Mission, Markets, and Modality: Organizational Decisions around Online Education at Minority-Serving and Predominantly White Institutions

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 15: Education and Inequality

Abstract

Online education has become a central feature of contemporary higher education in the United States, expanding rapidly across public and private nonprofit institutions. While existing research has focused primarily on student outcomes or institutional partnerships, less attention has been paid to how university actors make decisions around expanding online course offerings. This study examines how administrators and faculty understand the expansion of online education across Minority-Serving Institutions—specifically, Predominantly Black Institutions and Hispanic-Serving Institutions—and Predominantly White Institutions. Drawing on Weber’s theory of social action alongside theories of academic capitalism and institutional isomorphism, the paper investigates how organizational actors reconcile considerations of institutional mission, resource environments, student access, and field norms when evaluating online initiatives. More specifically, this study examines how administrators describe the relationship between online education and institutional priorities such as enrollment stability, access, and flexibility. It also explores how faculty interpret online teaching in relation to pedagogical commitments, student engagement, and the role of learning communities. By comparing narratives across institution types and organizational roles, the study analyzes how institutional context shapes the rationalities actors use to frame the same organizational shift. Rather than treating online education as a uniform technological development, this research conceptualizes instructional modality as an organizational transformation whose meaning varies across a stratified higher education field. In doing so, the study demonstrates how actors situated in different institutional contexts interpret and enact change in ways that may reshape differentiation across institution types.

Author

• Kea Saper, University of California-San Diego