A big thanks to Senators Hill, Tom, Becker, Kastama, and Litzow, who have put some money in our pocket here at the blog.  Last year, when the bill to establish Western Governors University-Washington was slithering through the legislature and everybody was promising that WGU would never come back looking for state funding, a betting pool developed around how long it would be before WGU came back looking for state funding.  The smart money was on two years, thinking the WGU folks would have the decorum to lay low for at least one legislative session.  But on a hunch we doubled down on one year.  And now, exactly a year later, Senators Hill, Tom, et al have introduced SB 6322—“Allowing nonprofit institution s recognized by the state of Washington to be eligible to participate in the state need grant program.”

Come to Papa.

WGU is a nominally non-profit enterprise, but their business model is no different from for-profit operations like Kaplan or Phoenix.  They depend a lot on federal and state financial aid, which is why the play for state need grant makes sense.

Their business also depends on a special appeal to working people.  With the same faux populism that Newt Gingrich uses to bash Mitt Romney, WGU-Washington tells prospective students that they can go to school after they’ve put the kids to bed, they can get credit for all the things they’ve learned out there in the rough and tumble world and they don’t have to put up with all the stuff that those twenty-year olds at real college do—football games, beer bongs, classes, actual professors, stuff like that. 

Despite the fact that we’re hopelessly snotty and elitist college professors here at the blog, we’re actually all for the Western Governor’s model in theory.  Godspeed to those who can teach themselves, those whose work and life experience have given them the knowledge and skill necessary to earn a credential, those who can demonstrate competence without logging any class time.  And certainly we’re all for people with jobs getting the training they need to get better jobs. 

What we’re not for is those people getting ripped off. 

Tuition at WGU-Washington will run you between $2890 and $3250 every six months.  Then there’s the extras: the resource fee ($145), the application fee ($65), the science lab fee ($350), the student teaching fee ($1000), and the education leadership practicum fee ($1000).  So let’s say you’re going to WGU to get a BA in Information technology.  And let’s say it takes you their advertised two years, half the time a real BA would take.  That’ll cost you $12,120, give or take (Nursing an Teaching will run you more). 

And here’s what you get for that 12 grand:

This is taken straight from the WGU-Washington website.  Translated, it means you get  1)  Course materials you can find for free in lots of other places all over the web (but not textbooks, those are extra); 2) some tests; and 3) someone to call for pep talks (not to be confused with teachers).  Twelve thousand bucks for that.

If WGU were really the working class heroes they claim to be, they would post links to all of the free learning resources for the subjects they teach online.  Then they would make their assessments available for a $100 processing fee.  You could do the same studying at night or on your coffee break and then take the tests and get your degree for a hundred bucks instead of twelve thousand.  The pep talks you’d have to get from your friends and family. 

That would, of course, cut into the budget for all the other stuff WGU does.  Advertising would take a hit and we’d certainly miss those peppy WGU-Washington commercials every ten minutes on T.V.  And then there’s lobbying--the Salt Lake Tribune reports that from 1999 to 2005, WGU spent at least $1.6 million on lobbying.  And the executive compensation packages would surely suffer. (A lot of folks in Olympia made a big fuss a few weeks ago when the CWU Board of Trustees all got high and gave Jim Gaudino $500,000 spread over the next five years—WGU Chancellor Bob Mendenhall’s $700.000-plus annual salary makes President Gaudino look like one of the 99 percent.)

That’s the stuff that’s now going to be covered by state need grant money—taxpayer money.  Or, at least we have to assume that’s where it will go.  At a time when the legislature is regularly beating on our very open and transparent real public universities to become more open and transparent, Washington’s sparkly new public online university is utterly unaccountable to the state.  WGU-Washington does not make its accreditation reports, its graduation rates, its student debt loads, its budgets, or its salaries publicly available.  SB 6322 is asking Washington taxpayers to take it on faith that their money going to WGU-Washington is somehow a good investment. 

But hey, WGU did turn out to be a pretty safe bet.