Overcrowding and rising costs have budgets at UCs and CSUs turning to online classes to appease their students’ needs. Though it might seem like a perfect fix for a student who needs to fulfill a course requirement, it’s not what we need to be seeing from our public universities.

Gov. Jerry Brown is attempting to fix an affordability problem by offering sub-par options in our public California universities. Although online courses will be cheaper, they’re not as good as traditional classes. The idea being proposed right now is to use the classes for high demand courses as well as courses students need to fill pre-requisites for degrees.

While more students will be able to take these online classes because the resources are more accessible and available, they’re missing out on having lecture and discussion with their professors and their peers. This makes it difficult to use online courses as a complete substitute for in-class learning.

These online courses are acceptable for remedial coursework or high school students looking to take a college class in preparation for their freshmen year. However, this system is not going to be a fix for the dwindling budget problems because it simply is not good enough to ideally replace classes.

A hybrid class that meets half of the time in person and the other half online could be sufficient middle ground. This would keep students in sync with their class and their professor. One that only has online content could become overwhelming for a student who is baffled by their textbook and have never seen or spoken to the “professor” for their course.

An online only class while exciting and innovative does not replace the fact that people learn in a variety of forms. Learning is usually associated with the five senses; information sticks because we relate it in a way that we can remember. A complete course could have many outlets for people with different learning types but an online course would stifle many people because of it’s one dimensional lesson plan. This solution falls short because the public universities in California can’t keep cutting the quality of their classes only in favor of quantity.