Even as fewer students overall pursue a higher education, online courses are rising in popularity — including at private nonprofits, which historically were slower to embrace them, according to a report released yesterday.
More than 6 million students — a large majority of whom were undergraduates — enrolled in at least one online course in fall 2015, according to the first in a series of publications from a research partnership between the Babson Survey Research Group, the blog e-Literate and the education nonprofit WCET.
This year’s report relied on federal data from more than 4,800 institutions.
[Learn how to choose between nonprofit and for-profit online programs.]
For the third consecutive year, online student enrollment fell at for-profits in 2015 but continued rising at nonprofits. And for the first time, private nonprofits enrolled more online students than for-profits, though public universities remained the most popular.
Jeff Seaman, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and co-author of the survey, says more students at private nonprofits flocking to online classes might go hand in hand with the decline at for-profits as some seek alternatives. Private nonprofits overall experienced the largest growth in online student enrollment between 2012 and 2015, rising by double digits each year.
“I think we have to think of it as them finally coming of age,” says I. Elaine Allen, co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group and a co-author of the report. “They’ve been growing slowly but not jumping in, and maybe this is an opportunity that they were ready to go into.”
As an example, Allen points to the public, nonprofit Purdue University‘s decision to acquire the for-profit Kaplan University and turn it into a new, public online university mainly for working adults.
Meanwhile, the co-authors attribute falling for-profit enrollment to bigger drops at just a few of the largest for-profit online colleges rather than to declines at many schools. Remo ve those larger institu tions from the equation, Seaman says, and the for-profit sector is “as healthy” as the others.
In fact, the proportion of schools report ing increases in online student enrollment between 2014 and 2015 was similar across the three sectors; about two-thirds of institutions saw more students pursuing online courses in 2015 than the previous year.
When it comes to the larger for-profits, “The issues are slightly different for each one, but they had a lot of negative attention,” says Seaman. “There were issues that came up about lots of things that would impact their ability to attract and enroll students.” Seaman adds that he expects online, for-profit enrollment to stop dropping in upcoming years.
[Discover four facts about for-profit, online education.]
Among more key findings: The total number of on-campus students — those who aren’t taking any online courses or who are enrolled in both online and on-ground classes — dropped by nearly a million between 2012 and 2015. Two- and four-year for-profit schools lost almost a third of their on-ground students in that period, and two-year public universities saw about a 10.4 percent drop.
That’s likely because both the number of students pursuing college and higher-level degrees decreased, along with the growing popularity of online learning, the report’s co-authors say. Online programs that provide alternative credentials like lower-cost certificates and nanodegrees might also contribute, Allen says.
Fewer students on campus will “present a problem for some schools going forward, because they’re no longer going to need big brick-and-mortar classrooms,” Allen says.
The report also lists 50 schools with the greatest number of students in at least one online course for 2012 and 2015, with the University of Phoenix at the top for both years. Overall, the differences in the lists illustrate the ever-changing state of higher education as more universities offer online learning, Seaman says.
[Explore ways to decide whether an online program is legit.]
The report then highlights the 50 institutions that experienced the greatest increases in the proportion of students enrolled in at least one online course from 2012 to 2015. Topping the list is Southern New Hampshire University, a private nonprofit, followed by Western Governors University, also a private nonprofit.
“There are still a lot of differences in institutions in how aggressive they are and how successful they are in trying to add their distance components,” Seaman says.
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Study: Online Learning Enrollment Rising Fastest at Private Nonprofit Schools originally appeared on usnews.com
