Students Are Backing Away From Online College
In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic began to squeeze and reshape higher education, I wrote that the experiment we were all about to endure might be worth it because it would expose the weakness of trying to teach and learn online.
Turns out, I may have been right about that.
And wrong.
I was wrong because I thought that we'd get answers on the grand exodus to online instruction 'in a year or two maybe.' It's been five.
I was also wrong in that I thought a push against the quality, cost, and time sink of online college programs would come from college leaders. I thought they'd look at the data, consider their own largely terrible experiences, and take a step back. Back then, I wrote, 'this virus crisis will force an untold number of college leaders to try going online and most will hate it. They will probably determine it's not worth it. They will talk to one another and write and share reviews. Schools will likely learn in a matter of months what otherwise may have taken years of earned learning to realize – that taking a college course online is not the benefit it can appear to be.'
By and large, college leaders didn't absorb that lesson from going online for Covid. I've been surprised that despite the terrible reviews and costly legal consequences, colleges have pushed ahead with online programs. They have even, in some places, expanded online programs in quantity beyond the pace of overall growth, causing individual program sizes to shrink. Nothing, it seems will stop college leaders from chasing an extra dollar.
In retrospect, I should have known better than to think that colleges would learn their own lessons and react accordingly.
Still, I was right about the bigger picture – that experiencing online education during the pandemic would turn people away from it. I was right about cause and consequence, just had the audience wrong.
It's students who are growing to dislike online education. That's according to the recently released 2025 Students and Technology Report from Educause, a nonprofit association that aims to advance higher education through the use of IT. The new report says, 'we continue to see shifts in modality preferences, with increasing numbers of students favoring on-site experiences, despite the post-pandemic expansion of online and hybrid learning.'
When compared to their 2023 report, the new version found that, 'Students increasingly prefer on-site course activities. Across categories of synchronous learning activities, students showed an increased personal preference for on-site course modalities.'
Educause broke that down a little too. Students strongly preferred some specific kinds of learning activities, lab work for example, be in-person instead of online – 75% to 19%. That's little surprise.
But students prefer in-class, on-campus settings for lectures too. The report shows that, 'Similarly, 64% percent of respondents noted that they prefer on-site lectures (an 8-point jump from 2023), while 30% preferred online instructor lectures (a 9-point decrease).' That's a 17-point swing in two years in favor of in-class instruction and a better than two-to-one preference.
Only in research and taking exams did students prefer online options. But even here, the trend is in favor of in-class opportunities.
'Research and exams, which were the only two course activities for which more students indicated a preference for online engagement in 2023 and 2025, also saw a shift: Although the preference for on-site research only increased by 2 points in 2025, reported preference for online research decreased by 7 points. When asked about exam preferences, 46% of students indicated that they prefer to complete exams on-site (a 6-point increase from 2023), while 48% preferred online exams (a 5-point decrease),' the survey found.
To summarize, for doing research, on-site preference moved 9 points. For exams, the preference is about even – 46% to 48% – but has also moved 11% in the in-person direction.
The survey also found strong student preferences in favor of on-site, in-person education for group activities, student presentations, class discussions, office hours with instructor, and peer/tutoring meetings. In other words, just about everything. All those, like the other examples, are moving in the direction of in-person learning.
And they are not subtle indicators. As Educause put it in the report, 'Taken together, these shifts in course modality preferences may indicate that students are increasingly interested in on-site experiences, especially for interactive, hands-on assignments and activities. It is interesting that students also indicated an increased preference for on-site engagement in traditionally individualized course activities, such as conducting research and taking exams.'
The message is clear. But it will be interesting to see whether school leaders get it. Learning my lesson, this time, I'm not going to bet they do. Even in the report's introduction, Educause says, 'we see institutions continuing to integrate digital tools and technologies and flexible learning formats.'
It will also be interesting to see whether all the rhetoric about meeting students where they are, and treating the student as customer, and letting students decide how they want to learn – whether all that will hold true when private education technology companies can't make a profit based on the answers.
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