Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like one of the factors that you’re optimizing on is the cost of getting a degree. Is this an across-the-board trend that you’re observing in your peer group of institutions running online degree programs.

Becky Takeda-Tinker: No. As a public non-profit state university, our only mission is student success in the workplace through education, and we want to keep the cost low and be able to measure the return on investment. It is our philosophy that we provide the highest level of return for the students because that is our only mission. It is not profit. It is not size. It is not whatever else may drive other institutions.

Sramana Mitra: How do you view the whole trend or discussion going on in the world of higher education about the cost of college and even the relevancy of college?

Becky Takeda-Tinker: When we look at the Gallup Poll, it says that 50% of Americans believe that the cost of education is worth it. When we look at 6% of Americans with a college degree that it was worth the money, those are really serious data points of how the American public perceives the value of higher education.

When we launched, we were in the middle of the recession in 2008. It had just started. We don’t have secretaries and admins running around. We have faculty who teach part time. We do multiple things in an effort to not only keep the costs down, but also to provide whatever resources that we have towards student support. We provide, at no cost, 24/7 live tutoring, tech support, and library access. Every student gets an assigned student advisor. We have a 72-hour grading policy from faculty so that students don’t get off track and start working on an assignment not knowing what their last grade was.

Everything is geared towards the student and the student’s success. When you look at our website and our retention numbers, our graduation rate is more than double than the national average. It is an all-out effort. We have some many institutions in the US. If Global was not going to be different in the way that it looks at higher education, then we don’t need to exist. We quantify quality with return on investment. We are an open book in that regard.

It is our intent to share the data, explain how we are able to capture it, and hope that we can provide some level of influence over the entire industry because Americans, in general, do not believe that the cost of higher education is worth it. How do we change that conversation? Global, it its own way, is trying to influence public perception through data and through delivering value and return.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Becky Takeda-Tinker, President of Colorado State University Global Campus
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