricula and whether they can increase learning productivity. ACE is well positioned to help uncover those answers.

DiSalvio: The higher education landscape is transforming at a rapid pace. How will higher education evolve in the U.S. over the next 20 years? How will it affect higher education leadership and what can higher education leaders do to prepare for future challenges and opportunities?

Broad: Higher education has been an industry that for decades hasn’t seen much change in its delivery and its teaching methods. However, in recent years we have seen significant innovations. I believe there will continue to be more emphasis on the role of information technology and the cognitive sciences, as well as online learning.

Another trend in higher education is the graying of the presidency. Fifty-eight percent of college and university presidents in 2011 were 61 years of age or older. Over the coming years, we are going to see a significant turnover of college and university presidents. ACE is committed to developing the next generation of leaders who will take on those presidential positions and help sustain the preeminence of American higher education. Among the programs we offer are those for new presidents and new chief academic officers, the ACE Fellows Program, and an array of other leadership development activities.

We also should anticipate that higher education institutions will develop more flexible options for students looking to ease their path to degree completion and to gain credentials they can show employers. At the same time, new types of credentials appear to be emerging. Some call these "stackable credentials." Digital badges for the completion of certain learning activities, credits for prior learning outside the classroom and portfolio reviews are good examples. Some of this involves helping students earn degrees and some may be helping students gain other kinds of new credentials beyond degrees that will help them in both employment and their career. These are just some of the pressures for change that we will see in the years ahead.

Dear Colleague:

We invite nominations and applications for the board of the National Council on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements. As described in the final report of the Commission on the ...]]>

NEBHE President & CEO Michael K. Thomas posted the following invitation for nominations to the board of the National Council on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements (NCSARA) ...

Dear Colleague:

We invite nominations and applications for the board of the National Council on State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements. As described in the final report of the Commission on the Regulation of Postsecondary Distance Education and its harmonization with similar prior work of both the Presidents' Forum/Council of State Governments (CSG) and the four regional higher education compacts (the Midwestern Higher Education Compact, the New England Board of Higher Education, the Southern Regional Education Board, and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education) we seek to create an interstate reciprocity system that will significantly streamline regulations and allow universities and colleges to more easily offer online courses across the country.

The national commission’s interstate reciprocity system calls for a single set of baseline standards and procedures to regulate distance education programs. The reciprocity system will ensure institutions can easily operate distance education programs in multiple states as long as they meet the regulatory requirements of their home state. The home state regulation will include standards dealing with institutional quality, consumer protection, and institutional financial responsibility.

We are communicating with you because you have been engaged in one fashion or another with the evolution of this national reciprocity effort and may wish to nominate someone for the board—or may choose to apply yourself. We will be seeking membership from individuals who will bring breadth in representation, applicable experience and a willing commitment to serve to the board.

Purpose of the National Council

As described in the national commission report, the role of the national council's board will be to "advocate for the expansion of the agreement and adhere to three core principles of operation: maintenance of a limited role within the overall governance of the agreement, responsibility for communicating information to the field, and representativeness of all stakeholders." In addition to these three core principles, the national commission report identifies five key roles and responsibilities for the national council to undertake to maintain the agreement:

• Focus on ensuring the inter-regional alignment of the reciprocity agreement;
• Hold meetings at least twice per year;
• Produce an annual report on the state of the interstate reciprocity agreement;
• Establish a mechanism to resolve disputes between regional compacts about interpretation and enforcement of the agreement when they arise; and
• Be accessible to the higher education community at large to address concerns and questions as they arise (including appeals from states that are expelled from the agreement by their regional compact).

In addition to meeting at least twice annually, the national council will meet periodically as needed, using teleconference or other technology. During the first months of the national council's operation, it is anticipated that meetings will be more frequent (perhaps monthly) to develop foundational materials and establish processes. The council is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2013.

