College Uncovered: Cyber School

Miami Herald

23-05-2025

Here's a milestone you might not have heard about: It's projected that this year, for the first time, more college students will take all of their courses online than will take all of their courses in person.
Online higher education has come a long way from its predecessor, the correspondence school. The universal shift to remote learning during the pandemic only accelerated that momentum. It has also allowed more comprehensive research into whether online teaching works as well as the in-person kind.
But even as more students go online to learn, there are many caveats about this fast-growing innovation. We talk to the experts about who should take online courses, where they should take them and in what subjects. We also lay out questions to ask of online providers, such as what kinds of real-world supports - office hours, tutors - are available.
Finally we solve a mystery that frustrates countless consumers: why most online courses cost as much as, or more than, the brick-and-mortar kind. After all, technology has lowered prices in almost every industry. Come with us as we expose the reason higher education can somehow find a way to charge more for a product that by all rights should cost less.
TRANSCRIPT
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered. I'm Kirk Carapezza …
[Jon] … and I'm Jon Marcus.
[sound of online courses] Welcome to the new B.A. from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences here at ASU. This course is called 'Elements of Culture.' … We've got a fun topic today. We're going to talk about making time for science every day. … Now, some psychologists research what's called narrative identity. …
[Jon] You're listening to the fastest-growing kind of college courses: the kind being taught online. Those are examples from Arizona State University and Western Governors University.
It's predicted that this year, for the first time, more college students will take all of their classes online than will take all of their classes in person. That's a huge milestone in higher education with a really simple reason: flexibility. You can take online courses any time and any place. You don't have to move to a campus or even commute to one. And that's important to the growing number of people who are working and raising families while they're in school.
But don't log on yet. There are a lot of things to think about before you decide to go to college online.
[Sabria Williams] At first everything was wonderful.
[Jon] That's Sabria Williams. She lives in North Philadelphia and works helping people who are older or have intellectual disabilities. Williams went online to get a bachelor's degree.
[Sabria Williams] It was hard work, but when you're dedicated and you want to get something done, you're going to do what you have to do to complete your classes.
[Jon] Like a lot of online students, her goal was to move up. Doing it online seemed perfect for her. She's 38 with five kids in her blended family.
[Sabria Williams] I'm a mother. A wife. So I have, you know, very little time to go to school in the field now. You know, I'm not a young spring chicken anymore. I just needed to be able to do this online on my own speed and during my own personal time.
[Jon] Williams spent two years taking online courses from a for-profit university and racked up $32,000 in debt. Then she got an unwelcome surprise from her loan company.
[Sabria Williams] And they're, like, 'Oh, well, it was your responsibility to find out if they were properly accredited or not.' I'm, like, well that can't be because they're going to tell me that they are, you know, and they're going to try to provide whatever they can to make it seem as though they're, you know, accredited.
[Jon] That's right, the school was not accredited during part of the time she went there. Williams dropped out. It took her seven years to get her loans forgiven after the government found the university misled her and other students.
Now she's given up on college.
[Sabria Williams] I just got kind of discouraged. I'm just, like, I'm going to drop it
[Jon] Now, a lot of online higher ed is not only convenient, it's perfectly legitimate. But, as this case shows, you need to be careful. So if online higher education is also an option for you, we'll tell you how to avoid experiences like that and how to make sure you get the most out of it.
This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I'm Jon Marcus of The Hechinger Report …
[Kirk] And I'm Kirk Carapezza with GBH. Colleges don't want you to know how they operate. So GBH …
[Jon] … in collaboration with the Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
Today on the podcast: 'Cyber School.'
[Kirk] We've been talking this season about the demographic cliff. That's a decline in the number of traditional-age college students. So universities are trying to attract new customers by teaching them online.
Now, online higher education goes back much further than you think. It has its roots in correspondence schools that would mail out textbooks and tests for students to work on and mail back. Here's a TV ad from 1993.
[sound of television commercial] Do you want to make more money? Sure, we all do. So call this free number to find out how easy it is to train at home for a better career. And now at home in your spare time, you can get your diploma or your degree. …
[Kirk] Things really took off with the advent of the internet.
[sound of television commercial] What if you could get your college degree from a leading accredited university, from home, at the office or while traveling. At the University of Phoenix online, you attend class when and where you want, via the internet. …
[Kirk] It was for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix that first dominated online higher education. And many of them had poor success rates, which gave it all a bad rap. But a few prestigious colleges and universities eventually also went online.
Online higher education really blew up when MIT announced an ambitious goal: It would provide MIT courses for free online to anyone in the world who wanted to take them.
