A catastrophe has led to the closure of classrooms across the country. Students are told that face-to-face instruction is no longer being offered by institutions of higher education. All classes will be conducted online until further notice. Faculty who began the semester with face-to-face courses are required now to convert all of them to online within a week. This event forever alters the future of higher education in the age of neoliberalism.A catastrophe has led to the closure of online education across the country. Students are told that online instruction is no longer being offered by institutions of higher education. All classes will be conducted face-to-face until further notice. Faculty who began the semester with online courses are required now to convert all of them to face-to-face within a week. This event forever alters the future of higher education in the age of neoliberalism.
Two educational catastrophes. One grounded in reality and the other in fiction. For some, the elimination of face-to-face instruction would be greeted with great joy; for others, that emotion would be reserved only for the end of online instruction. One event pushes higher education backward into its history; the other propels it forward into its future. Not only do both scenarios provide us the opportunity to think about education from the perspective of catastrophe, but because we have had to deal recently with one of them, we might now have a different perspective on the other.
When the Coronavirus pandemic closed all institutions of higher education in the United States, online education was called upon to rescue it from complete shutdown. Faculty across the country were required to convert immediately their face-to-face courses to online ones so that students could continue, if not also finish, their semester. As this catastrophe occurred around spring break, most students had already completed about half of their semester. Online conversion of a face-to-face course under these conditions could then be viewed as affording faculty and students the opportunity to finish what they had startedâalbeit in a different, and for some faculty, an unfamiliar and abhorrent modality.
In 2017, there were just over 20 million students pursuing higher education in the United States. Over two-thirds of those students were not enrolled in any online courses. The onslaught of the Coronavirus pandemic therefore meant that around 13.5 million students of higher education became online students overnight. The magnitude of this catastrophe though might be tempered because without the option to conduct classes online, higher education in America would have been entirely closed for business. Online education offered students the opportunity to continue their education in a time of international health crisisâan option that would have been at lot more difficult if a catastrophe entirely wiped out online education.
Prior to the advent of the Internet and online education, an educational crisis of these proportions would have been dealt with very differently. One option would have been to continue coursework by correspondence. This would have involved students receiving instruction through printed textbooks and assignments through workbooks or learning guides. Once an assignment was completed, the student would then mail it back to the instructor, who upon grading it, would then mail the assignment back to the student. Same with tests, which of course would ideally be proctored.
The history of correspondence education in the United States was mainstream as far back as the 1890s, and by 1906, International Correspondence Schools, which is now Penn Foster, had 900,000 students and a sales force of 1200.1 Correspondence education was so well established at the turn of the century that the American philosopher, Charles Peirce, who had a notoriously bad relationship with institutions of higher education, even tried to get into the business of correspondence education.2 By the middle of the twentieth century, the leaders in correspondence education were the University of Wisconsin Extension and the University of Maryland University College.3 If this all sounds really old-fashioned, consider that as late as 2002, I was teaching students through this method for Indiana Universityâs Independent Study Program.
The courses were ones that were regularly offered on the Bloomington campus: Comparative Literature 255âModern Literature and the Other Arts; Philosophy 100âIntroduction to Philosophy; and Philosophy 120âElementary Ethics. I started teaching for the Independent Study Program in 1988 and would later write or co-write the learning guides for each of these courses.4 These courses were continuous enrollment and students had up to two years to complete them. Some of the students were traditional ones who also concurrently took courses on campus, but far more were not. They came from all over the country and some were even residing in far off places such as Iran and Germany. They were also from many different walks and stages of life including some incarcerated students, the most infamous of which was a Beverly Hills murderer, who took my ethics course from prison.5
But short of credit-bearing correspondence courses, there would be other options for students to continue their education in times of catastrophe albeit informally. In Chapter 3, âLittle Blue Books,â for example, I discuss the publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, who became the so-called greatest-publisher-in-the-world by leveraging the potential of the United States and international postal system. Haldeman-Julius published small, cheap books on every subject imaginable and distributed them to a national and international audience exclusively by mail. These books were especially popular during the economic catastrophe known as the Great Depression, and during the Second World War, where soldiers could easily carry them in their pockets. But whereas correspondence courses and cheap books were the main options for alternative education in times catastrophe a century agoâand perhaps as late as the turn of the twentieth centuryâthe new millennium offers some new alternatives for education at a distance. We now live in a digital age where communication, information, and education conducted online are as normal as the U.S. Postal Service was for those same things a century ago.
According to the latest figures, before the Coronavirus catastrophe, about 3.5 million students were enrolled in at least some online courses and 3.1 million were only enrolled in online courses. The Coronavirus pandemic of course changed all of these figures, but prior to it, less than 18% of students pursued some higher education online, and less than 16% only pursued online education. While it is impossible to determine what percentage of the 3.5 million partially online students and the 3.1 million fully online students would not have been able to get to a classroom to complete their catastrophic semester face-to-face, it would have been far fewer that the 13.5 million students who went online overnight as a consequence of the Coronavirus.
It is going to take years to work through the ironies brought out by this higher educational catastrophe. First and foremost among them is that online instruction, higher educationâs âdark horse,â bailed out face-to-face instruction in a time of catastrophe. This was something that was recognized within hours of the announcement that instruction would be online as a result of the pandemic. For example, the same day that it was first announced that some prestigious private universities were going online, late-night comedians started to satirize them for this decision. Here is how one put it: âGet this guys, Harvard just announced that they are sending all of their students home until further notice, and they will take classes online. Now if you meet someone who says they went to Harvard, youâll be like, âOh, that online school!ââ6
The impact though of this catastrophe was not only to the reputations of prestigious private non-profit institutions of higher education, but also to non-profit public institutions. Compared to for-profit institutions of higher education, non-profit institutions enroll far fewer students per capita online. In 2017, 11.3% of students at non-profit public institutions were exclusively online compared to 19.12% at private non-profit institutions, whereas 20.68% of students at non-profit public institutions were enrolled in some online courses compared to 9.53% at private non-profit institutions. Moreover, the vast majority of students at non-profit institutions did not enroll in any online courses before the Coronavirus catastrophe with non-profit private institutions (71.35%) slightly outpacing public institutions (68.01%) in this regard. However, compared to for-profit institutions, these pre-Coronavirus catastrophe online percentages for the non-profits are relatively low. In 2017, 49.05% of for-profit institution students were enrolled exclusively online, 9.35% enrolled in some online courses, and 41.6% did not enroll in any online courses. Overall, the 2017 percentages only tell part of the story of online education prior to the Coronavirus catastrophe because the total number of non-profit education students far exceeded the number of for profit education students: 9,977,334 non-profit public and 2,941,931 non-profit private education students were not enrolled in any online courses compared to 558,434 for-profit education students. In short, the Coronavirus affected the no-completely-online-student reputations of both public and private non-profit institutions, and in terms of sheer numbers, the public institutions suffered a much greater reputational blow.7 But why is this important? Because reputation is closely connected to institutional ranking and prestige: two of the major markers of success in neoliberal academe.8 And this educational catastrophe may have just significantly deconstructed the validity of both rank and prestige relative to online instructi...