News & Press

Written by Michael Harloff, Ed.D
Commission on the Future of Higher Education Reports on Distance Education and its Importance to American Students, as well as, the Educational, Business, and Industrial Communities

Is it just plain un-American to resist the movement towards distance education in US schools? Well, if you read the trends in Congress and U.S. schools it is!

On September 19th, 2005 U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, established a 19-member Commission on the Future of Higher Education and charged the Commission with "developing a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education that will meet the needs of America's diverse population and also address the economic and workforce needs of the country's future."

Since the formation of the Commission, the Commission has held a series of public hearings that have involved a national dialogue between students, policymakers, academic communities, business leaders, and parents.

What does any of this have to do with distance education? Plenty. A report prepared by the Commission, "notes with alarm the seemingly inexorable increase in college costs, which have outpaced inflation for the past two decades." In a recent article published in the Career Education Review and written by James Schroll with support from Tom Netting of Jefferson Public Relations, Schroll states that "college tuition rates have increased by 200 percent between 1981 and 2003." Schroll goes on to report that a central concern of the Commission is rising costs of education and the increasing debt levels of students and their parents.

The Commission, after having identified the rising costs of education in the U.S. as a critical problem facing American students and families, goes on to encourage educational institutions to "do more to support and harness the power of distance learning to meet educational needs of rural students, adult learners, and workforce development." In a further effort to encourage institutions to cut costs and to ease student access into educational training programs the Commission "urges colleges to remove barriers to student mobility and promote the emergence of new learning paradigms." (such as distance education programs)

But while the U.S. Department of Education is researching the barriers to expanded educational opportunities - not everyone is getting the message. A case in point is a bill making its way through the legislature in Michigan. Michigan House Bill 5218 sponsored by Representative Fran Amos, which proposes to provide licensure for workers in the massage therapy industry, also proposes to block massage student access into distance education. This is a clear case of state government lagging far behind national initiatives and simply not getting the message.

Many schools report that a central reason for, and cause of, the steady and insidious increases in educational costs is in large part due to the often misguided and misdirected efforts of state and national government into educational issues that they frequently do not fully understand thus creating the mountains of red tape that drive costs higher and higher.

The efforts by the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Margaret Spellings are a big step in the right direction. As government and the educational community attempt to take positive steps towards solving problems related to increased educational costs and better student access to education we can only hope that they don't trip over the stumbling blocks placed upon the path - such as the Michigan massage bill.

National Governing Council Health Education Partnership
www.ngchep.org

References:

Career Education Review, Commission on the Future of Higher Education, by James Schroll with support from Tom Netting, Jefferson Government Relations, September 2006, Section 1, Workforce Communications, 627 Shore Drive, Suite 100, Oshkosh, Wisconsin 54901 - 1-800-558-8250

Commission on the Future of Higher Education, U.S. Department of Education, Report Draft dated August 9th, 2006