or the academic quality of the people soon to join the Boilermaker family. As a financial matter, the deal is very favorable and low-risk to Purdue. The most serious question revolves around Purdue’s reputation and whether it might be diminished in some way by expanding the range of students to include more working adults. It’s not the first time such objections have been raised. Maybe these statements sound familiar: • These “colleges are resorting to all kinds of devices to get students.” • [These institutions] are really universities “in aspiration rather than fact”; They pretend to the title of “university.” • These schools are “robbing the U.S. Treasury.” • “A foolish effort to substitute an imitation and a counterfeit article for the genuine...” You might guess that they come from the current Purdue Global debate. But in fact these are criticisms from the Morrill Act debates of the 1850s and 1860s, when Purdue and its land-grant counterparts were created. Similar disparagements likely accompanied the post-World War II expansion of Purdue’s mission to take in the returning GIs in the regional campuses that we operate today as Purdue Northwest and Purdue Fort Wayne. The democratization of higher ed, and its broader accessibility to wider sections of society, has always drawn detractors from within the incumbent system of the day. Penn State has operated its online Penn State Global Campus for 20 years. The University of Maryland has served adult learners
online through the University of Maryland University College since the mid-1990s. Neither university has suffered reputational damage. Rather, each has brought vital opportunity to working adults, military servicemen and women, and disabled citizens for whom coming to a residential campus is simply not an option. Typically, voices of criticism have received vastly disproportionate attention compared to the many, highly credible statements of support for our Purdue Global move. Ultimately, it won’t be either the supporters’ or the critics’ forecasts that matter, but rather the results. Kaplan University graduates achieve excellent results today in better jobs and higher wages. If we do our job well, these outcomes will continue and improve; as part of our governance of Purdue Global, we plan to constantly analyze and report them publicly. inflation,” in which average college grades keep drifting up and up (despite documented lighter reading and homework loads) runs counter to the longtime Purdue culture of challenging students and pressing them to reach their full potential. As best one can tell, our average grade may no longer be substantially below the national average. If so, and if this shift is evidence that our traditional culture has softened over recent years, it presents the question whether this is a desirable, inevitable, or troublesome trend. RIGOR AT PURDUE The striking phenomenon of “grade
30 May 2018
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