[Dimitris Bertsimas] This was a monumental story. This was the beginning of the internet. And MIT decided, and I'm very proud of that, that all of these educational offerings will be open and free to the people.
[Kirk] That's Dimitris Bertsimas. He's vice provost for open learning at MIT where he's been on the faculty for 40 years.
By the 2010s, MIT and others had developed something called the MOOC. That stands for massive open online course. MOOCs were a way to teach thousands of students at a time, and they were supposed to revolutionize and democratize higher education. They were offered by edX and Coursera and many others.
[Jon] Yeah, Kirk, MOOCs became a pop-culture phenomenon, even on late-night shows.
[Stephen Colbert] My guest tonight is an MIT professor who believes the future of education is on the internet. I can't wait for BuzzFeed's '10 Biggest Comp Lit Fails.' Please welcome …
[Kirk] I remember that. They were a really big deal at the time. I mean, how often were university professors on Colbert?
Dimitris Bertsimas of MIT taught a MOOC in quantitative methods, which was the second MOOC that was launched by MIT. But even he says MOOCs didn't entirely live up to the hype.
[Dimitris Bertsimas] It had about a million learners over a decade. It's a pretty significant. If you look at it from an individual perspective, this is a significant reach in the world. But financially for the institutions it was not a success.
[Kirk] That wasn't the only way that MOOCs didn't pan out. It turns out learners really do need to interact with each other, and with faculty. And that was an early lesson that came from trying to teach online.
[Dimitris Bertsimas] Education has a social component. If the only thing you do is online education and you have no human experience, no personal relation with your classmates, no personal relationship with your teachers, the data suggests that it is not as satisfying in a somewhat impersonal online experience.
[Jon] So, Kirk, there's the first thing to be cautious about when choosing to take courses online: Make sure there are things like office hours and tutors and advisors, just as there are for students who go to college in person.
At the beginning, these kinds of things were rare and early results from online higher said, were poor.
[Ramya Shankar] I'm Ramya Shankar. I am an associate professor at City College of New York.
[Jon] Ramya Shankar says that students tended to do worse online than they did in person.
[Ramya Shankar] If you looked at a variety of outcomes - for instance, if you looked at course completion rates or degree completion rates or even labor-market outcomes in terms of the prospects for employment, the prospects of getting a good wage - all of these were found to be consistently lower for students who had enrolled in online degrees compared to traditional degrees.
[Jon] Shankar says these comparisons were not entirely fair. That's because the differences in success rates were partly due to who was taking online courses. They were often people who had to balance school with work and families, like Sabria Williams - not more privileged high school graduates with the time and money to live in dorms and spend time in the library.
[Ramya Shankar] It may not have been that the online degree itself was of low quality, but the low outcomes were driven more by other features, like the social or economic circumstances of students who were selecting themselves into these degrees.
[Jon] Then Kirk, the universe presented an unprecedented opportunity to test this.
[sound of television newscaster] Across the country, the coronavirus has abruptly forced at least 55 million kids from elementary school to college out of their classrooms. They're now trying to learn at home.
[Jon] The pandemic forced everyone online, and that provided a chance to really test how online higher education worked.
[Ramya Shankar] It gave us this wonderful natural experiment where suddenly you didn't have students choosing online versus in person. It was decided for students.
[Jon] Basically, the entire world was the control group. So you could see which kinds of students benefited and who was struggling online.
[Jon] Shankar's research started to find that online higher education was doing a better job than people had thought it was, before Covid. And she says it's gotten better since.
[Ramya Shankar] Technology has advanced so much in the last few years. Remote conferencing technology has advanced so much. An online course is coming very, very close to a substitute, a really good substitute, for an in-person class, and I think that's only going to get better.
[Jon] Kirk, as we've heard and will continue to hear, not everyone agrees that online education is a good substitute for in-person learning. But one thing is for certain: For better or worse, the pandemic got people used to it. And that has only sped up the growth of online learning, including with traditional-age students who might once have started as freshmen on a brick-and-mortar campus.
[Philip Regier] Flexibility and convenience is a huge reason why students come to online.
[Jon] Philip Regier is CEO of Ed Plus, which designs online courses at Arizona State University.
[Philip Regier] If everybody could go to an on-campus setting, they would, but that's simply unrealistic for the vast majority of our students. Now what we're seeing with the students who are beginning online is that type of freedom is also a huge attraction for them.
[Jon] Not all online higher education is the same. A lot of those for-profit universities are still around, and they still deliver comparatively poor results. Many turn out graduates who don't make enough to pay off their college loans or who don t make more than adults in their states who didn't go to college. That's according to federal data released during the Biden administration.
