At Inside Higher Ed, Rick Hess has an article on an Obama-administration program that aims to make college available to more students, but that marks “launched a worrisome but largely unnoticed assault upon the nation’s publishers and the vibrant market in online learning.”

Part of the program is an “online skills laboratory,” a resource through which “the federal government will ‘invite’ colleges, publishers and ‘other institutions’ to create online courses for Uncle Sam in a variety of unspecified areas. The feds will then make the courses freely available and encourage institutions of higher education to offer credit for them.”

As Hess says, such resources already exist. Online courses and materials are spreading rapidly, and online enrollments grew from 1.6 million students in 2002 to 3.9 million in 2007 (more than 20 percent of total enrollment that year). The problem, apparently, is that “colleges and universities offer them at prices that approximate those charged to students enrolled in more costly traditional instruction.” What the federal program does is intervene in that market by offering services free of charge.

They would do better, Hess says, by intervening in the anti-market devices already at work: “credentialing and regulatory practices that impede the emergence of low-cost entrants; state-funded institutions that use new e-learning students to cross-subsidize other units; and proprietary operators that have happily responded to this cozy arrangement by competing on convenience rather than price.”

His conclusion:

For those who think that the U.S. Department of Education can develop instructional programs and identify promising innovations and opportunities more effectively and efficiently than the messy market place, the “Online Skills Laboratory” must sound like a swell idea. For those who believe that functioning markets generally yield better outcomes than state-directed enterprises, it is a very troubling development.