Star Tribune
St. Cloud State University hopes an accelerated online program will boost enrollment and ease budget woes. Critics say it’s a scam.
ST. CLOUD — The regional university here is vying to become the first in the Minnesota State system to offer seven-week “accelerated online programs” — targeted at adults with unfinished bachelor’s degrees — using a Dallas-based for-profit company that promises to recruit students and help retain them through graduation.
St. Cloud State University leadership is banking on the new partnership to make a dent in its colossal budget deficit and expand its reach to help some of the 1.2 million Minnesotans with college credits but no bachelor’s degree.
But critics say the plan is a futile attempt to temporarily inflate enrollment while the online management company Academic Partnerships takes 50% of the program’s tuition dollars.
University leaders say they want to reach nontraditional students, many of them adults from historically underserved communities, at a time when traditional student enrollment is plummeting. The student head count at St. Cloud State has dropped from more than 16,000 in 2013 to about 10,000 last fall.
“It’s on us to do whatever it takes so that St. Cloud State University can remain a thriving and evolving university for generations to come,” Robbyn Wacker, St. Cloud State president, told faculty in August. “Keeping our university frozen in time will be its demise.”
St. Cloud State had planned to launch about a dozen accelerated online programs this fall. But this spring, after cutting dozens of faculty positions and suspending 70 academic programs, the Minnesota State system hit pause.
Now, Minnesota State is reviewing the proposal — examining the programs for academic rigor and the sustainability of its business model — before making a decision this fall.
Katherina Pattit, dean of St. Cloud State’s business school, is overseeing the development of some of the online programs and welcomes the “additional quality control.”
“It is very true not all of these partners are created equal,” she said, “and there are, in fact, some bad actors and practices out there.”
Many online management companies are being scrutinized by the federal government because of complaints about the educational value of online programs.
Academic Partnerships spokeswoman Katelynn Dugan said the company doesn’t interfere with a college’s decisions on admission standards, tuition costs, advising services, curriculum or instruction.
“The same rigor [students] have on campus will be the same rigor they have online,” Dugan said.
Why contract with a for-profit company?
St. Cloud State leaders say they need outside help because like many universities, theirs is still primarily designed to recruit and instruct young adults seeking an in-person experience.
“This will be very important for the [prospective nontraditional students] because we can’t just go to a high school with our outreach team,” Pattit said. “These people are all over the place and it’s very hard to reach them.”
Academic Partnerships works with about 50 colleges across the country, but mostly with graduate programs. Dugan said the company’s tuition model is designed to keep students enrolled.
“We provide all the upfront capital investment to help get the programs into an online format, then we help to recruit and retain those students through completion,” she said. “And as the student progresses, we get a share of that tuition, which means that if they stop progressing, we stop being paid.”
Why the push for 7-week online courses?
The proposed accelerated online courses are established programs at St. Cloud State — ranging from community health and psychology to nursing and cybersecurity — that would be formatted into seven-week classes.
Nursing professor Roxanne Wilson, who helped create the online program, is now helping transition semester courses to seven-week segments. She said the fast-track coursework is designed to be highly interactive to keep students engaged, and that she and many of her nursing colleagues are excited about the idea.
“I don’t have reservations,” she said. “Do I think we’ll have some challenges and things we need to change? Of course. But if we’re looking at how to meet the needs of the population of working adults, we have to do some things differently.”
Pushback from faculty
After Wacker announced the cuts this spring, the faculty union launched a “Save St. Cloud State” campaign to draw attention to the university’s “seven-year, $32 million contract with a predatory for-profit company.”
If accelerated online programs are in demand, faculty could develop their own, argued Jenna Chernega, president of the Inter Faculty Organization, which represents professors at Minnesota State universities.
“I think we have faculty who do a really good job at teaching online, and online education is a really good option for some students,” she said.
Chernega warned that many for-profit companies take advantage of low-income students or students of color by targeting them to sign up for classes but not caring about student success, often leaving these students with more debt and no degree.
Fred Zimmerman, a former professor at St. Cloud State, left the university this summer because he didn’t like the administration’s direction, including on what he called a “foolish” relationship with Academic Partnerships.
“Some people call [online management companies] academic parasites. Some people call it snake oil associations,” he said. “It’s not well thought of.”
Zimmerman, a longtime professor who helped found the school of engineering at the University of St. Thomas, taught graduate and senior-level classes at St. Cloud State, including a seven-week graduate course on strategic management.
He estimated that the accelerated classes fit only about 60% of the content from a semester-long in-person class.
In a rare public pushback, university administrators responded to the “Save St. Cloud State” campaign with their own “Stand with SCSU” webpage and hashtag. The page features videos of professors and local business leaders who support the university’s plans, as well as details about the agreement with Academic Partnerships.
Pattit, the business school dean, said she rejects the idea that condensed classes are less rigorous; instead, she said, faculty are challenged to highlight the most critical lessons.
Is there a need — at all?
The university projects it would earn $2.5 million in 2024 and $10 million in 2025 from the online accelerated programs.
But the university will be up against significant competition as it tries to recruit people looking to finish their degrees.