Membership Guidelines for the National Council

• The board of the national council will be large enough to ensure that the perspectives of all stakeholder groups will be represented on the board, but small enough to be an effective working coordinating board. We anticipate that 15 to 17 council members will be selected.
• The board will include the CEOs of the four regional higher education compacts, which will be charged with developing the four Regional State Authorization Reciprocity Agreements that will ensure nationwide coverage of state reciprocity.
• The remainder of the board, up to 13 possible additional members, will be selected to represent a diverse set of perspectives and interests.
• Membership will not be driven by numerical representation or delegated interests; rather, members will be selected based on their knowledge of the field, ability to work across multiple perspectives, and commitment to the collaborative work and success of the national council. The selection committee will draw from all institutional sectors (including large- and small-scale; public, private, and for-profit distance education providers), regional and national accreditation agencies, state regulators, state attorneys general, and state higher education executive officers.
• Board members will serve staggered terms, with limits established for the length of time that each board member may serve.

Selection Committee

The selection committee will include the four regional compact CEOs in collaboration with leadership of the Commission on the Regulation of Postsecondary Distance Education and the Presidents’ Forum/CSG collaborative.

Information on Submitting Nominations

Nominations and applications will be accepted until July 15, 2013. Appointments will be made as soon thereafter as possible, with the goal of initiating the work of the board by Sept. 1, 2013.

Nominations and applications should be directed to ncsara@wiche.edu, and should include a brief bio of the individual being nominated or applying, a brief description of why this person would be an exceptional member of the board, and with what stakeholder group or groups this person is affiliated.

We encourage you to submit applications and nominations and appreciate your consideration. If you have questions or would like more information, please contact my office at presidentsoffice@nebhe.org or call 617-357-9620, x128.

Sincerely,

Michael K. Thomas
President & CEO
New England Board of Higher Education

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University ...]]>

Former University of Connecticut President Michael Hogan resigned as president of the University of Illinois less than two years after he was hired to repair damage done by an admissions scandal. He will be succeeded by longtime university administrator Robert Easter, who reportedly agreed to do the job for two years.

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University of Vermont trustees selected E. Thomas Sullivan, currently senior vice president for academic affairs and former provost of the University of Minnesota, to be the next UVM president, effective July 15.

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The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) named Bruce Chaloux as its new executive director and CEO, succeeding John Bourne, who is retiring from the online learning association in March. The consortium also named Chief Knowledge Officer Janet Moore editor-in-chief of its Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. Chaloux joins Sloan-C from the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) where he served as director of student access programs and services and founded the Electronic Campus, a 16-state consortia of  300 colleges and universities in the South, that make available more than 40,000 online courses and 2,000 degree programs.

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The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education confirmed the appointment of John L. Cox as the next president of Cape Cod Community College, succeeding Kathleen Schatzberg upon her retirement at the end of June. Cox currently serves as vice president for finance, operations, and government relations at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Md.

The three-part program will begin with orientation in the Middle East during the last week in May, entrepreneurship education at Babson during July and ...]]>

More than 40 Israeli and Palestinian students will learn about entrepreneurship and establish businesses this summer at Babson College and, ideally, bring a spirit of peace and understanding back to their countries.

The three-part program will begin with orientation in the Middle East during the last week in May, entrepreneurship education at Babson during July and August, and business launch and management throughout the rest of 2011 back in the Middle East.

Students will also meet with U.S entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and include community service projects in their business plans. All company profits will be donated to the students’ community service program

Students will get seed capital from Babson and participate in distance-learning initiatives to keep global faculty and support teams updated. At the end of 16 weeks, they will complete a Report to the Community in the Middle East, and present it to faculty members, community service organizations, local diplomats and politicians, family members, and fellow classmates.

Last month, I suggested we separate hype from reality—not so much to criticize distance learning, but to seek an even higher ideal. Much of what is thrust under the umbrella of distance learning isn’t conducted at much distance, isn’t well supported and limits opportunities for institution-wide collaboration and innovation. ...]]>

Last month, I suggested we separate hype from reality—not so much to criticize distance learning, but to seek an even higher ideal. Much of what is thrust under the umbrella of distance learning isn’t conducted at much distance, isn’t well supported and limits opportunities for institution-wide collaboration and innovation. Distance learning should be an exciting appeal, rather than just a pragmatic expediency—a positive good in itself, not a necessary evil. Settling for a low standard for online courses only validates the views of the skeptics, and justifies the doom-and-gloom malaise of those with pastoral memories of a higher learning that perhaps never was.

