27. Online Education In The Bay Area: New Gold Mountain

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In the last post Simple Solutions For Mills College Financial Situation we showed you Hung Liu's installation Jiu Jan Shan - Old Gold Mountain. This was an old Chinese nickname for San Francisco.

In this post we will describe to you the new mountain of gold that Northeastern University has identified in the Bay Area. Who is standing in their way? Mills College, their biggest competitor in the region.

Where does Northeastern see the most money for themselves in the Bay Area, with a course that mixes online and face-to-face? Masters in Higher Education Administration.

What is the one course Mills College is accredited to deliver online (and face-to-face)? Masters in Educational Leadership.

Thanks to Dani Aidan Stone for digging this up.

Sharpening The Pencils In Higher Ed

While President Hillman and the Board tell us that there's just no market any more for what Mills College is selling, the system-gaming masterminds at Northeastern have come to the exact opposite conclusion.

In January 2019 Northeastern University was looking to launch a new degree, a Masters in Higher Education. They undertook market research to study where the most lucrative markets for their program would be. They identified the Bay Area.

Who was the only competitor that could match Northeastern's combination of face to face and online graduate courses? Mills College, of course. Not even "Stamford" University had the full spectrum of offerings.

The leading provider in this space "has experienced phenomenal growth over the past 5 years"...and this was before COVID drove the entire world online:

Northeastern has now gone live with their Online Masters in Higher Education. It costs $32,000.

Mills College Accreditors Approve

When Mills College launched a new online degree program in educational leadership it was another landmark in the 92-year history of the Mills School of Education. Mills was praised by the accreditation team from WSCUC for their "robust" implementation of online education:

The program was announced in July 2018 in conjunction with Noodle Partners.

Noodle have developed new solutions for their university customers to engage their alumnae base:

[Source: Inside Higher Ed]

15% sounds fairly reasonable; Apple takes 30% on the App store. Did Mills select the option for Noodle to do the marketing? Or did they try to "save money" by doing it themselves - or not doing it, as the more likely outcome was.

[Source: Inside Higher Ed]

Marketing to alumnae because they are more likely to do a course offered by their alma mater: it seems like a no-brainer. So it's no surprise the Hillman team did the opposite, projecting blame onto the AAMC for their own actions, attacking and dividing the alumnae, sending people on the college's payroll to infiltrate resistance groups to demoralize and spread disinformation.

How could Mills College find another $10 million to address its "structural deficit" without doing anything different? Just find another 300 students who want to take this already created and proven online course (assuming whatever Northeastern can charge for an online Masters in Education, Mills College can also, ie. $32k per student). Or find another 30 courses that each can attract 10 students. Mills College offers more than 50 Liberal Arts majors, so this seems within the bounds of possibility rather than something beyond imagination.

Share The Booty

The tragedy of this situation is that online education could easily be a way for faculty to be inlcuded in the financial upside of Mills College's restoration. Why settle for a meager pay rise every ten years, when you could have skin in the game with a share of the fruits of your labors? Professors can earn royalties like rock stars in the metaverse.

The global population of university graduates is expected to double over the next decade, reaching 300 million by 2030. China and India will account for nearly half of all the world's degree-holders. On average bachelor's graduates earn one-third more and master's graduates earn two-thirds more. [Source]

Online education is booming. The global e-learning market is growing at 9.23% a year and is projected to rise from $188 billion in 2019 to $376 billion in 2026. Higher Education is expected to be about 10% of that market - if Mills were to claim market share of merely 0.01% that would be ~$8 million per year. E-learning courses consume 90% less energy and produce 85% fewer CO2 emissions per person than face-to-face education. In 2020, 41% of students believed that the quality of their college-level online learning experience was far superior to physical classroom learning. 65% of U.S. faculty members advocate for online learning courses and educational resources. [Source]

[Source]

CONCLUSION

Northeastern gets to eliminate a major competitor AND take their campus as a bonus. We can't blame them for being smart. But we do have to ask...why can't Mills see the same value in online education that Northeastern does? Why doesn't Mills College get to reap the rewards of being in the right place at the right time, after a 169-year journey to get there?

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