The Second Thing That Has Come Out of Texas in the Last 10 Years That Makes No Sense

UT Telecampus was a bright shining star in the world of quality, award-winning distance learning administration. Darcy Hardy was the one who taught many of us how to get it started way back when. So now they say that they did their work so well that their mission is complete. The only downfall visible to the rest of us is that it wasn't self-sustaining. Perhaps the mission needed to be updated and redefined, but am I the only one who is thinking that this makes absolutely no sense from a quality, economic (in the big picture), streamless student services, visibility, or common-sense viewpoint? Well, apparently not. Here's just a few tidbits of reaction from the blogosphere.

• " A service available at a larger campus might not be available at the smaller ones and they need the extra assistance. There is no discussion about the redundancy of effort in each campus having to reproduce each of these services on their own-with highly varying quality. What is the real cost of that redundancy? It will be buried in the campus ledgers." - Russ Poulin, WCET
• "One has to wonder: "What's the rest of the story". Elimination of the Available University Fund (formerly the PUF fund, I suppose) moneys could have crippled the TeleCampus by 2012. No doubt, the AUF has been losing money like any other fund, especially as Texas oil fields have become depleted. However, a longer-term approach to reducing dependency on those funds could be approached in such a manner as to actually improve the performance of the TeleCampus and the System's smaller campuses." - Mary Lee, past TxDLA president
• "Will the cost of marketing increase as each unit that markets their academic college scales up? Most likely, yes, unless you are the Business School and have your well-oiled marketing team in place, but if you are Liberal Arts, I doubt a true integrated marketing function exists. In the least, the stronger programs won't be there to underwrite the weaker programs. The richer will become richer and the weak weaker." - Jim Fong, Education Marketer
  

There's a lot more speculation and comments out there. It's quite interesting that this early consortium is shutting down, while others are just building up and experiencing major growths. I'd love to see what lessons there are, if any, to be learned.