I offer a more aspirational definition of distance learning than simply deflecting class time to online activities: Reaching out beyond a region (nationally and even internationally) and providing a substantial investment in faculty and student support, an academic institution provides a full educational experience and learning community entirely online—worthy of the reputation and integrity of that institution.

Institutional resistance to online learning has been melting away during these recessionary times, as schools seek ways to address enrollment pressures without increasing faculty or classrooms. But the test for online learning should be based as much on learning efficacy as financial efficiency. Seeking comparability in learning outcomes should be the baseline standard. Even that understates the potential advantages that an online environment might create for faculty and students.

Faculty familiarity with technology should not be an advantage for some, but a generic function provided pervasively for the benefit of all. From our firsthand experience, we see examples of what a substantive and systematic distance education commitment can create. For example, instead of a faculty member just developing something that is used in one course, one professor, with significant support, developed a much more robust study of Boston’s Big Dig—with the idea that its use would transcend that one professor and that one course. The professor knew in advance that this component would have more utility and substance than just for his own immediate purposes. This investment in course development allows many different features of the Big Dig to be explored, and then potentially used as part of a “library” of tools by other faculty.

One program’s innovation can be applied to another: A Socratic technique for a law program worked beautifully for management case studies. Through a common platform and array of support services, courses can have a common look and feel, without the creative burden falling on the individual instructor.

With a collective commitment to distance learning and instructional technology, advances can be shared across an institution. Using “green screens” for faculty lectures, faculty can speak and illustrate at the same time. Well-constructed course materials that faculty devoted dozens of hours to developing can be archived in a media library for others to tap in future courses.

I have yet to meet a professor who hasn’t felt that teaching online makes for better in-class teaching. Opportunities abound to re-engineer the traditional classroom experience, to use technical tools to take some work out of the class setting, and to better appreciate that learning doesn’t best occur through one-way lecturing but through active student involvement—all powerful distance learning lessons that redound to the conventional classroom.

Student services can be pooled as well. A hotline for remote students can cover students’ various time zones and their weekend queries. Staff can provide webinars and discreetly monitor courses to check in with students at key points in the semester and provide quick responses to problems. Crisis intervention takes many forms; in one case, a staffer alertly caught a student posting bigoted offensive comments on a course discussion board. A central office can send discs and files to parts of the world with low bandwidth—for example, to soldiers deployed in the mountains of Afghanistan. When one Port-au-Prince student’s routine trips to Miami to take his exams were disrupted by the various Haitian crises, staff arranged for off-cycle proctored exams. Doctoral qualifying examinations have been administered in real time with students and faculty scattered in various locales. Deaf students experience distance learning through closed captioning. The opportunities to accommodate students’ needs are boundless and the examples inspirational.

Serendipitous community-building is perhaps the most exciting byproduct of a robust online environment. Rather than the typical ships passing in the night, part-time students get to know one another as they progress through a common curriculum, regardless of their busy lives and competing demands. And the potential for student diversity is far greater as distance learning expands the school’s sphere of influence beyond the limits of local homogeneity. We have built virtual space for students to network outside their course work. In one case, a course on the biology of food led some students to coauthor a class cookbook; in another, IT students designed their own career advising network; and another group created virtual “pizza and beer” gatherings across the U.S. to stay connected via Skype. Our students then tap formal university events and milestones as opportunities to congregate and finally meet one another in person.

Though concealed within the data, these are truly exciting times for recreating and redefining the learning process—through the roles faculty play, the opportunities to test new tools and techniques, the access and interaction of students across diverse locales and lifestyles, and the reach of institutions beyond their narrow borders. The future of distance learning is more about creating community than exploiting technology, more about enhancing education than enrollments—and even more about academic courage, leadership and innovation. The opportunities are endless, constrained only by our own imagination.

Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.

G. K. Chesterton famously once said: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” This, I believe, applies to distance learning as well. There is far too much self-congratulatory hyperbole about the growth and pervasiveness of online learning – which exaggerates reality and overlooks the true revolution ...]]>

G. K. Chesterton famously once said: “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” This, I believe, applies to distance learning as well. There is far too much self-congratulatory hyperbole about the growth and pervasiveness of online learning – which exaggerates reality and overlooks the true revolution occurring less visibly.

