Online classes: The education superhighway

On June 8, 1993, a 12-person jury found Marcus Wellons guilty of rape and murder. The presiding judge sentenced Wellons to death. During the penalty phase, members of the jury presented the bailiff with a pair of edible chocolate breasts and the judge with an edible chocolate penis. The defendant filed an appeal, arguing that the judge had an unprofessional relationship with the jury. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear Wellons v. Hall to consider how state and federal courts handled the appeals process. And so a gift of confectionery genitalia has led to a review of the relationship between federal and state courts, by the nine most powerful jurists in the land. Welcome to the bizarre world of unintended consequences.

Early forays into online education are setting up higher education for a series of equally dramatic (if less erotic) series of unintended consequences. Two centuries in, American higher education has evolved into an entirely new beast. In Colonial-era Harvard, students learned Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Today, this university offers over 100 majors. In 1870, about 50,000 Americans were enrolled in colleges; by 2003, that number was 17 million. College was once the narrow province of the wealthy elite; today, the university endorses a lengthy paragraph describing all the sorts of people welcome here.

At the moment, no one is really sure what they want to do with online education. A 2009 survey of 182 colleges found that nearly half weren't sure whether their online programs were profitable, and 45 percent had shuffled the management of their online programs within the last two years. Wesleyan College has started offering thousands of non-credit online courses, all developed by outside, for-profit companies. Two weeks ago, The Princeton Review announced its intention to work on creating the largest online college in the world, catering to union members.  This spring, The New York Times is offering online courses as part of certificate programs ranging from entrepreneurship to nurse paralegal studies.

My wager is that online learning will destabilize the very notion of "going to" a university. It will catalyze a trend already underway. Now, earning a degree can include classes taken at other schools, both online and in class. Consortiums allow students to take classes in nearby schools. Semesters spent on different continents count towards your degree — no problem. The university is begging for it, in fact: The Study Abroad Office plasters its angsty slogan, "Just go away!" on every pamphlet it can get its hands on.

Online programs might make college campuses function (even more) as party housing that comes with sports teams to root for. As elite institutions like MIT or U.C. Berkeley begin offering more online courses, maybe you'll have a concentration — under education, you can write "degree: one-third MIT and two-thirds UMD." Maybe you'll want to piece together a really specific major that you couldn't pursue at a single institution — you'll take "Christian Art" from Notre Dame, "Care of Stained and Leaded Glass" at the Campbell Center for Historic Preservation Studies, "Construction Engineering" at Texas Tech and "Counterterrorism" at this university — and you'll wind up with a degree in "Religious Security." Maybe you'll ditch the job with Whiting-Turner to drive the Popemobile. That's how unexpected consequences go. 

Mardy Shualy is a senior government and linguistics major. He can be reached at shualy at umdbk dot com.