We seem to be keeping good company regarding distance education:
http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/best-online-masters-engineering-programs/I'm not convinced online education is always effective, but I'm fairly sure there are more effective ways to convey instruction than relying heavily on the traditional lecture. From everything I've read, A&M limits online degrees from the College of Engineering to non-thesis masters degrees.
It's hard for me to find fault with the University finding ways to control costs and prices. I also flat out reject the premise that a former student or a current student can easily detect or track a change in quality. And USNWR doesn't have a direct measure for tracking instruction quality either other than essentially word of mouth.
None of this excuses indiscriminate growth. But planned growth to grow revenue and manage via scale can be done. And, yes, there will be more adjuncts and more carefully selected tenured faculty moving forward.
As a specific example: a friend of mine from either my class or the class behind me graduated with a P.E. from A&M, then took a J.D. from Stanford focusing on intellectual property. He's taught at Tulane for quite a while and when I heard the law school was bolstering their intellectual property faculty I thought "they should hire him."
Turns out they did. He's an example of a strategic, fully tenured hire. And there's little doubt those kinds of resources can be recruited and it sounds like Dr. Young is providing insight to the BoR on how to accomplish this.