While overall enrollment in higher education has fallen since 2012, distance education growth continues, a new report shows. The report examines the trends and patterns of distance education enrollments among U.S. degree-granting higher education institutions.
The report titled “Digital Learning Compass: Distance Education Enrollment Report 2017,” conducted by the Digital Learning Compass organization, reveals that in 2015, more than six million students — nearly 30 percent of college students — took at least one course online.
“The overall higher education environment is changing,” said Jill Buban, PhD, senior director of research and innovation for the Online Learning Consortium, in a press release. “The total pool of postsecondary students has been shrinking for each of the last three years. At the same time, the demographics are shifting to a student community primarily comprised of adult and other contemporary learners, for whom distance learning often provides the best path to a post-secondary education. As schools compete for students in this environment, distance learning programs become essential to their ability to succeed.”
Some of the key findings of the report:
- The number of students studying on a campus has dropped by almost one million (931,317) between 2012 and 2015.
- Of the total 6 million distance education students, 2.9 million are taking all of their courses at a distance and 3.1 million taking some, but not all, distance courses.
- More than 1 in 4 students (29.7 percent) now take at least one distance education course (a total of 6,022,105 students).
- A year-to-year increase of 226,375 distance education students, a 3.9 percent increase, up over rates recorded the previous two years.
- Public institutions command the largest portion of distance education students, with 67.8 percent of all distance students.
For more information, go to the full report.
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0