If you’ve ever signed up for an online course at FRCC, you might have been surprised by the cost. That’s because, per credit-hour, online courses cost nearly 70 percent more at FRCC. As of fiscal year 2022, an in-person course at FRCC will run you $156.50 per credit-hour, while an online course will run you $263.20 per credit-hour. That’s a difference of $106.80, or nearly 70 percent more for online courses. That’s excluding any fees or other expenses, which are often higher for in-person courses. Despite this, students in online classes perform slightly worse than students in in-person ones, with pass-rates of 81 percent for in-person courses, and only 75 percent for online courses at FRCC.
That goes against what some people assume: that online courses cost less to operate, and, as such, should cost less to students. According to a brief footnote in a March 2020 Budget Update slideshow obtained by The Front Page, “Online Learning revenues exceed their expenses by about $8M each year.” This would indicate that the cost to operate an online course is lower. However, administrators contest this.
“Online still has some significant costs,” Rebecca Woulfe, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Online Learning, told The Front Page. “We spend millions of dollars as a system on technology for our online courses… So I don’t want you to think that online costs less than in-person, or the same – we’d probably need to do an analysis of what that is.”
As for why Online Learning revenues exceed their expenses, Chico Garcia, Dean of Student Affairs, Online Learning, says there are a lot of expenses that might not be accounted for in that statistic. “A lot of what doesn’t get factored into the costs for online are the things that happen on a campus,” Garcia said. “There are lots and lots of [on-campus] resources that online students also have to utilize, right? The registrar’s office, [the] financial aid office, security, a lot of different things that they also [utilize].”
Additionally, Online Learning isn’t the only area where revenues exceed expenses. “English makes a ton of money for us,” Dr. Woulfe said. “Math makes a ton of money, because almost every student comes in and takes a math class and most of our math classes, you know, are not highly expensive. And so we definitely make money, right? We have those programs that are like online, where they generate more money than what they cost us. But then we have other programs that don’t do that, and Chico mentioned one of them, and that’s nursing. Nursing is very expensive because of the equipment that they need, and … because of the staffing that they need.”
This brings up the question: is it okay that some departments, like English, Math, or Online Learning, subsidize other departments, like Nursing or Automotive?
Dr. Woulfe suggests that the answer to that question hangs on an age-old debate on the role that higher-education should play in society: “Is [higher-ed] a public good, or is it a private good? … People who think that higher Ed is a public good are those individuals who say our society as a whole is better when we have more people educated, right? … And if you think of higher education as a public good, then having one program subsidize another is part of that philosophy, right? … So, you’ve got those 2 sides, and our approach is that ‘public good’ [approach], right? We, and it’s the community in our name, we are here to serve our community.”
Garcia summarized those thoughts, “Our resources are shared, it’s a part of the nature of community colleges,” he said.
While it’s still unclear if online courses cost more for the college to run, they definitely cost more for students in tuition. Dr. Woulfe, with her nearly 20 years of experience at FRCC, takes us back to the very beginning of online education to explain why. “I used to say the server sat in the office with the I.T. director,” she said. “It was the early days of E-learning. And because of that, each of the colleges had their own tuition rate for online. And each of us had an online tuition rate that was slightly higher, because we were paying for that technology, we had to buy the license.”
That was until former Colorado Governor Owens created the “Governor’s Task Force to Strengthen and Improve the Community College System,” whose goal was to form recommendations on how the Colorado Community College System could improve.
In their final report, presented to Governor Owens in March of 2004, the task force recommended that CCCS “Adopt a centralized, standardized, and integrated Information Technology (IT) system,” and “require the CCCS to provide, and all colleges to use exclusively, a common utility infrastructure [for online learning].” That “common infrastructure” they’re referring to would be a system like Down 2 Learn (D2L).
“As we moved to be in compliance with that law, we also moved to the same tuition amount,” Dr. Woulfe said. “Back then [the online rate] was … maybe 20 or 30 dollars higher than the in-person rate … and [all CCCS colleges] have the exact same in-person tuition rate, and both of those are now set by our governing board. … Each year, if we increased tuition, … we increased it by a percentage, right? A percentage of a higher number is more money, right? So, as these 2 increased with the percentage, the gap between them became greater and greater.”
While The Front Page was unable to obtain pre-2010 online tuition data, the percentage difference between the cost of online and in-person tuition remained almost perfectly consistent at 76 percent more for online courses from 2010 to 2019. Using historical in-person tuition data dating back to 1995, we can project backwards under the assumption that online and in-person tuition rates were changed at the same rate. This shows a nominal difference in cost of $43.23 in 1999, when online courses began operating, compared to the higher difference of $114.30 in 2019.
That 76 percent figure is higher than the “nearly 70 percent” figure cited earlier, because the gap, starting in 2019, began to shrink. “Many of us, probably Chico, I know me [and] lots of my peers that are also vice presidents said ‘this is way too big of a gap. We have got to do something about this gap.’” Dr. Woulfe said. “So, 3 years ago, we finally were able, with the support of our presidents and the system office, to say, ‘when we increase tuition, we will only increase the in-person [rate], we will not increase the online [tuition rate], so that we can start to close that gap.’”
The question is, then, how small will the gap get? Could online courses be cheaper than in-person ones in the future? “I don’t know if we have thought that far in the future, to be honest,” Dr. Woulfe said. “I’ve not heard a plan, right? I don’t know at what point they’ll say, ‘okay, this gap is reasonable.’ I don’t think we can answer that.”
“I know the fight I was [fighting] was that they shouldn’t cost more,” Garcia said. “So, I know I’ve always been on that battle … But maybe there is something to say, ‘oh, they should cost less’, … But I don’t really know if that’s true or not. We haven’t really looked into the of [whether] they should cost less, or not.”
Ultimately, the cost of tuition is decided by the CCCS and its governing board. No staff members or administrators at FRCC directly control tuition rates. Even if CCCS keeps up the freeze on the cost of online courses, and if prices for in-person courses continue rising at the rate that they have for the past 27 years, 4.18 percent annually on average, then it will take until 2035 for the two tuition rates to reach parity. As a result, the price disparity between in-person and online courses will most likely continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, the cost of tuition is decided by the CCCS and its governing board. No staff members or administrators at FRCC directly control tuition rates. Even if CCCS keeps up the freeze on the cost of online courses, and if prices for in-person courses continue rising at the rate that they have for the past 27 years, 4.18 percent annually on average, then it will take until 2035 for the two tuition rates to reach parity. As a result, the price disparity between in-person and online courses will most likely continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future.