“If people really want to pursue online degrees, there are options all over the place,” said Neil Kraus, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and the author of three books on education policy.
Kraus said he thinks the real driver behind the push for new accelerated online courses are for-profit companies trying to make money and colleges desperate for enrollment and tuition dollars. He worries the result won’t actually benefit working adults.
“We’re going to give more people bachelor’s and advanced degrees, saddle them with more debt, make them fight for fewer jobs,” Kraus said, “and then higher ed will get blamed for that.”
St. Cloud State graduate David Tostenson, now a philosophy professor at Fort Hays State University in Kansas, has first-hand experience with creating an online program to attract students. The university advertised heavily on social media and students signed up — and then many failed to complete their degree.
“We have people who have been in the program online for eight or nine years and they’re not graduating,” he said.
Tostenson said online programs can be a good thing, but the burden often falls on students to be proactive and not fall behind.
“Just because it’s easier to sign up doesn’t mean it’s easier to finish,” he said.
That hasn’t ebbed with Simpli-Fi. The startup incorporated in 2018 as a company based out of Florida that integrated technology systems together in commercial buildings to work as a single unit. But business sputtered when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Campbell had to make staff cuts to his team of 16 employees. He called it one of “the worst times” of his life.
“But during that time is where we made a pivot,” Campbell said.
He set out to find a new technology, eventually spotting NASA’s electronic nose thanks to Brown Venture Group, a St. Paul based firm that supports Black, Latino and Indigenous tech startups. Campbell’s brother, Paul Campbell, is a partner at the firm but said he recused himself from the investment decision.
Chris Campbell was skeptical of the electronic nose’s capabilities at first but sprung for a commercialization license after spending a year researching the technology. By this past summer, he had moved the company to Minnesota and specifically the Osborne building because both are “known for device creation,” he said.
Simpli-Fi’s sensor packs some of the science of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry — which require huge machines — into a sensor the size of a dime, Campbell said. Using nanotubes, the sensor picks up metabolic qualities in the air and breath, he said.
For now, the company is focused on the C. diff-sensing Provectus Canary device, which scans the air around a hospital patient to detect the bacteria that causes the infection, which has gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea. The company is working toward the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval for using the sensor to detect various diseases.
A Minneapolis man was sentenced Friday to 20 years in prison for murdering his neighbor in their North Side apartment building last year.
Walter Lee Hill, 59, had pleaded guilty on Monday to second-degree intentional murder. He will get credit for having served nearly a year in jail.
Police were called to the Gateway Lofts on W. Broadway Avenue last November on a report that someone was shot. Officers found Donald Edmondson, 60, dead on the floor of his apartment with a gunshot wound to the chest.
A video camera in the hallway showed Hill knocking on Edmondson’s door, reaching into his sweatshirt pocket and firing his gun once. Hill then left in his Lexus, which officers found near Elliot Park downtown.
They spotted Hill walking nearby, asked for his ID and arrested him when he said something to the effect that they had the right guy.
A witness told police they saw Hill shoot Edmondson, and another said there had been an ongoing dispute between the two. Two days before the murder, Hill had called police because he believed neighbors were breaking into his apartment.
In a statement, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Edmondson “should still be alive. A violent act committed with such disregard by Mr. Hill has taken him from his family. This sentence delivers accountability and protects our community, and I hope it brings some measure of peace to Mr. Edmondson’s loved ones as they attempt to move forward with their lives.”
ROCHESTER – Buoyed by strong growth in the health care industry, Minnesota’s third-largest city continues to outpace the rest of the state in job creation.
The Rochester Metropolitan Statistical Area added about 7,000 jobs over the past year, a 6.3% year-to-year increase, according to the September jobs report from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). By comparison, Minnesota as a whole was up 1.2% during the same time period. The next closest region to Rochester was Mankato, which grew 1.6% year to year.
Much of the growth in Rochester MSA, which includes Dodge, Fillmore, Olmsted and Wabasha counties, was driven by a 15% year-to-year increase in the education and health services sector. The sector employed 62,435 people in the region in September, nearly half the overall workforce.
The strong job numbers come as Mayo Clinic breaks ground on the first phases of “Bold. Forward. Unbound. In Rochester.” The $5 billion project — the largest investment in Minnesota history — is expected to bring about 2,000 construction workers to Rochester in the coming years.
While Mayo has not said how many employees it plans to hire once the new facilities open, local economic development officials expect the impacts of the expansion to reverberate across the region.
“As their growth goes up, the rest of the economy grows as well,” said John Wade, president of the Rochester Area Economic Development, Inc. (RAEDI). “If you think about neighboring communities, too, there will be more housing opportunities and job opportunities and businesses looking to expand.”
Wade said he also sees potential for growth in other sectors tied to Mayo, such as hospitality, which makes up more than 8% of the region’s workforce. Precision manufacturing and medical technology were also identified as potential growth sectors.
Native of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood used NASA tech to revive shuttered company
World awaits potential Israel, Hamas cease-fire news as leaders head to Qatar
Minneapolis man sentenced to 20 years in prison for 2023 murder of neighbor
Native of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood used NASA tech to revive shuttered company
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings