Most schools for postsecondary education offer various forms of distance learning, and most of those are online programs, making online degrees an increasingly popular option for prospective students. In this section we aim to provide some information on the online education industry so that you are familiar with the way it has evolved and grown over the last decade.
Online education is often synonymous with distance learning. And the National Center for Education Statistics groups online education into the larger distance learning bucket when compiling statistics on postsecondary education. Here are some interesting stats that they’ve compiled:
- In 2006-07, 66% of the Title IV post secondary universities offered some sort of distance learning education, including 89% of public 4 year colleges and 70% of private 4 year colleges.
- 66% of institutions had undergrad programs available for distance learning versus 60% for graduate programs.
- There were about 12.2 million enrollments in college-level distance education courses in 2006–07. Of those, 77% (or about 9.4 million) were in online courses.
- In the 2006-07 school year, there were about 11,200 college level programs that were designed for distance learning
- In the fall of 2006, the school with the highest number of total enrollments was the University of Phoenix Online Campus at 165,373 - more than three times that of Ohio State University’s main campus program!
Other interesting statistics provided by Sloan-C’s “Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008”:
- Over 3.9 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2007 term, a 12 percent increase over the number reported the previous year.
- The 12.9 percent growth rate for online enrollments far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth of the overall higher education student population.
- Over twenty percent of all U.S. higher education students were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007.
- Institutions that offer programs to serve working adults are the most positive about the potential for overall enrollment growth being driven by rising unemployment
As is plain to see, online education programs are in the mainstream and an integral part of today’s postsecondary education environment in the United States.