Regionally Accredited Online Criminal Justice Degree ?
Q: I am the Director of the Criminal Justice
program at Cloud County Community College. I am proud to announce that we
have recently received full accreditation for our ONLINE degree program from
the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association.
To my knowledge, we are the ONLY community college in our area to receive
accreditation from the Regional Accrediting agency. Other schools have been
authorized to offer individual classes, but under the rules of the Regional
Accrediting Agency a school must make a formal request for institutional
change before the degree program will be accredited. We have done that.
One of the best things about our program (besides the great instructors) is
the costs.
Kansas residents pay just over $49 per credit hour!!
Out of state (including International) students pay under $95 per credit
hour!!!
A:Sounds like a good opportunity for Kansans. However, I would not
expect a great response from the rest of the country when non-Kansans
are charged almost double the in-state rate. Most Internet based
programs seem to offer separate tuition rates that are uniform
in-state and out. I believe that is justified by the program being
self-sufficient. So, CCCC may want to reconsider this disparity if
they truly want to serve non-Kansans with this program.
We certainly considered the tuition issue closely when putting this program
together. As I'm sure most readers of this forum know, it is common for
state sponsored schools to charge a higher rate for "out of state" students.
Taxpayers are not willing to pay part of the costs of an education for
someone from outside their state. The alternative to this scheme is to
charge the same rate for all students, but then the taxpayers think that
you're gouging your fellow citizens. So, we chose to simply charge the
exact same rate for online classes as we charge for traditional (on campus)
classes.
The GREAT thing about all this is that our out of state tuition rate is
actually cheaper than most other online classes anyway. All that means is
that our in-state students get an even better deal. And not surprisingly,
our out of state students are pretty happy with their reduced costs as well.
Initially our emphasis was not on serving those outside Kansas. We are a
rural community college serving north-central Kansas and southern Nebraska
(by the way, we waive out of state tuition for Nebraskans living within 100
miles of the college). Our "service area" covers more than 900 square
miles! That means we have a lot of potential students who live up to 2
hours away from our campus.
When I first put this program together my main focus was on our law
enforcement community. Most of the police in our area do not have a degree.
It is also very difficult for them to come to campus to get a degree.
Distance education, especially online education, is a great way to reach
them right where they live and work.
Something funny happened, though.
We first offered only 1 or 2 classes online. Almost immediately we had out
of state students enrolling. In fact, my first class online was
Constitutional Law, and we had 3 students from Europe enroll in the first
two months. That made us pause as we considered the reason for this
phenomena.
We finally figured it out ... even with our higher out of state tuition rate
we were simply a great bargain. After a quick survey of the community
colleges online we found that the average out of state tuition was well over
$180/credit hour. Some schools were charging as much as $270/credit hour.
OUCH!!!
Things got even more interesting when we started looking at the larger
schools. For instance, schools like Capella, Nova Southeastern, etc., were
charging as much as $300 (or more) per credit hour. Even the state
sponsored schools charged very high tuition rates for the same level of
classes.
What's so great about our program, besides the price, is that our program is
fully accredited by a regional accrediting