If you were in school yourself, or knew someone or had children in school when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, then you probably remember well what it was like when education moved entirely online.
And if you remember that, then you probably remember the refrain that accompanied those early pandemic days: At some point, everyone hoped, things would go “back to normal.”
As it turns out, online education — to varying extents — is the new normal at the post-secondary level. Data from the Department of Education’s Integrated Post Secondary Education Data Systems shows that a majority of college students took at least one or more of their classes online in 2022: 54%. In pre-pandemic fall 2019, it was just 37% of students.
“That was really due to a spike that occurred during the COVID years that really opened up the eyes of both students and faculty that might have been resistant to online — even though a lot of what happened during COVID wasn’t really what I would call ‘online education,'" said Anthony Piña, Illinois State University’s chief online learning officer, in an interview.
Piña said the percentage of college students taking at least one online class had been creeping up by about 2% every year since the early 2000s. Had virus mitigation efforts not pushed all education online, Piña said the expected figure would have been 43% of all college students having at least one online class last year — not the ten-points-higher 53%.
“I think that reflects a lot of the trends we’re seeing at Heartland [Community College],” Kate Herald Browne, HCC’s director of online education and instructional technology, said in an interview. “45% of our students take online classes. If students didn’t want these courses, they wouldn’t be enrolling in them even if we offered them.”
The way that Herald Browne sees it, a broad offering of online courses positions HCC to better serve the needs of its students. No online-only degree programs are offered, but the ability to take some classes remotely expands student access to Heartland.
“I think when you’re talking about education, there’s a commitment you make to your students: That you will meet them where they’re at,” she said. “The inclusivity of online learning is what is going to make institutions like Heartland much more attractive to folks — not just inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake, but to say, ‘You see me, you recognize me and what I’m going through in my life, and this education will fit into the complexity that I’m experiencing now.’”
And for a college with nearly half of its students enrolled in at least one online class, Herald Browne says HCC’s future goals with online learning are not necessarily focused on expanding that percentage.
“It’s more about, ‘What are we doing correctly to maintain that 45%? What are students enjoying about these classes? What are our learning outcomes? How can we go deeper into the style of teaching that makes this experience really meaningful?’” she said. “There are some folks who just think that’s not possible for online learning — that it’s not serious. But I don’t believe that; I truly believe that online learning is and can be the best of both worlds.”
New, online-only degree programs
But some institutions see expanded online courses as a sort of unexplored frontier or means of offsetting rising costs and declining enrollment ahead of the expected drop in potential students in coming years.
In Illinois, the cohort of high school seniors set to graduate last year was down 5% already from a 2015 peak. That total is projected to drop by at least 22% by the mid-2030s, as reported by Crain's Chicago. The dropoff was part of a recent presentation by ISU interim president Aondover Tarhule who said the university is bracing for 2026, when 20,000 fewer students are expected to graduate high school.
For some universities, the effects are already being felt: In Wisconsin, three regional campuses of the University of Wisconsin are set to move to online-only instruction to avoid closure after lagging enrollments.
ISU recently welcomed its largest freshman class since 1986, but sustaining those numbers may prove challenging. Piña, a longtime educational technology professional, was hired in 2022 to be ISU's chief strategist on expanding and improving online learning — a position explicitly created ahead of the "enrollment cliff."
“ISU has been very successful at being a university for what we would call traditional students: Students who are here to study full-time. Students who either live on campus or close to campus,” he said. “Where many of our sister campuses are struggling and shrinking or closing down programs, that hasn’t been our problem here, so online learning hasn’t really been a large focus.”
With the number of students graduating high school set to drop precipitously, Piña said the university is eyeing different markets for its education. The university hired education consulting firm EAB to help identify new targets for expansion and landed on a series of new graduate degree programs.
The online-only master’s degree programs will be offered in public health, actuarial science and sports management, though they are still pending approval and finalization. It’s possible that some online-only undergraduate degree programs could be offered in the future, though that's not the primary focus currently.
“What we’re using online for is to reach markets that that we don’t currently reach: Employed students, people who started college and didn’t finish, and students from outside of the U.S.,” he said. “We don’t have to grow: With our strategy, we’ll be able to backfill and not shrink and be in that panic mode that so many of our peers are.”
Since the ultimate goal is to bring in additional revenue sources, professional certifications and microcredentials are also among the ways ISU plans to grow online; Piña said collaborations with some of the area’s largest employers like State Farm, Rivian and Country Financial are “an untapped market” for online learning.
"The whole idea behind this is to provide more options, more choices. ...Technology is used for one reason only: To solve problems. And if that problem is that you're physically separate from the campus, then you have online and distance education to solve that particular problem," he said.
