I wish you had a subscription to the Los Angeles Times so you could read this article in full. If you do, you should.
The University of Southern California had one of the nation’s best graduate social work programs. In search of more revenue, it made a deal with an East Coast digital startup to establish an online degree in social work, and enrollment ballooned from 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016. The university saved on the cost of dorms and classrooms.
The money was rolling in, but the big beneficiary was the tech company, which kept more than half the revenue and is now valued at more than $2 billion. USC’s once prestigious social work school has lowered its standards to admit students who would not have qualified in the past; its reputation has suffered; and it is “facing a budget crisis so severe that nearly half of the staff may lose their jobs.”
Maryland-based corporation 2U Inc. now services universities around the country and abroad, but it relies on USC for about a fifth of its revenue.
Industry analysts have pressed 2U executives repeatedly about the unfolding situation at the social work school, and the company lowered revenue forecasts last fall, citing in part instability at the Los Angeles university…
Part-time teaching positions are being largely eliminated and professors required to shoulder significantly heavier course loads. A university committee has recommended laying off up to 45% of the non-teaching staff….
2U takes a 60% cut of online tuition from the social work program, and the contract carries onerous penalties if USC breaks the arrangement. People familiar with the agreement told The Times it contains a so-called poison tail that requires the university to continue handing over its revenue share for two years after canceling.
USC’s contract with the company extends to 2030.
The arrangement has been great for 2U. Not so much for USC.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Virtual learning is limited. When will people realize this?
SOME, not all, Social Workers have told me that too many NEW HIRES (in Social Work) don’t have field experiences. SAD.
Online social work degree??? If ever there was a field that needed face-to-face learning, it’s social work (and teaching). Knowledge about social work makes up maybe a tenth of what’s important about social work. Being able to deal with and care about people – including and especially very difficult people – is 90% of the job.
Columbia University and Rutgers offer on-line social work degrees so it’s likely not uncommon even in the top social work programs. I agree with you that it seems odd but apparently the grad schools arrange for field experience wherever the students are.
The biggest master degree programs in education are online, which frankly is a farce.
Incidentally, dorms. I’m surprised that they provided dorms for graduate students – many universities don’t. For that matter, most grad students are beyond the age where they want to live in dorms. And when grad student housing is available, it’s generally astronomical. I can’t imagine how a university could lose money on dorms, unless there’s some shady accounting going on.
Classrooms too are generally figured into the cost of a course. Online courses should be cheaper for that reason. Again, if they were losing money on classrooms, their accounting department is either incompetent or unethical.
Thanks for covering this, Diane. It is such a cautionary tale of greed and stupidity demonstrating, yet once again, how smart people get seduced with the promises of high technology and fast money.
Thanks, Mike. This is indeed a cautionary tale. We remember that a decade or so ago, tech enthusiasts claimed that MOOCS would take over higher education, and three-quarters of colleges and universities would disappear.
Now they are looking for online programs and robots to replace teachers.
If that happens, poor kids will get cheap computers and rich kids will get teachers.
When I first moved to Southern California many years ago, one of the first things I heard was that USC was not a reputable institution (“If you’re rich, go to USC. If you’re smart, go to UCLA”). Now the whole world knows.
Mark Stevens, the hedge funder who recently shoved and cursed an NBA player during the playoffs, is a USC graduate. USC was a site of the recent college cheating scandal. The USC Rossiter school of ed boasted the first Dean who was a Pahara Fellow (a Gates-funded reform organization). Until recently, the Dean omitted the “honor ” from her bio at the USC site. One of the Arnold-funded education centers is headed by a former USC faculty member.
A USC social work faculty member involved in a scandal at the school (reported by the media) ended up in the school’s office of religion- no kidding.
When the head of the USC board of trustees owns yachts, like Betsy, what should be expected but a lack of values?
A terrible story, mainly about mismgt, I think: the few details dropped about USC’s contract w/2U are hair-raising. Also, this program (& other 2U programs sold cheaper to other U’s) is not your computerized self-test-&-advance program like K12 or Summit, the courses are real-time skyped classes w/actual people teaching/ grading etc. [If anything like the parallel program run out of Rutgers, during & after coursework online there’s an add’l 1-1/2 yrs of fieldwork & internship]. The big draw would be for full-time workers going for a grad degree at night, figuring they can complete the coursework piece faster w/o travel-time.
