When Starbucks recently went searching for a school to provide online education for baristas, it didn’t look twice at the University of Arizona.
The UA had nothing to offer the world’s largest coffee chain since none of its bachelor’s degrees is available online. Now that’s about to change.
After years of delay, the UA is launching a new chapter in its history by offering some of its undergraduate degrees over the Internet, beginning with the fall semester.
The move could help create thousands of new Wildcats worldwide, and is expected to add tens of millions of tuition dollars to the UA’s coffers, officials said.
It also offers UA dropouts a chance to resume their studies without returning to campus. Instead, they can interact with professors and classmates through video chats, email and document-sharing sites.
People are also reading…
“Students everywhere now have access to a life-changing University of Arizona education,” said Vincent Del Casino, the UA’s vice provost for digital learning, who’s leading the new effort.
Until now, the university has only offered graduate degrees online.
The 21 new online offerings include bachelor’s degrees in diverse fields such as business administration, psychology, meteorology, philosophy and “e-society,” which encompasses digital information and data science.
The tuition rate is the same for all students, regardless of residency: $490 per unit.
The UA is the last of the state’s three public universities to offer online bachelor’s degrees, a delay that gave rival Arizona State University a huge head start over the last five years or so.
ASU now enjoys a top 10 national ranking in online education, culminating last year with its megadeal with Starbucks to provide degrees to the chain’s employees.
The UA intends to seek out similar corporate partnerships for its online bachelor’s program, Del Casino said.
Such deals can be lucrative. ASU’s online program, for example, brought in $80 million in gross tuition revenue last school year, a number expected to jump to $144 million in the coming school year, ASU records show.
The UA will spend about $6 million for start-up costs, and expects the online undergraduate program to bring in $41 million over the next five school years, Del Casino said.
Some of that revenue will go back into the online program for upgrades.
Money left over could go toward other UA needs, he said.
Del Casino says the online degrees will be equal in quality to those earned on the UA campus.
“The admission standards are the same. It’s a fundamental misconception that online education is somehow easier and less rigorous,” said Del Casino, who teaches world geography online at the UA.
One wrinkle is that the UA hasn’t yet figured out how to provide online students with real-world experience in their fields before they graduate, as it now does for those who study on campus.
Melissa Vito, UA’s senior vice president for student affairs and enrollment management, credits UA President Ann Weaver Hart with getting the new program off the ground by making online education a high priority.
Previous efforts in years past stalled repeatedly due to “very significant budget cuts and severely strained resources,” Vito said.
“I think what we have done is a major achievement,” she said. “Last year at this time, there were no undergraduate degree programs.
“Now there are 21, with the infrastructure and support to help students be successful.”
