Online Student Aid: Tiptoe, Don’t Run

Technology advocates in Congress like Rep. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) say they are racing “as fast as we can” to lift rules prohibiting billions of dollars in federal aid from flowing to students taking classes online. On this issue, there’s such a thing as too fast.

Internet educators argue that the “50% rule”--a law that prevents federal grants and guaranteed loans from going to colleges that teach more than half of their courses via “distance education”--is a drag on their business. Some drag. A Merrill Lynch study estimates that the U.S. market for online college education will grow from $1.2 billion in 1999 to $7 billion in 2003, a phenomenal amount for an industry that barely existed a decade ago.

A hasty new expansion of distance education could, as the American Federation of Teachers pointed out in a report last week, create a “two-tiered system” that directs “less affluent students to online courses while the socializing and networking benefits of an on-campus education remain largely the preserve of the affluent.”

Some easing of the 50% rule may be in order. Distance learning does, for instance, offer rural students a chance to learn from the best big-city educators and enable states like California to accommodate growing student demand.

However, the 50% rule was crafted for good reason--to inhibit fly-by-night correspondence schools of the sort that cropped up everywhere in the 1980s. Repealing it altogether would only encourage similar abuse online.