Analyses of higher education frequently focus on the wrong questions, and few have proven more persistent or more damaging than this one: Is online education as good as the real thing? The premise itself is the problem.
Framing online learning as inherently suspect while treating the traditional classroom as the gold standard has never been grounded in evidence. It has been grounded in habit, and it has been costly. While we have been busy relitigating a debate that should have been settled years ago, millions of students have been making a different calculation entirely.
A majority of today’s postsecondary students take at least some coursework online. The workforce has largely moved on from asking how a credential was earned. Hiring managers want to know whether a candidate can perform. Transcripts do not come with a notation for physical seat time.
And in today’s age of rapidly changing entry-level jobs, learners require skills that last not just at the start but throughout a career. The lecture hall has never been a guarantee of learning, and the laptop has never been a barrier to it.
It is time to stop debating delivery and structure, and start demanding results. The students enrolling in our programs today look very different from the traditional residential students our systems were originally built to serve.
Today’s students are working adults, caregivers, career changers, and first-generation learners who need education that fits their lives, not the other way around. For these students, a flexible program is not a consolation prize. It is often the only viable path forward.
Make no mistake: strong quality and consumer protection standards are critical for ensuring that students achieve the durable outcomes we want them to. But designing quality frameworks that penalize flexibility is not protecting students. It is failing them.
Did the student finish? How long did it take? What did they earn before and after?
Do a learner’s credentials align with what employers are actually hiring for? What did they take on in debt, and can they reasonably pay it back?
Have we prepared the student simply for short-term results immediately after graduation, or have we prepared them for a lifetime with the ability to navigate changing technologies, workforce needs, and different cultures?
After all, research from the American Democracy Project has shown that workers with strong communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills consistently outperform their peers regardless of where or how they earned their credentials.
This civic and collaborative capacity is an important reminder that the full return on a degree shows up not just in starting salary, but in how people lead, engage, and contribute across the arc of a career. These are the questions that determine whether higher education is working.
Regional public universities often have strong answers to these questions. The problem is that our quality and rankings infrastructure was not built to surface them.
Third-party partnerships can help these institutions build programs that connect to real labor market demand, but only when the incentive structures are right. Too many provider contracts have been built around enrollment numbers, which means the institution absorbs the reputational risk when students don’t make it through.
The field needs to demand better: partners whose success is tied to the same outcomes we expect students to achieve—persistence, completion, and meaningful employment after graduation.
I saw first-hand the power of building online learning that worked during my time leading the Arkansas State University System, when we grew A-State Online to reach the students our traditional campus structure couldn’t fully serve: especially working adults who needed flexibility to hold a job while earning a degree, as well as first-generation students and transfer students who fell through the cracks between two and four-year institutions.
We built this with faculty first and foremost, and we also partnered with Risepoint to offer in-demand programs that deliver a high ROI. We were deliberate in leading with quality—rigorous curriculum developed by faculty, strong student support, and intentional design at every level.
Reorienting around quality requires action not just from institutions. Getting it right will require action on multiple fronts—not just from institutions and their partners, but from the policy and accreditation systems that design the rules of the road
Accreditors must build evaluation frameworks that treat online and in-person programs as equals, assessing both on evidence of student learning and economic advancement rather than on the physical characteristics of how instruction is delivered.
Policymakers need to redirect accountability conversations away from inputs and toward outcomes, asking not about the modality through which the students learned but whether learning actually occurred and whether it paid off—and not just immediately after graduation. This must include understanding the durable skills students learned and how their education benefited them in the longer term.
Institutional leaders must be willing to tell a more honest story about quality, one that begins with student results and works backward, rather than one that starts with program prestige and hopes the outcomes will follow.