The big story is what is charged to students & how much of that– because they are grad-level programs– students are allowed to borrow from govt. From the related 6/3 NYT article at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/upshot/student-debt-big-culprit-graduate-school.html
“An accredited university can essentially create a master’s degree in anything, set whatever price it likes, start signing up students for federal loans, and market the program as ‘accredited’… Anyone who passes a credit check is eligible to borrow the full cost of attending any accredited graduate school, regardless of how much money a person has, or doesn’t have, in the bank…
“People don’t become social workers to get rich — most earn less than $50,000 per year — yet $109,486 was the average amount borrowed for a master’s in the subject at the University of Southern California… unusually high even though a large majority of the program’s students learn online.” [Clearly this program was overpriced & would not have passed muster under Obama-era regs.]
The NYT article points out that Obama-era regs would have put a stop to grad-level fed loans grossly outpacing potential earnings in the field [& thus ability to pay back], but Trump suspended the rules. Dept of Ed just released a bunch of updated data, timed just prior to anticipated final ruling to cancel the Obama regs– the idea being that consumers can access this info & make their own decisions w/o need of nanny state telling them what to do.
Sounds like the same sort of bubble in the making as created by bad mortgage loans in 2000’s.
Yes, I just posted something similar below but I didn’t know about Rutgers. Columbia University also offers an on-line masters of social work.
Someone at USC got taken for a ride by 2U. But I wonder if those other universities offer their own platforms or are also contracting with a similar outside vendor.
This was clearly a terrible business decision. But when I read the LA Times article, I thought it was interesting that this was an attempt to do online education in a way that seemed better.
“With 2U, students attend live online classes in which about a dozen students and a professor can see and talk to one another in a setup some compare to the game show “Hollywood Squares.” The experience is designed to be of higher quality than other programs on the market that offer recorded lectures, tutoring by email and, for some, a sense of isolation.”
There is something to be said for trying to offer education for adults who are yearning for it but don’t have the luxury of living near a college or providing childcare for their children if they do.
Graduate school is fairly simple if you are young and single with no financial responsibilities except to yourself. It is fairly simple if you have a partner who will work while you learn. It is not easy if you are a single parent who works full time and can’t afford childcare.
The problem is when a university is so dependent on an outside profit-hungry company whose only interest is the bottom line. This company sold foolish administrators a bill of goods.
Columbia University also has an on-line Masters of Social Work program. I wonder if it is the ideal on-line degree or if it is just as flawed but no one is looking closely.
I wonder how many of the top social work grad schools also have this. And the not very bright administrators at USC thought they needed to offer this too in order to keep up.
Several things to consider here:
USC has been focusing upon the recruitment of foreign students (primarily East Asian) for the last twenty years. They are a cash cow and now make up nearly 20% of the student body (both grad and undergrad). The graduate program in question is one of their least reputable, and its expansion was an attempt capture foreign students that are on visa but wish to live elsewhere in the US [Hello! New York!] as well as low hanging fruit from the US.
Half of downtown LA’s property south of Olympic Blvd has been owned by USC for the last 100 years [USC is one of LA’s oldest institutions.] Over the last ten years the university has been developing many of those properties, building high-rise dorms and apartments for their more wealthy students (several students were killed a decade ago, spurring the decision to shift student housing north of the 10 freeway and shuttle students in.)
Several of USC’s graduate programs are in the top 10-20 in the nation, including their Pharmacy, Engineering, Business, Film and Public Planning. On the other hand, their education graduate program, like Stanford’s and UCLA’s, has a definite Deformist bent.
Sorry, was going to say that something was needed to pay for the high-rise development. I guess they thought they had found the source of revenue.
Stanford’s publication, Stanford Social Innovation Review, a place where various foundation staff brag about the work they do and, tout the plans of the oligarchy, is the poster child for Stanford values or lack thereof. Self described “reporters” write puff pieces about billionaire-funded programs like TFA and evidently, it’s left up to the reader to know if and, by whom, the “reporters” are compensated.
Then, the icing on the cake, the Review’s editors select which comments get posted. Criticisms of TFA appear to be off-limits.
What a mess.