The Echo Chamber

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A couple of days ago, Inside Higher Ed published an article titled “Online Learners Earned Fewer Degrees Than Their Peers During For-Profit College Boom,” based on what they referred to as a “a report published last week by Third Way, a center-left think tank.” The report described lower completion rates among online learners compared to on-campus students.

These two pieces might lead you to believe that there is new research on the impact of online learning on student completion rates. If that’s your assumption, you would be mistaken.

There is no new research; rather, this is an illustration of how the Arnold Ventures-funded coalition operates (see this post for background). They publish a piece of research, promote it repeatedly with the help of a sometimes overly credulous trade press—Inside Higher Ed in this case—all in an effort to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt around online learning.

Winter Actual Report Release

Arnold Ventures (AV) funded a research project for three three professors through an institute at the University of Florida to look at longitudinal data from 2012 - 2017. The report argued that while previous research showed mixed results on the impact of online learning, this study focused more specifically on students enrolled in fully online programs and examined longer-term outcomes. Despite some interesting analysis that included looking at demographic variables (which a lot of research on online education avoids), the researchers’ main conclusions were to support existing AV and Department of Education (ED) priorities calling for “the design and targeting of accountability measures specific to online degree programs.” That is, online is the target and should be.

The working draft of the paper was released by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University in November 2023 by Justin Ortagus, Rodney Hughes, and Hope Allchin, titled The Role and Influence of Exclusively Online Degree Programs in Higher Education. The work was done through an institute at the University of Florida. The Annenberg release was quite clear that this work was funded by AV.

Coincident with the working paper release in November, the three authors wrote an article in The Century Foundation (TCF, funded by AV) as contributors. To its credit, the TCF article called out that this was based on external research paper, but the TCF article does not call out the AV funding. And unsurprisingly, the commentary piece leaned into the common AV message, with the main heading “Exclusively Online Programs Hinder Student Success.”

In January 2024, a version of that piece was published in the American Educational Research Journal, and Inside Higher Ed published an article summarizing the research soon after. There was other media coverage of this research in November 2023 through January 2024.

The timing and messaging was not coincidental, as it occurred right before the January - March negotiated rulemaking that targeted Distance Education (fully online) specifically with new regulations. Attendance taking, dismantling SARA, data collection specifically on DE but other modalities, etc.

Summer Revise and Promote

That rulemaking led to the proposed rules this summer targeting online education and the associated public comment period. We are now waiting to see the Department of Education’s final rules and if ED will keep in the rules despite strong pushback in the comments. That is why AV wants to revive this message of online is bad and needs accountability now.

What we’re currently dealing with is the same three authors writing another article, this time at Third Way, reviving the themes but doubling down. The Third Way (funded by AV) article is different, however. It made no mention that the actual research was done in a separate report released almost a year ago, and the article makes it appear that the authors did this work for Third Way.

The report briefly summarizes the findings and offers far-reaching, often impractical, policy suggestions, such as requiring full transparency of costs and revenues for all online programs and elevating accreditation standards for online degrees. These recommendations are nearly verbatim from AV / TCF / ED arguments on the DE rule making, and they even threw in Online Program Management (OPM) regulation as well, which had no part in their actual research.

There was no mention of the actual report except for “More detailed methodological information can be found here.” When you click through (which the vast majority of readers do not do), it doesn’t go to a methodology section, it goes to the working report of the study from November 2023.

This is where IHE comes in, again. IHE published its article “according to a report published last week by Third Way, a center-left think tank.” There was no report published last week, and any careful reading of that article would show that it was merely a summary of findings as an excuse to push the recommendations. Further, the IHE article does not mention the January 2024 IHE article - I am not sure that the editors are even aware that they covered this topic twice. The AV-funded ruse worked, and they got trade press coverage purporting new research data while ED is deciding on the final rules.

And most of the trade press (and national press) continue to avoid any mention that so many of these efforts share common funding from Arnold Ventures or are coordinated in any way. Whether that is deliberate or not, we cannot say, but it is not good journalism.

We realize this is being posted on the day that Doug Lederman announced he is stepping down from Inside Higher Ed, 20 years after he co-founded it. We will miss Doug for a job well done and wish him well. But the timing is purely coincidental.

Parting thoughts

We don’t want to write posts like this. We want to write about how institutions are doing digital learning, what lessons they are learning, and how to make it better. But it is important to track how the outrage machine works and to realize that you are being played. And unfortunately these latest articles and reports are just that.

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