You Missed The Runway

New federal data reported by Inside Higher Ed confirms online learning is now permanent infrastructure throughout higher education.

Duh.

If you've spent any time working in professional & continuing education the last 10 years, this new reporting doesn't surprise you. But where the data can be helpful to senior leadership at private nonprofits is illustrating where they are lagging dangerously behind other institutions.  

Private for-profit four-year universities have the highest rate of online enrollment of any sector (90.5%) of students taking at least some classes online in fall 2024. The for-profits have been "all-in" on online delivery for a long time, a legacy of schools like the University of Phoenix building their entire model around.

Public nonprofit colleges are second-highest and climbing, with 54% of their students taking online courses in fall 2024 (that's up from 35 percent in 2019). This growth is attributed to demographic pressures that are shrinking pools of traditional 18-to-22-year-olds and pushing publics to use online programs to reach adult and nontraditional learners as an alternative student base (see Indiana University for a public that is doing this exceptionally well). 

Private nonprofit universities are growing online enrollment anemically slow (46% of their students took distance courses in fall 2024), just as they are reeling from steep tuition dependency, evaporating traditional enrollments, and acute budget deficits. This is also the slowest moving sector in higher ed. There are hundreds of private nonprofits struggling just to get out of the hanger because too many of them are wedded to a dying business model and doubling down on their "residential experience" as an identity worth holding onto. And while nearly all of them have an internal unit built to actually compete for non-traditional online learners (their PCE/O units), too many are dismantling their PCE units and calling it "efficiency" and reorganization. 

If the serious mid-tier tuition dependent privates looked at their peers that are doing online right, they'd pause on folding their school or college of professional & continuing education into generic back-office divisions of hacks, and delay handing their PCE budgets to unctuous consultants selling 300-percent online enrollment growth fantasies. Stop and look at what NYU, Northeastern, Boston University, USC and DePaul are doing with their PCE units' decades of online delivery, adult-learner expertise, and market-sensitive pricing.

The private nonprofits that figure this out in the next two years will realize tangible alternative revenues just as their traditional enrollments bottom out. The ones that keep dismantling their PCE units to save pennies this FY or next are just adding miles to their increasingly dilapidated runways.