3 Things Covid-19 Will End In Higher Ed
College Covid questions are about to be answered.
We will know in just a few weeks whether college enrollments for the fall tanked, whether schools will brave an in-person teaching model, a blend or go entirely online, whether schools can enforce social distance and mask regimens, and much more. Right now, everyone is speculating.
Back in June, I’d already speculated about five things that the Covid-19 ordeal will etch on college for the long term. It has been a challenge to think of five things this Covid-19 odyssey has knocked into the dustbin, college-wise. I only came up with three.
Using e-mail as a primary communication tool is so 2010. It’s all text and push notifications now. And nothing made that more apparent than the rapid disbursement of students from campus in the spring. Colleges found out that the best way, the only way to keep their communities informed was through their apps.
The University of North Carolina, Greensboro, which won an international award for “Best Overall App” among colleges, is pretty clear about what is happening.
“We have been watching trends with Generation Z and one of the key observations is that they are not using email as much as previous groups,” said Craig Biles, University Digital Design and Mobile Communications Developer at UNCG. “Even when they do, we find they are hesitant to mingle their personal email with their school email. Push notifications give us a way to communicate that better fits their lifestyle and preferences.”
It's not that e-mail will disappear; it may just shift to a secondary medium for current and upcoming college students. And this Spring, having to communicate with urgency, colleges saw a preview of what may be the new normal.
Testing Centers
Many, probably even most teachers don’t give tests and exams in class anymore. Gone are the days when professors would pass around testing books or scrawl exam questions on the whiteboard and watch students hunch over and scribble. Instead, many colleges built testing centers where students could go on their own schedule and take exams under the watchful eye of a center monitor. It made sense and offered more schedule flexibility and less professor time.
But due to Covid-19, colleges could not do anything in person. And many had their first large scale engagements with online testing. And, as that technology proves indispensable, putting students in another face-to-face environment to take a supervised test will seem both unnecessary and an unnecessary risk. Remote, online exam proctoring is not cheap, but neither was the old way. Upkeep of physical space and the cost of paying in-person monitors was not nothing. Accordingly, it’s a cost many colleges may be happy to swap out. With colleges across the world evaluating their physical spaces for social distance, a floor and ceiling testing center may be among the first to go.
Full Tuition for Online Programs
The summary is that most students were unsatisfied with online education when they were forced into it this Spring. There were lawsuits. Nearly all (93%) said online tuition should cost less than in-person tuition. Some colleges have given in, lowering the tuition sticker price of online programs.
It’s difficult to overstate what a big deal that may turn out to be.
That’s because, from the dawn of online education, schools, and the businesses that make online programs possible, have said that there is no difference between studying online or on campus. They dug in on charging the same price for each because they insisted they were the same. And they did not want students or the public or employers to equate online with a cheap, second-rate alternative.
But now that the dam has broken, now that some schools have reduced the price of their online programs, it will be a steep challenge to go back. Consider, for example, this opening sentence in the Philadelphia Inquirer from July 28, “Some colleges in the region are starting to acknowledge that taking classes online isn’t quite the same as being on campus — and they’re cutting tuition because of it.”
That linkage will be a difficult genie to put back, especially since it’s seen as an acknowledgement, a confirmation of what we already knew. And as more and more colleges fold on this point, the genie will only get bigger, making it implausible that schools will be able to sell their online programs as equal to their in-person ones in the future. Or charge accordingly.
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