Why come to Huntsville when you could just earn a degree online? Well, there are a lot of reasons why having warm bodies together in a room is beneficial, and I’m not just talking about romantic endeavors! Having a professor work with students directly allows questions to be answered, ideas compared and students can fully understand what their assignments are when they leave class to do homework. These things don’t happen in an online course.
Online courses offer many advantages for stay-at-home parents, established professionals who are trying to work full time and earn a degree or the physically disabled. Those who have already moved to a major four year university to be a full time on-campus student are not the ideal candidates for online classes.
Unfortunately, Sam Houston has started the nasty habit of requiring full time on-campus students to take some courses that are only offered online in order to complete their degree. Not only are students robbed of the excellent classroom instruction they would receive in a normal class, the university makes students PAY for the instruction they do NOT receive. If professors are not being provided to students in the usual manner, students should not have to pay the usual price for a full-fledged on campus class.
In addition, established four year universities ‘shoot themselves in the foot’ when they start to rely on internet classes as a cheep substitute to expanding their campus and faculty. In the process, they make an internet degree appear more attractive than their own courses of study. Why should parents send their young high school graduates to another city to live on their own if all they are going to do is take internet classes? You don’t have to live at a university to do that. Depriving students of the resources they are still forced to pay for, like classroom instruction, in order for administrators to have higher salaries or to build a giant clock in the middle of campus is not sound fiscal policy or the right way to grow a successful university.