When Online Learning Isn't Extra Anymore

🖥️ More institutions getting into the online game; what the Columbia deal might mean for admissions elsewhere; and the international enrollment cliff. These are excerpts from my newsletter, Next. To get the full version in the future, sign up here.

🗓️ 35 days until Dream School hits bookshelves.

So I hope you'll excuse my full-court press in these final weeks to generate pre-sales, which are critically important to authors. Publishers and bookstores pay attention to those numbers when they decide how much effort they'll put into marketing a book and how many copies they'll have in stock.  

👀 Today, I'm giving you another sneak peek at my new book: the introduction.

Combined with the table of contents, you'll get a complete picture of what we're building together. Dream School: Finding the College That's Right for You gives families permission to think more broadly about what signals a "good" college—and then provides the practical tools to discover your dream school. 

If you already pre-ordered the book, thank you. If you plan to but haven't, please do now.

And once you do, be sure to complete a proof-of-purchase here to unlock a bunch of goodies:

• An 18-page guide that you'll get immediately by email and that we're giving away only during this pre-order period.

• Access to an exclusive webinar next month on spotting colleges that care about teaching. 

And if you already did all that, please tell friends who might be interested in the book by forwarding the table of contents and introduction to them. 

EVENT

Throughout August, I’m partnering with several outside groups to participate in free webinars about the book and college admissions. Next up: Grown & Flown

📍 Finding the College That's Right for You

🗓️ Wednesday, August 27 at 8:00 p.m. ET.

👉 Register here for free

THE LEAD

A defining feature of American higher ed compared to the rest of the world is that it’s made up of lots of small colleges.

Some 40% of U.S. institutions enroll fewer than 1,000 students. Most of these colleges are in the Northeast and Midwest—a legacy of a time when communities and churches founded schools around the country’s early years and again after World War II to serve returning GIs.

That’s how traditional colleges expanded. The growth of online learning, by contrast, has followed a different path. Over the past two decades, it’s become a more concentrated market, dominated by leaders like Western Governors, Southern New Hampshire, Arizona State, and the University of Maryland Global Campus—especially in graduate programs.

But the pace of that concentration has slowed since 2021, as Phil Hill noted in a recent newsletter, and neither the undergrad nor grad online markets have returned to the more consolidated state they reached in 2019 (see Phil’s chart below).

In the wake of the pandemic—when virtually every college went online in some capacity—many opted to remain there. They may not offer every degree online, but for programs that attract time-pressed, place-bound students, or where faculty are open to experimenting with delivery methods, sticking with digital makes sense.

So what does a more fragmented online market mean for both colleges and students?

For institutions, it signals that online is increasingly becoming a core line of business—one with the potential to offset some of the declines in traditional enrollment. 

Too many colleges still see their enrollment outlook solely through the lens of demographic trends, rather than through evolving student demand. But those colleges that are aligning their offerings with students’ lives and workforce needs—by launching or expanding online programs—are starting to see enrollment gains.

That was one of the findings from a three-part series of white papers I recently completed on online learning at regional universities (with support from Risepoint).

Even for colleges that have only dipped a toe into the online waters—or are still standing on the deck—there remains real opportunity (Part 1). Some of the most promising examples I found weren’t just about launching programs, but about embracing a broader cultural shift toward risk-taking, experimentation (Part 2), and more nimble program development (Part 3).

For students, the growth of online learning means that even traditional, on-campus students will likely take at least one online or hybrid course before they graduate.

I’ve heard from several parents, who are sending their first child to college this fall, that their first-semester schedule includes at least one online or hybrid class. That’s quickly becoming the norm (see chart below). At many institutions with strong online infrastructures, it already is.

At Arizona State, 57% of on-campus undergraduates—students who’ve explicitly chosen the in-person college experience—take at least one online course. Another third take hybrid courses that blend in-person and digital learning. In other words, nearly 9 in 10 students living and learning on campus are engaging with online instruction.

Bottom line: Just as students move fluidly between physical and digital spaces in their everyday lives, the same is becoming true in college. And now, two trends are reinforcing each other: as more students expect being online to be part of their lives, more colleges are building the infrastructure to support digital learning. And as more colleges offer online options, even traditional students are increasingly engaging with them.

