As enrollment in online college grows, students wonder: Why does it cost more?

[Jilly_in_VA]

Emma Bittner considered getting a master's degree in public health at a university near her home in Austin, Texas. But the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend.

So she checked out master's degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper.

The price for the same degree online was … just as much. Or more.

"I'm, like, what makes this worth it?" said Bittner, 25. "Why does it cost that much if I don't get meetings face-to-face with the professor or have the experience in person?"

Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are using online higher education to subsidize everything else they do, a survey of the people who manage these programs finds. And some schools are spending significant amounts on marketing and advertising for it.

The result is that 83% of online programs in higher education cost students as much as or more than the in-person versions, according to an annual survey of college online-learning officers. The survey was conducted by Eduventures, an arm of the higher education consulting company Encoura, for the nonprofits Quality Matters and Educause.

About a quarter of universities and colleges even tack on an additional "distance learning" fee, the survey found.

Universities and colleges "see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for," said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/15/nx-s1-5311603/why-does-online-college-cost-more

Ain't that a kick in the head?

[mitch96]

1. " Why does it cost more?" Desire and need go up? The colleges see an opportunity to make more money..

Last edited Sat Mar 15, 2025, 01:59 PM - Edit history (1)

Like car dealers during covid...Opportunity and timing...
Follow the money...
m

[mike_c]

2. I fought online "distance education" for decades

Not just me; most of my colleagues in the Cal State University opposed them because we did not trust the administration to offer online degrees with the same rigor as those taught by expert faculty, in person. The admin treated those courses as cash cows, without any effective enrollment ceiling (some faculty who taught in those programs refused to take more students than they could handle, but many just did what they were told). They also insisted that the university owned the intellectual property rights for the classes and after some minimum number of offerings, many of the online classes could be handed off to grad assistants who worked for slave wages, or to part time lecturers at the bottom of the faculty pay scale. That made the issue a faculty union matter.

It's ironic that when the COVID pandemic forced all class meetings online, the faculty did a generally good job of distance teaching, although I think most of us remained uncomfortably aware of the shortfalls of online instruction. But I can assure you that saving students money was NEVER part of the discussion about online degree programs. Ever.