The Marketplace of Schools

Education thrives on diversity and experimentation. Not everybody has the same needs, and the provision of many different models and means of education helps to ensure that people have many different opportunities open to them. This fall, the University of Massachusetts hopes to bring the first online courses to China, pioneering a program has the potential to benefit thousands and greatly improve educational access.

UMass, which claims to be the amongst the first foreign universities to offer an approved online degree program in China, will offer 40 of its courses to students at Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University. By giving students the opportunity to receive credit for these courses, which could differ greatly both in substance and style from courses available from Chinese universities, the program seeks to diversify the educational options available to Chinese students. One need only look at the profusion of international schools all over the world to see that one’s geographic location does not and should not necessarily restrict the available types of schooling.

While this program will only include about 5,000 students, we hope that it is successful enough to lead to similar experiments in the future. In addition to providing greater opportunities for students, a large base of such programs would help to establish connections between younger generations in China and the United States. Although we are unsure at how much effect this particular, somewhat limited program will have on cultural exchange, its introduction is a sign of greater global community, and it signals a future in which the Internet allows different countries to share cultural and intellectual innovations.

Despite our overwhelming optimism for the program’s success and proliferation, we remain concerned about the possibility that contentious course material might be censored or altered—especially considering that the Chinese government regularly restricts access to certain sites it deems “subversive.” In this case, Chinese officials have promised not to censor the courses, but we are hesitant to trust them to hold to their word. Even recently, when China was bidding to host the Olympics, it indicated that it would improve the human rights situation within its borders, and it has so far failed to live up to those promises. We hope that the requirement that the Education Ministry approve degree programs does not devolve into government censorship of course content, which would undermine the entire pedagogical goal of the project.

While the effectiveness of this program, which ultimately could depend the government’s role, remains to be seen, the establishment of the program itself is a historic and promising sign. We can only hope that other schools follow UMass’s lead in bringing new educational opportunities to previously untapped markets.