Much of what is shoved under the rubric of distance learning is not conducted at a distance, doesn’t attract new learners to these institutions, and isn’t terribly well supported by the schools boasting large online enrollments.

The most dramatic, frequently quoted, and perhaps embellished statistics come from the Sloan survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities, who claim that more than one in four students took at least one course online. Almost five million students at any one time were learning online. This definition of online assumes at least 80% of the content occurs outside class time, thus measuring a shift from the classroom to the computer, but not necessarily a complete leap from a local to a virtual campus.

Should you opt to confront one of the wizards of Oz claiming large numbers of online enrollees, or giddy about the ubiquity of distance learning, here are a few questions guaranteed to unnerve them:

How many students do you actually have enrolled exclusively online? I have asked this question of leaders of some of the major institutions in the distance learning business. The typical answer is they do not know, nor even think to track this information, since online courses are simply a convenience and option offered to their existing student population.

How many students taking online courses actually live at a distance where they couldn’t ever commute to your campus? “Distance” learning is largely a misnomer: Few institutions attract students beyond their catchment area through online offerings, nor do they even try.

How many academic degree programs do you have fully committed to distance students in which the complete menu of required courses is guaranteed to be available online? Many institutions offer random web-based courses, scheduled sporadically, subject to faculty whims.

How do you provide faculty with assistance to develop their online courses? (By now, you are making the boaster squirm a bit, as you shift the questioning to support for distance learning.)

What is your staff size relative to the number of online courses offered? Do you employ instructional designers and media and graphics specialists to shadow the faculty, or do you just provide an online tutorial for faculty to work self-sufficiently with the learning management system? Distance learning has become a laissez faire crapshoot—a technological tool to be used whenever and however one chooses.

How does your institution establish and maintain academic standards, expectations and quality in the online arena? How do you know that students receive a comparable educational experience? Do you routinely monitor online courses to address problems that arise? Do you have a help desk specifically designed to support students at a distance? Have your institution’s resource operations—especially the library, bookstore and registrar—adjusted their hours, accessibility and services to accommodate remote students?

By now, you have almost guaranteed that you will not be invited back to future gatherings.  But, if you want to go in for the kill, begin to penetrate their understanding of the online student community, or lack thereof.

How well do online students get to know one another in their courses and programs? How do you promote affiliation, community, and peer learning? How do you connect these students to the mothership?  What are the demographic characteristics of your online students that differentiate them from those on campus? What applied research have you conducted to measure student satisfaction, comparable learning outcomes and impact on the academic culture? How have you taken the lessons learned online as opportunities to improve classroom instruction?

The idealistic goal should be to create an exciting and engaging learning environment where the remote student can have a holistic experience by learning from faculty, fellow students drawn from diverse backgrounds (geographically and otherwise), and course materials. Their institutions would be obsessed with attaining comparability with the conventional classroom and campus, if not a superior learning experience. And they would be investing significantly and collectively in making that happen.

Like Chesterton said of Christianity, most haven’t yet really attained the true potential of distance learning. American institutions have made great progress in creating technological tools that allow faculty, generally acting independently, to mitigate face time in favor of work online. Asynchronicity—not being the same place at the same time—is not a sufficient standard in itself to fulfill the promise of distance learning.

I offer a more idealistic and aspirational definition: Reaching out beyond a region (nationally and even internationally), and providing a substantial investment in faculty and student support, an academic institution provides a full educational experience and learning community entirely online—worthy of the reputation and integrity of that institution. How many would still boast that we have achieved that standard?

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Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University. In a future one of these monthly columns, he will suggest what it might take to achieve the ideal of distance learning, and welcomes your comments and insights.

The nation seems to have suddenly awoken to the reality that for-profit academic institutions are a force to be reckoned with. For so long, they have been ignored as inconsequential, second-rate competition, and vilified for their greed and lack of quality. Two events seemed to have changed their image into something far more formidable: the ...]]>

The nation seems to have suddenly awoken to the reality that for-profit academic institutions are a force to be reckoned with. For so long, they have been ignored as inconsequential, second-rate competition, and vilified for their greed and lack of quality. Two events seemed to have changed their image into something far more formidable: the realization that government-sponsored financial aid goes disproportionately (and with a dangerously high default rates) to the for-profit sector, and the excellent exposé on Frontline (College, Inc.) that slammed the aggressive recruiting practices of these schools.

