Home News Public Colleges Are Going After Adult Students Online. Are They Already Too Late? – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Public Colleges Are Going After Adult Students Online. Are They Already Too Late? – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Three struggling campuses of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education plan to pursue an increasingly popular strategy in higher ed: building a new “virtual campus” that will educate working adults who have some college credit but no degree.

In an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dale-Elizabeth Pehrsson, the president of Clarion University of Pennsylvania, described the online operation, which would not go into operation until next year, as an attempt to “aggressively compete” with Southern New Hampshire University and other online providers that have “stolen” students from Pennsylvania.

The Pennsylvania virtual campus, as described by Pehrsson in an interview with The Chronicle, would combine existing undergraduate and graduate online courses from Clarion and Edinboro Universities and California University of Pennsylvania, three campuses of the Pennsylvania system in the western part of the state that are in the process of merging into one entity. It would also join a handful of similar moves by public-college systems in recent years to reach the 36 million Americans with some college credit with no degree — an especially attractive market for public colleges facing enrollment challenges, given the waning number of high-school graduates in many parts of the country.

But competing with the established national players in online education presents a tall order. The so-called mega-universities have a huge head start and deep pockets, two advantages public universities are unlikely to overcome easily, if at all.

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