[Philip Regier] Where you got your degree and what you got your degree in is going to be on your resume forever, or your LinkedIn profile, in this case. And I think very carefully about being expeditious versus being thoughtful about quality.
[Kirk] Okay, Jon, so the first piece of advice is to be careful where you take your online courses. And today you have a lot more choices, including big flagship universities and smaller private colleges with good reputations.
[Jon] Yeah, but Kirk, as with a lot about higher education, not everything is as it seems. Some of those brand-name schools actually contract with third-party providers to run their online divisions. These are called online program managers. But you might never even notice.
[Kirk] Okay, this is a really crazy hurdle for students. These online program managers are mostly for-profit. They do their own marketing and some of them hire their own faculty, even though the course says it comes from a well-known institution. So before you sign up for an online course, ask exactly who will be teaching it.
[Jon] Okay, Kirk. That's the where, and the who. Now let's deal with how these places teach online.
Online learners who are out there alone by themselves, they tend not to do well. That's what happened with the early MOOCs. Good online programs now have real life people available to students who need them when they need them.
[Deb Adair] Often they're taking these courses, you know, late at night and at odd times, and so they have to have these resources available, and those are, you now, the tutoring centers and the library materials and the other academic supports that are available.
[Jon] Deb Adair is CEO of an organization called Quality Matters. It's a sort of seal of approval for online programs. She says you shouldn't stop at asking simply whether or not a school has these things. Make sure you can find them.
[Deb Adair] You can't just walk to campus and knock on a door, right? So you're going to have to have that all spelled out.
[Kirk] Okay, Jon, so let's talk about another important question: what to take online.
[Jon] Yeah, Kirk, I talked to Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University. It's not only the biggest online university, it's the country's biggest university of any kind, with nearly 176,000 students.
I was surprised to hear Pulsipher say that not every subject can necessarily be taught well online - at least not yet.
[Scott Pulsipher] As you moved further into areas that might require project-based learning or hands-on learning or even Socratic methods, those do get a little trickier to do online. It's really hard to teach, if you will, a technical skill that requires, like, reconstructing a particular mechanical item. So if you're going to do mechanical engineering, that might be a little tricky to replicate, even if you were using augmented reality in an online environment.
[Jon] Of course, the most important question is whether your online education will lead to a job or a promotion, because that's the main reason you're doing it, right? Pulsipher says there's a simple way to find this out.
[Scott Pulsipher] What is the employment rate of the graduates of that program? Are they employed in the field of study? What kind of income gain or data do they have with that? The other thing that you can just even search and just start to understand is, like, to what degree are graduates of different institutions employed at different employers? You can do searches like this on LinkedIn.
[Jon] Kirk, this all obviously sounds like a lot of work, but the truth is that online higher education is getting better and finding quality programs is getting easier.
[Kirk] Yeah, Jon, a lot of those online program managers are going away or their deals are being renegotiated. More schools are adding advising and office hours for their online students. Online courses are even getting smaller, which allows more personalization.
[Jon] Right, Kirk. But that brings us to a surprising reality I learned recently while working on a story about online higher ed. You'd think it would be cheaper than in-person college, right? In fact, 80 percent of Americans think online higher education should be cheaper. That was a big part of the promise of shifting online. I mean, technology has lowered the price of almost every other service that uses it.
[Kirk] But … not higher education?
[Jon] Nope! More than 8 in 10 online programs cost as much as or more than the in-person versions. And about a quarter of universities and colleges even charge an additional distance learning fee.
[Kirk] Just leave it to colleges to take a good thing and make it worse. So what's their explanation?
[Jon] I'm glad you asked! So we've been talking all this season about how the number of traditional age students is going down, right?
[Kirk] The demographic cliff.
[Jon] Yeah, the demographic cliff. So a survey of online officers found that universities are using the money from their online programs to keep the lights on - to basically subsidize everything else they do.
If you look on social media, you can see how infuriating this is to students. More importantly, it's yet another reason to keep tuning in here to get the truth about how higher education really works.
[Jon] This is College Uncovered. I'm Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report …
[Kirk] And I'm Kirk Carapezza from GBH. This episode was produced and written by Jon Marcus …
[Jon] … and Kirk Carapezza.
This episode was edited by Jonathan A. Davis.
Our executive editor is Jenifer McKim.
Our fact checker is Ryan Alderman.
[Kirk] Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.
Mei He is our project manager. And head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
[Jon] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation.
It's produced by GBH News and The Hechinger Report, and distributed by PRX.
Thanks so much for listening.
More information about the topics covered in this episode:
Find online courses certified by the organization Quality Matters.
Watch a video about what to look for when picking an online course.
Read about how most online courses cost as much as or more than in-person ones, and why.
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