A festival of bad ideas

Public higher education in America has become a festival of bad ideas. The UNC system is a pliant conduit for many of them.

A partial list of bad ideas in North Carolina is long:

• a conservative school at Carolina; its objectives for civil discourse are admirable but its legislative imposition and implementation aren’t;
• a requirement that UNC students take a civics class more appropriate for middle school students than for university ones;
• an independent, lavishly funded “tech transfer” enterprise, NCInnovation, ostensibly to commercialize the research of institutions not known as research institutions; the three Triangle universities, where over 90% of North Carolina’s university research funding exists, are excluded;
• using sports gambling revenues to fund the athletic departments of smaller, regional campuses choosing to participate in big-time college sports; Carolina and NC State are excluded from this uniquely bizarre arrangement, despite their massive regional and national economic impacts.

The latest bad idea is Project Kitty Hawk, a curious name for a $97 million centralized, online education initiative begun with one-time, Federal recovery funds. A first-rate report in The Assembly describes a burgeoning, independent non-profit bureaucracy housed somewhere in Chapel Hill short of its own goals.  

Participation in Kitty Hawk is voluntary, so far.  Few UNC campuses, including Carolina and NC State, show inclination to join.

Why Kitty Hawk?

An impetus behind Kitty Hawk apparently is a need to enroll more students. Several UNC campuses have been perennially under-enrolled, despite virtually free tuition and sliding admission standards, and the system’s overall enrollment has flattened out. Perhaps there’s also the lure of easy money from the Feds or a desire to poach students from out-of-state online programs, though the latter would require compromises in quality and standards.  

Kitty Hawk proposes recruiting “non-traditional” students, including those who left college without a degree. It would provide access—access that is assumed to be unavailable—to these individuals. Three observations are relevant:

First, a centralized online program would not solve the enrollment deficits at recurrently under-enrolled UNC campuses. Any campus shortages obviously would not be affected unless those institutions themselves had enrollment increases.

Second, there are myriad reasons why students leave or don’t attend a college.  Is this because they don’t have access to online programs? Probably not. It may be fruitful to examine the causes of enrollment movements and drifts and to consider options to address them, including merging or eliminating duplicative academic programs, as North Carolina did in the 1930s and again in the 1970s.

Third, online access is already plentiful. A large number of accredited for-profit and non-profit institutions, including several UNC campuses, have enrolled online students for decades.

Reinventing the wheel

Kitty Hawk isn’t the first time a university believed it could profit grandly by re-inventing the wheel: the president of the University of Arizona is on his way out after a spectacularly unwise venture into online education.

Calbright is another online initiative with similar objectives to those of Kitty Hawk. Designed for California’s community colleges, it began in 2019. For three consecutive years now, it has fended off legislative attempts to terminate it. At $200 million, Calbright’s initial funding was twice that of Kitty Hawk’s. However, fewer than 300 students had completed a tuition-free “certificate” four years after initiation.

Although Calbright has free tuition, open admissions, no grades, and much shorter programs of study compared to universities, a consultant in California observed the number of certificates awarded is “not even in the order of magnitude that they need to be producing at this stage.” 

And if Calbright’s cheery projections are realized, as California’s Governor Gavin Newsom dreams, its free tuition policy would have consequential budgetary implications.

Breathless advocates

Notwithstanding advocacy by over-caffeinated cyber strategists, several challenges confront online education generally and Project Kitty Hawk specifically.

First, technology remains an obstacle. Whether it’s absent infrastructure or software glitches, students and teachers struggle with online classes. Parents became aware of these challenges during Covid.

Second, online learning takes discipline and motivation. Cynics suggest college teaches you to sit under LED tube lights for long periods. It’s especially tough to sit through an online class.

Third, teaching a first-rate online class takes effort and support. It’s one thing to post lecture notes online and email them to students; it’s another to offer an online class with well-produced, embedded videos, links to carefully selected sites, timely access to a qualified instructor, and engaging chat rooms where students meaningfully contribute.

Great online programs are not cheap and cheap ones are no good.

Finally, competition with established and accredited online institutions is problematic, including universities like Florida, NC State, Ohio State, and Maryland, not to mention University of Phoenix or Strayer University, first-movers in the for-profit realm.

Unanswered questions

The Kitty Hawk project is a top-down muddle funded with temporary money. It has already scaled back projections and trimmed expectations. Many questions remain, including these:

• How will Kitty Hawk fund itself after the Federal largesse disappears?
• Will Kitty Hawk’s formidable competitors conveniently cede ground?
• Who will identify, interview, hire, and, most importantly, supervise, the battalions of adjuncts it would take to teach these classes, if the Pollyannaish projections are realized? (Outsourcing is possible, but it would entail disadvantages in oversight, control, and standards).
• If teaching and supervision are to be done instead as “overload” by existing full-time professors and administrators, how much will the extra duties dilute their work and their responsibility to on-campus students?
• Why not strengthen existing programs instead of duplicating and centralizing?
• How is the bountiful funding provided by taxpayers being spent?  What is the projected cost per graduate?

As with the other bad ideas, this one also has an anti-professorial tilt. Ironically, it’s the professoriate’s collaboration that might have saved it.

Dr. Art Padilla served as a senior administrator at the University of North Carolina System headquarters and later at NC State, where he was chairman of the Department of Management. He has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State, and the University of Arizona, winning several teaching awards and recognitions, including the Holladay Medal, the highest faculty honor at NC State.