State Universities Meet Online Education Needs Through Higher Ed Holdings

Academic Leaders Serve Growing Numbers of Non-Traditional Students

By Dr. Gerald A. Heeger

I passionately embraced the development and expansion of online learning starting more than twenty-years ago.  Few administrators of public universities at the time saw the coming transformation of education that would be spurred by the combined forces of a digital revolution and globalization.  Today, I believe Higher Ed Holdings can play a pivotal role in helping public universities make the transition to serve a new population of students online.

As the Dean of New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies in the 1990’s, I saw early on the impact that online education can have when my school was an early recipient of a grant from the Sloan Foundation to launch its first online program.  It quickly became apparent to me that the traditional definition of a college education and what constituted a student body was in for dramatic changes.  The model of educating students uninterrupted K through graduate school would undergo “creative destruction”.

With these looming changes in mind, I accepted the Presidency of the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) in 1999.  Demographic and lifestyle trends indicated that public universities would have to serve students that were older, entrenched in their careers and stressed for time by family obligations.  The university, one of 13 institutions in the University of Maryland System, had already established itself as a leader in serving non-traditional students with outreach programs to veterans after World War II and to US military personnel serving around the world.

I was attracted to UMUC because it already recognized that the primary benefit of online education was that it serves non-traditional students. During my six years at its helm, we expanded its award-winning online classes to tens of thousands of students worldwide and more than 177,000 online course enrollments.

UMUC rightfully earned a reputation for leadership in online degree programs by setting high standards for accessibility and affordability. When I first arrived on campus the University System of Maryland was under dual pressure from lawmakers to reach more students and address greater diversity as state budget subsidies were declining. Online education helped UMUC extend its intellectual reach in a convenient and flexible innovative format.

Since then I have witnessed many universities adopt online education only to fail at delivering quality because of inferior platforms, less than ideal relationships with vendors, and, most importantly, internal disorganization. The exception has been those public universities that chose to partner with Higher Ed Holdings.  I serve as a Board Member of this Dallas based service provider. It does the “heavy lifting” for its partners by helping professors move their courses to its innovative online delivery platform, it assists universities in organizing online strategy, and it recruits at considerable out-of-pocket expense non-traditional students for the university’s degree programs.

Challenged to meet so many different needs today, most universities don’t currently have the resources at their disposal to launch such ambitious online programs.  Higher Ed Holdings partnership enables a state university to concentrate on creating and executing high-quality instruction.

I became associated with Higher Ed Holdings because it clearly helps public universities fulfill their historic duty in a new age through its online platform.

President Barack Obama has stressed on several occasions that the middle class must be successful for the nation to recover from the current recession.  The President’s call to action should not be lost on leaders of higher education.  The competitive global landscape for future generations of Americans depends on how universities prepare non-traditional students for “knowledge economies” that are yet to be invented.

The non-traditional constituency is bigger than ever, and so is the competition, especially from for-profit programs not affiliated with state universities, most of which are major research universities. With technology, state universities no longer need to cede that ground to those other institutions.

The online platform lets universities open up high-demand areas without having to give up other priorities. They can offer their programs in high-demand areas – such as Higher Ed Holdings partnerships with the Schools of Education at Lamar University and the University of Texas at Arlington – and use the online model to increase affordability.

Public universities and the American public have long had a tacit “contract” with one another.  Public universities would respond to changing learning needs; the public would support those institutions with tax dollars.  Today, that mutuality is threatened:  tax dollars grow scarcer and learning needs are multiplying.  The Higher Ed Holdings partnership strategy assists public universities in keeping their part of this historic and necessary relationship.