The slow death of campus based law degrees

Barely Legal is on his high horse about the introduction of online Juris Doctor degrees ... Part of Pyne-O-Clean's rationalist cost-cutting agenda for universities ... Never mind the quality, feel the bulk 

An offline, real life, law lecture

THERE is a well-worn jape about online law degrees - they're not worth the paper they're printed on.

Yet, we live in the online age. The forward march of online education is to the beat of the economically rationalist drum, led in goose-step by our Minister for Higher Education Christopher (Poodles) Pyne. Slash wages, massively increase capacity, and minimise input costs. Output: degree.

As a postgraduate law student, former vice chancellery staffer, and (now burnt out) student advocate, I am acutely aware of what this new beat in legal education means - faculty restructures.

Group of Eight universities, like mine, are moving towards the introduction of entirely online Juris Doctor programs. Barely Legal can here reveal that the ANU, arguably Australia's most respected postgraduate educational institution, is about to release its "proposal" to introduce an entirely online Juris Doctor program, to run in parallel with the "offline" or "real life" Juris Doctor. 

It is a forgone conclusion that the degree will go ahead. I was in the focus group (you read that right) assembled by the faculty to better understand how recalcitrants like me would react to an online-only degree running concomitant with my own "in person" education.  No wider student consultation, no "stakeholder heat-mapping" - this has been education by focus group from the beginning.

The degree sausage maker has been put on the table at the ANU Law School, and an institution that has long prided itself on superior postgraduate education is about to start churning out low cost, economically rational degrees. 

Barely Legal understands similar ideas are currently under consideration by other Go8 Law Schools. To this extent it seems the ANU will continue a tradition of leadership in postgraduate education, even if we are led into a detached online black hole of legal education. 

Offline students

The university experience

The new online law degree would see budding lawyers isolated from the sunlight of student peers, isolated from the wisdom of their lecturers and tutors, and isolated from their future profession. 

This is not to say remote learning is an evil thing. My own mother completed a B.A. by correspondence majoring in Aboriginal Studies from Monash University. 

She did this while raising yours truly and two other rug rats in a remote farming community in rural Victoria, without spousal help. In those days lecturers went to the trouble of mailing course content to those they knew had no other access. 

It is this sort of scenario Go8 institutions will paint in response to those who resist online only degrees. Don't you think single mothers living in rural communities deserve to be educated too? Are you anti-single mother? Perhaps anti-education? Why shouldn't they get access!?

It seems eerily coincidental to me that while our rural universities are being declared economically unviable and uncompetitive, in a soon to be deregulated "tertiary marketplace", the biggest and richest universities, the Go8, are introducing low cost (to the university, not the consumer) online degrees offered to all and sundry, without a deep commitment to academic rigour or engagement in their local communities.

If these were the aims of the Go8, universities like the ANU and others of their (s)ilk would dramatically increase their funding to rural campuses, like the campus in which my mother sat her final exam, in Morwell. The Morwell campus has since been reoccupied by Federation University. 

The Go8 realise that such "real life" academia costs buildings, utilities, staff, and manageable class sizes. The reality is that online education can be foisted upon my rural peers, because universities can pay a lecturer the same amount to oversee potentially unlimited class sizes online (who all pay the same fees) instead of providing an academic roof over their heads in or near the town they choose to call home. 

Being an "offline" Juris Doctor student, I would say that, wouldn't I?