Interesting Reads This Week

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My reading this week helped take my mind off my NCAA basketball brackets. Like my brackets, it was a mixed bag.

This week’s reading reinforces a pattern that is becoming hard to ignore: we keep focusing on tools—online learning, AI, credentials—but outcomes depend far more on whether those tools actually fit the context in which they are used.

Satisfaction is baked in

The Encoura + RNL survey on student satisfaction held some surprises. You might expect online and adult students to be less satisfied than on-campus and traditional students. Services are often better developed for on-campus students, and adult learners often have higher expectations. But that’s not what the data show.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that online learning is simply “better.” What the data suggest is that online works better for the students who choose it. The numbers should also give administrators at traditional four-year institutions pause. Those are not strong results.

More importantly, the data raise a harder question about what institutions can realistically do to improve satisfaction. Student satisfaction and success may be less about what institutions do after enrollment and more about whether students end up in the right place to begin with. That’s a much harder problem to solve.

This could reflect sunk cost dynamics—students feeling more committed to a choice they made. But the implication is the same: satisfaction is not entirely within institutional control.

But wait, there’s more.

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