“As California State University prepares to close its doors to tens of thousands of qualified students next year, Chancellor Charles Reed said Tuesday he will ask Sacramento for $884 million to meet CSU’s budget needs – a long-shot request from the cash-strapped state,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Why doesn’t the Cal State University system create an entirely online degree program and make it available for cheap to anyone who is interested?
Imagine that. Anyone could get a Cal State degree online. The cost could be as low as $1,000 a year – and maybe even lower. I would imagine that you could not do this with all their programs, but the online program could be supplemented with traditional classes, tutoring and counseling.
By comparison, current Cal State annual fees are over $10,000 a year, and going up again.
I shared this idea with GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Campbell, who teaches at Chapman University. he loved it. Well, let’s see if anyone will take this ball and run with it…
A dirty little secret is that at most Cal State campuses the Continuing Education program can run summer school and what they call intersession (between semesters), filling all classes with fee paying students at no cost to the taxpayers. Any thought of expanding this self-sufficeint style to the normal semesters, though, is met with a big No from the Chancellor’s office, however. One has to wonder why the Chancellor and Board would rather endure budget cuts, enrollment reductions and otherwise deprive the public of educational opportunities vs. becoming entrepreneural and implementing more of the Continuing Education self-supporting model. Perhaps the agenda is not about maximizing educational offerings after all ?