Online Education Saved Higher Ed's Enrollment Numbers. Is It Costing Everything Else?

Online Education Saved Higher Ed's Enrollment Numbers. Is It Costing Everything Else?

I'm going to say something that might be unpopular coming from someone who is currently getting their doctorate entirely online: the shift to online education has come with real costs that most institutions don't want to talk about, and most of them are cultural, not technological.

The pandemic forced 90% of U.S. colleges online in 2020. By fall 2021, 61% of undergraduates were taking at least one online course, up from 36% in 2019. Graduate students are even more likely to be learning through a screen. That's not a temporary adjustment anymore. That's a permanent transformation in how higher education operates. And while it's expanded access for a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise have it, the research is clear that we're losing something in the trade.

Students Are Teaching Themselves, and Paying Full Price for It

The move online has quietly shifted the burden of learning from institutions to students. Online learners are now expected to set their own goals, find their own resources, manage their own progress, and regulate their own motivation. These were responsibilities that used to be shared with instructors and institutions. That's not inherently bad. Self-directed learning is a valuable skill. But here's the problem: 80% of Americans believe online education should cost less than in-person programs, and more than half of U.S. colleges are taking significant profit margins on online courses while charging the same tuition as on-campus programs.

Students are getting less support and paying the same price. That's not a pedagogical philosophy. That's a business model.

The research also shows this shift hits unevenly. Students with higher GPAs do better in online courses than their lower-performing peers, and that gap is wider online than it is in person. Self-directed models can increase stress and anxiety. Students consistently report feeling less supported. And here's a finding that should bother anyone in higher education: there's no association between self-efficacy and students' satisfaction with their academic achievement in these models. Students can believe in their ability to learn and still feel like the system is failing them.

The Relationship That Makes Education Work Is Disappearing

The single most influential factor in educational success is the instructor-student relationship. That's not opinion. That's what the research shows. And that relationship has been fundamentally weakened by the move online.

A study of over 3,000 students found that 78% described their online experiences as "not engaging," with 75% specifically missing face-to-face interaction with instructors and peers. Teaching presence is the strongest predictor of online engagement, but most instructors struggle to establish it in digital environments. Students report problems with delayed feedback, limited opportunities for real-time clarification, and the loss of nonverbal communication cues that make deep academic conversation possible.

The tools to fix this exist. Virtual office hours, recorded video lectures, creative use of discussion forums and breakout rooms. But most faculty aren't using them, either because they haven't been trained or because their institutions haven't invested in the transition. Many schools simply moved their in-person curriculum into a learning management system and called it online education. That's not adaptation. That's uploading a syllabus and hoping for the best.

The Quality Question No One Wants to Answer

Here's the number that should concern administrators: a Brookings Institution analysis reviewed numerous studies and found that virtually all of them showed online instruction producing lower student performance compared to in-person instruction. Meanwhile, 43% of students believe online education is worse. Only 29% of faculty approve of its effectiveness.

The U.S. Department of Education's own research says online learning can achieve comparable outcomes under optimal conditions. The key phrase is "optimal conditions." Most institutions aren't providing them. And the most consistent finding across the research is that blended approaches, combining online and in-person elements, outperform purely online instruction across disciplines. Labs, clinical skills, and creative fields suffer the most in fully online formats, but the quality gap shows up broadly.

This Is a Fixable Problem

The frustrating part is that the research doesn't say online education can't work. It says most institutions aren't doing it well. The problems documented in the literature are not inherent limitations of digital learning. They're consequences of institutional laziness and faculty under-preparation. Schools that invest in faculty training, robust student support, clear learning pathways, and thoughtful course design get good results. Schools that treat online delivery as a cost-cutting measure get exactly the outcomes the research predicts.

The cultural shift is real and it's permanent. Higher education has moved from a community-based, relationship-driven experience to an individualized, self-directed process. That trade-off might be worth it for access and flexibility, but only if institutions actually commit to making online education work rather than just making it profitable. Right now, too many are doing the latter and pretending it's the former.