This Thursday, the House Higher Education Committee will hear HB 1822, a bill establishing Western Governor’s University as an official state university. HB 1822 is the companion to Senate Bill 5136, which the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee has already heard.

The house committee will no doubt see the same parade of HEC Board members, Gates Foundation functionaries, and Community College administrators that the Senate did. They’ll hear about the magic of online learning–how it’s better, faster, and most importantly, cheaper than real college.

When the hearing is over, we would encourage members of the committee to fire up their laptops and go to this link: www.wgu.edu

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What they’ll find there is a very slick website full of information about Western Governor’s University. What they won’t find is any mention of faculty.

And that’s why online learning is cheaper. It cuts out teachers. And teachers are the one thing that universities shouldn’t be without.

Compare Washington Governors University to the Open Courseware Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WGU invites you to “earn a degree that employers value.” M.I.T. says flatly that Open Courseware is “not an M.I.T. education,” does “not grant degrees or certificates,” and that the project only provides access to “the course materials that support the dynamic classroom interactions of an MIT education.”

M.I.T. is one of the world’s finest universities and the Open Courseware Project has become the gold standard for online learning. It operates in the best academic tradition of making knowledge as broadly and freely accessible as possible. Online universities take what are probably inferior versions of the free M.I.T. materials and sell them to students along with some access to a “mentor” or “facilitator.”

Western Governors University is what it is and, as a clearinghouse for credentials, it probably does a decent job, certainly better than profit machines like Phoenix or Kaplan. But it is not the engine of education and social mobility that the online advocates say it is—none of them are sending their children to online universities.

HB 1822 will change nothing. It gives no money to Western Governors University, creates no oversight or quality control and gives lip service to credit arrangements that are already in place. The only thing that this bill will do is hide the fact that we are destroying public four-year education. Designating Western Governors University an official Washington university will allow the legislator to claim that they increased degree production and pretend that our middle classes aren’t losing the promise of college. Real college, the kind with professors.