There is much hypocrisy as newspapers, themselves for-profits, and the politicians who previously promoted the development of more storefront enterprises in their own districts, now question the fundamental ability of for-profit universities to deliver higher education—and “not-for-profit” universities now feel the threat of this competition. This is not to say that for-profits haven’t been guilty of excessive behavior, but they operate in a much larger academic ecosystem, which needs to be acknowledged. I offer these five uncomfortable observations.

First is that the for-profits fill the void relinquished by the rest of us. A case in point is the University of Phoenix, which began in the 1970s as a small for-profit program aligned with the Jesuit University of San Francisco, then moved to Phoenix to escape the scrutiny of the California accreditors, and slowly morphed from a bricks-and-mortar enterprise to mostly online in just the last decade. At no point did the University of Phoenix invent anything especially new, discover something that wasn’t otherwise obvious, or unearth a market that wasn’t being systematically neglected by the mainstream educational establishment. I recall asking a senior administrator at an urban flagship state university on the East Coast why Phoenix was able to develop such a successful presence there. She replied that the business school faculty at her university were not interested in teaching part-time adult students and simply surrendered that market to the for-profit.

Second is that the for-profits make the equivalent of hamburgers, and sell them in large quantity to a mass market—nothing exotic, nothing even especially novel or risky. Credit for every academic invention should go to highly acclaimed universities. The for-profits simply took those innovations and turned them into commodities, and high-priced ones at that. While originality, creativity, and academic imagination reside in the nation’s most prominent universities, the will and the way to cast a wide net for students exists in the for-profit world, which produced major marketing machines. The numbers are staggering: The four largest companies/universities have a combined headcount of more than one million students and annual revenues of $11.7 billion. Their stocks, though, are plummeting under the pressures to reform.

Third is the painful reality that the for-profits are not so different from the rest of us. All major colleges and universities engage in glitzy self-promotion, student recruiting, and assistance with procuring federal financial aid. We try, however, not to cross the line into misrepresentation and manipulation. What was portrayed on College, Inc. occurs in the not-for-profits as well, just, one hopes, less aggressively and deviously.

Fourth is the simplistic backlash that anything for-profit is inherently evil and any association between a nonprofit and a for-profit is inevitably corrupting. The more nuanced question is how to divide the labor and determine a legitimate space for the profit motive. For example, few colleges, other than Cornell University, make their own ice cream—this is something easily outsourced. But we do make our own education, which shouldn’t be subcontracted to an outside vendor. There are fundamental skills and defining features of our institutions that simply cannot be compromised or confused by outsourcing. While a partnership of for-profits and nonprofits, in so many domains, is inevitable, where the line is drawn between the two is not.

For-profits are now enormous and here to stay, though perhaps humbled and constrained by the barrage their reckless behavior inspired. We now need a détente rather than a blanket and universal rejection or a see-no-evil approach between mainstream academe and this emerging giant. But the traditional universities and accrediting bodies need to reassert their say over what is educationally credible.

Fifth is the dangerous convergence, in the public’s perception, of distance learning and for-profit corporations. Distance learning is not the exclusive domain of the for-profits, most of which developed first in the conventional classroom offered at convenient sites. And prominent universities should not shy away from online learning for fear of guilt by association. Quality online learning is often lost in the schlock being peddled to the naïve consumer. There are important opportunities, if not a responsibility, to embrace the role that technology can play in providing powerful educational options for adult learners. These shouldn’t be stigmatized because of the mass marketing of online programs by for-profits or the mistaken notion that distance learning and the profit motive are somehow synonymous. I am concerned that important, laudable online initiatives might become collateral damage of the front-page exposés on for-profit mischief.

And now a sixth observation, perhaps more of a prediction: We ain’t seen nothing yet. While legislators wring their hands on how to get the genie back in the bottle, the for-profits are moving quietly and imperialistically throughout the world where the fine distinctions between for-profit and nonprofit are less clear. At some point, U.S. institutions will wake up to an even more glaring case of neglect—and find the for-profits have gobbled up the global marketplace with their version of U.S. higher education.

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Jay A. Halfond is dean of Metropolitan College and Extended Education at Boston University.