Down Economy May Be Driving Students to Online Education

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:05:00 GMT

As jobs continue to disappear and unemployment soars, large numbers of adult learners may soon be enrolling in online programs, particularly at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, according to a new online education survey (“Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2009).

These two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, which offer programs tailored to working adults, will likely see the biggest boost in enrollment, but all types of colleges could experience an enrollment surge as more people turn to higher education to gain marketable skills in the recession, revealed the 2008 online education survey by the Sloan Consortium, a non-profit organization working to improve online education.

“A lot of people want to increase their skill levels or get that degree they didn’t have,” said I. Elaine Allen, one of the report’s authors. The threat of losing their job can be as big a motivator for people to get a degree as actually losing their job, Allen told The Chronicle.

She said that the primary motivator for adults turning to online education over a traditional classroom-based education may be one of convenience. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want,” Allen said. With Internet -based courses, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

Over 20 percent of all U.S. students enrolled in higher education were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007, according to data from the Sloan Consortium. And, The Chronicle suggests, if the recession were to drive more students to take courses online as expected, the percentage of online education students is likely to rise sharply.

Most of that growth will likely come from the two-year and for- profit colleges that have not yet maximized their potential for online enrollment, Allen predicts, while public institutions likely won’t see “huge growth” in Web-based learning. Of all the colleges surveyed, 58 percent said that online courses were critical to their enrollment strategies, and a full 70 percent reported that competition for the growing number of students pursuing an education online is increasing.

Allen said, “For the first time, [schools] are seeing students choose another college for its online program.”

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Student Loan Default Rates In Nevada Rank Among Top In Nation

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:55:00 GMT

After ranking number one in the nation for student loan defaults for the last four years, Nevada managed to come in fifth this year with a 7.4-percent default rate based on the Education Department’s data for borrowers who began repaying their loans between October 2005, and September 2006.

To combat the state’s consistently high default rate, state colleges have spent the last six years reaching out to Nevada’s federal student loan borrowers who are late on their payments before they default on their loans, said Sharon Wurm, director of financial aid for Nevada’s public college system (“Nevada’s Rate of Default on College Loans Among Highest In The Nation,” Las Vegas Sun, Nov. 30, 2008).

Because Wurm has found that students feel more comfortable discussing their student loan repayment options with their school than with their lender, her office now contacts borrowers by email, ground mail, and telephone to discuss ways students can avert default, such as economic hardship deferments and forbearances. These options allow students to temporarily stop making payments or make reduced payments on their loans.

“[Nevada’s recent ranking] validates all the hard work that the institutions are doing,” Wurm said.

State Lacks Student Loan Default Demographic Data

While Nevada’s outreach initiative may be helping to improve the state’s default rate, Wurm said the state has limited data on the types of students that typically default and the reasons why so many college students continue to default.

One reason, Wurm suspects, may be the state’s low graduation rate. Currently, just 13 percent of Nevada students graduate from the public college system.

In general, students who attend two-year colleges or for-profit schools that offer certificates tend to have higher default rates because they more frequently drop out of school and typically graduate with lower earning potential than students who graduate from four-year institutions.

At the Las Vegas campus of Kaplan College, a for-profit institute offering one-year programs for medical insurance coding and billing 90 percent of students take out student loans, but about 60 percent of students drop out before graduation and 18.9 percent default on their loans.

The College of Southern Nevada, which only has a 4-percent default rate, has been working to improve its retention rate by contacting students when spotty attendance — one of the most common reasons why students do poorly in their classes — first starts to become a problem. The school’s program directors attempt to contact students by phone, ground mail, or via text message, which has helped absenteeism at the school drop by 13 percent since July 2007.

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Down Economy May Be Driving Students to Online Education

Student Loan Default Rates In Nevada Rank Among Top In Nation