The following is part of a memorandum from the president of Humana University. Last year the number of students who enrolled in online degree programs offered by nearby Omni University increased by 50 percent.

The following is part of a memorandum from the president of Humana University.

“Last year the number of students who enrolled in online degree programs offered by nearby Omni University increased by 50 percent. During the same year, Omni showed a significant decrease from prior years in expenditures for dormitory and classroom space, most likely because instruction in the online programs takes place via the Internet. In contrast, over the past three years, enrollment at Humana University has failed to grow, and the cost of maintaining buildings has increased along with our budget deficit. To address these problems, Humana University will begin immediately to create and actively promote online degree programs like those at Omni. We predict that instituting these online degree programs will help Humana both increase its total enrollment and solve its budget problems.”

Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the prediction and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the prediction.

In this article, the president predicts that implementing the online degree courses will help increase the enrollment in Humana University as well as solve the budget deficit problems, because of the increased enrollment in similar programs in Omni University associated with its less money spent on maintaining school buildings last year. However, there are a few questions regarding his/her lines of reasoning that requires further analysis. The argument could end up being pretty convincing or invalid in the end, depending on the answers to those questions.

To begin with, I need to ask whether there exists other factors that can help explain the less money spent on classroom space in Omni. While we are informed that the amount of enrollment in online courses increased significantly last year, we need to know if the students in Omni actually lived in the dormitory or not. It is possible that students were more inclined to live in their own home instead of in the university. If so, Omni did not necessary have to spend money on maintaining the dormitory because no one lived in it. Then the expenditures would reduce a lot and it is doubtful to attribute the reduction of the budget in Omni to the increased enrollment of online courses. As a result, the argument of the president will be weakened.

In addition, the comparability of the two universities remains an unanswered question. The author reaches its prediction based on the fact in another university, but we have no information concerning the appropriate way of teaching of the courses in these two universities. For example, if Humana has practical courses like chemistry and biology so that experiments need to be conducted in the classroom but Omni does not, then the courses in Omni are more suitable to be taught through the internet instead of in the classroom. If it is the case, the implementation of online programs in Humana is unconvincing. In other circumstances it is not.

Even though the online courses can actually help reduce the expenditures and two universities are comparable, we still need to put forward the question that whether the implementing of these programs will be beneficial in the long term. If the implementation requires quite a few expensive high-tech equipment, the cost will be considerable large and may even exceed the income. In this case, the online programs will not be profitable and the argument made by the author will be unreasonable. Otherwise, the measure will solve the budget problems.

To sum up, while it may be logical to institute the online programs in order to increase the enrollment in Humana, we still need to consider several questions regarding other factors that may contribute to the decrease of the expenditures for buildings in Omni, the comparability between Omni and Humana, as well as the profitability of the measure in the long term. Only after those questions are adequately addressed can we effectively evaluate the president’s argument and reach a logically sound conclusion.