But online learning isn’t just an add-on to serve existing students—it can be a strategy in its own right. For institutions looking to grow, diversify their student body, and align with the needs of adult learners and the workforce, online programs open up new markets and new models. 

Rather than a collision, this is a convergence—with the potential to create a more flexible, accessible, and resilient version of American higher education.

Could Columbia Deal Shift Admissions?

One reason American students have expressed interest in higher ed institutions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, among others, is not only because of politics or the price of tuition. They also like the admissions standards, which are often clear and straightforward compared to the “holistic” process adopted by most selective institutions in the U.S.  

But what if holistic admissions were to go away in the U.S., too?

What’s happening: When Columbia University struck a deal last month with the Trump Administration to pay more than $200 million to end several federal investigations, the agreement included a few provisions related to its admissions process. 

• Columbia promised it would “maintain merit-based admissions policies” and provide “admissions data…showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests” by October 1 each year.

• This provision on admissions from the Columbia agreement is likely to be part of any deal between the administration and other elite universities since those in the Trump orbit consider admissions at highly selective colleges to be unfair and biased against white students.

Background: Most selective colleges, including Columbia, follow “holistic admissions,” a procedure that considers factors beyond grades and test scores.

• This approach, which attempts to measure qualities that aren’t quantifiable and are usually gleaned from an applicant’s extracurricular activities, essays, and recommendations, is loved and hated in equal measure by parents and students. 

• Both favor a method that focuses on the “whole student” until they discover that applicants who had lower GPAs or test scores were accepted and they weren’t.

• Human beings like certainty and admissions procedures provide anything but. 

Driving the news: The agreement “might be pushing us towards…much more mechanistic admissions processes, as opposed to more evaluative stuff,” Peter F. Lake, a higher ed legal expert, told The Chronicle of Higher Education recently.  

• In other words, an admissions process more like what we find in other countries.

• At the very least, the requirement that Columbia include test scores in its reports to the government might encourage the university to follow some other Ivy League institutions in bringing the test back as a requirement. 

Bottom line: Coming up with a more mechanized approach at top-ranked colleges is likely impossible given that they get way many more applications than they have spots.

• Even if you simply line up applicants with the highest test scores and grades, you’d still have many more with perfect numbers than there are spots in the freshman class—and that’s before you have to figure out how to fill the athletic rosters. 

• So don’t count on holistic admissions going away. But one sure bet is you’ll learn more about who is applying—and who is getting into the most selective colleges in the U.S. 

SUPPLEMENTS

🌎 International Enrollment Cliff Ahead. The U.S. could lose 150,000 international students this fall, according to a new report from NAFSA: Association of International Educators, with overall enrollment projected to drop 15%—the steepest decline in recent memory. A pause in visa interviews this summer, new social media vetting, and limited consular appointments in countries like India, China, and Nigeria are to blame. The economic fallout? An estimated $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 U.S. jobs at risk. (NAFSA)

📈 Confidence in Higher Ed Ticks Up. For the first time in a decade, Americans are feeling more positive about colleges, with 42% expressing confidence in the sector—up from 36% in both 2023 and 2024, according to a new Lumina Foundation-Gallup education poll. Fewer people now say they lack confidence, and trust is rising across nearly every group—including Republicans, whose confidence rose six points to 26%. Still, higher ed’s reputation remains well below where it stood in 2015, and polarization persists: just 45% of Americans believe college fosters tolerance. (Lumina-Gallup)

💰 What College CFOs Are Saying. At a dinner I hosted with higher ed CFOs during their annual  meeting last week, the message was clear: the current business model is cracking—and tweaks won’t cut it. My top takeaways: You can’t cut your way to sustainability, but new programs won’t save you either. Philanthropy is underutilized. The best ROI is in retention. AI has promise, but boards expect more than it can deliver today. Faculty renewal—tenure and a lack of retirements— is the next big cliff. Leaders are data-rich but insight-poor. And in every room, culture—not cost—is the biggest barrier to change. (LinkedIn)

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff  

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