Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to ask you some questions. Help me understand what is the size of the student body and how that splits into different areas that you’re talking about. You talked about seven areas of IT certification. It sounds like they’re well-tuned to job prospects. How big is that in your student body?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Going back to your first question on how big the student body is, we opened our doors to about 200 students in September 2008. We now have 17,200 students, and we’ve graduated over 8,500 to date. We offer courses every single month and they’re 8-week terms. We keep data on everything because we’re online. At the Bachelor’s level, we have 1,538 and 200 at the Master’s level for the IT program. All of our programs are geared towards workplace success. We are actually looking at employment data in the longitudinal and also current status to understand what, in fact, we need to train our students.

Sramana Mitra: What is the largest track in your student body?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: At the undergraduate level, it would be Accounting at about 9.3%. At the Master’s level, it’s Healthcare Administration. That comprises 1,200 students.

Sramana Mitra: What is the percentage of the IT track?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: The IT track would be 9%.

Sramana Mitra: 9% for Accounting and 9% for IT?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other track that is of comparable popularity?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: I’m sorry. Our largest track is Business Management at 15%. Second largest would be Accounting at 9% and IT also at 9%. Healthcare administration at the undergraduate level is at 6%.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve emphasized greatly on the employment tie-in. How do you track the employment rate and long-term holding on to jobs of your students?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: We survey employers to understand the value of the graduates and their satisfaction. That’s at 98%. We also track our student satisfaction, which is similarly high. More importantly, we’re actually looking at salary. We track through Equifax all of graduate data by cohort. We have five years’ data going longitudinally. We can see from that data that our students continue to increase year over year.

Sramana Mitra: What does it cost to get an undergraduate degree through your program?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: The students only pay per-credit hour when they’re taking classes. Once they start, the tuition rate never changes. We have no student fees. It’s $350 a credit hour. If the student were to get a Bachelor’s degree, we also do have some discounts for partnerships. At the graduate level, our cost per credit hour is $500. That would be $18,000. Once the students start with us, that rate never changes until they complete their degree. We haven’t increased our tuition rates for five years now.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus
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