Houston may be its home, but leaders of the city’s community college have their sights set on the entire globe.
In the fall 2025 semester, Houston Community College administrators will launch their new “Global Online College,” hoping to entice more international students to take classes virtually from their home countries.
HCC Chancellor Margaret Ford Fisher and other college leaders say they mainly hope it expands HCC’s brand across the globe, attracting more students to their roughly 60 fully online programs. They’ve also touted the move as a way to boost tuition revenue and meet a growing demand for online classes post-pandemic.
“Imagine the value for our students,” Ford Fisher said in front of roughly 900 attendees during her November State of the College speech. “An associate or baccalaureate degree at a community college price. … While we focus on our community, we must think more broadly and expand our reach much further.”
Still, uncertainty surrounds the ambitious plan. In response to questions from the Landing, college leaders did not detail the demand for such programs, how HCC will measure success of the initiative or whether the college will increase staffing ahead of the launch. HCC Online College President Jerome Drain said “there are no goals that I’ve set” for a number of students to enroll.
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HCC drew roughly 3,500 international students in 2023, the most recent year with available data. Students came from roughly 130 countries, with the largest shares from Vietnam, Nigeria, India and China.
But attending Houston’s community colleges virtually from abroad doesn’t seem to be a popular option — at least for now.
Drain didn’t provide an exact percentage of how many students attended HCC virtually while living overseas in the fall 2024 semester. At neighboring Lone Star College, international students comprise just 1 percent of the online college’s enrollment, said Laura Bettencourt, interim president of Lone Star’s online campus. Lone Star College is the largest community college system in Texas.
This is all very blue-sky at the moment, so there’s no indication about who this is for, how many people might use it, how it will benefit HCC and its mission, and so on. Oh, and no cost estimate as yet, too. I can see a case for this – surely, having more online options would benefit current and future students who might have need of them – but beyond that it’s just not clear what this is about. On the plus side, at least now I have a clear question to ask HCC candidates and incumbents about when I do the very limited round of interviews on tap for 2025. Assuming there are contested HCC races to be had this year, of course. We’ll see if this goes anywhere, but in the meantime I’d really like for the Board of Trustees to ask a whole lot of questions about this.
Charles: I think this clearly represents mission creep on the part of HCC. The mission assigned to Texas community colleges by the Lege is twofold:
(1) Provide career training for potential or actual employees of local employers.
(2) Provide a lower cost path for the first two years of college for students aspiring to baccalaureate or graduate degrees.
There is a long standing problem in organizations of all types (academic and non-academic) that they prefer to expand their empire rather than focus on the quality of their products or services.
HCC has struggled to build its enrollment in substantial part because it takes in a high percentage of academically deficient students many of whom never succeed in remediating those deficiencies. Putting more resources into getting success with existing students is not glamorous, but it has a high benefit for the Houston community.
I suppose that a global online college could be justified as a revenue generator if the College can make a true profit on those students from outside the area. But, you may remember when HCC got involved in creating a community college for Qatar and made very little, if any, true profit from it.
I would be much happier if HCC stayed focused on improving success rates with students from our region rather than trying to build a big reputation in China and Viet Nam.
So, a healthy skepticism regarding this proposal is definitely in order and I encourage you to question the HCC candidates about how this proposal would actually benefit the Houston community. I would be happy to visit with you about this if you have any interest in doing that.