Repost from January 30, 2025
By John Watson, Digital Learning Collaborative
The percentage of post-secondary students taking one or more online courses has generally been higher than the percentage of K-12 students who are online, and accurate data are more available at the post-secondary level as well. Therefore, it’s worth checking in on post-secondary online learning enrollments from time to time. Fortunately, we have good federal data (IPEDS, from fall 2023, covering both two-year and four-year institutions, and including graduate programs) and an excellent blogger (Phil Hill) analyzing the data. Let’s jump in.
The key data points, according to Phil’s analysis:
- 53% of college students took at least one online course (that’s obviously more than half, but it’s worth pointing out—that’s more than half!). This includes students who were enrolled in all online courses and those who took a mix of online and face-to-face courses.
- 26% of students (not 26% of 53%) were in fully online schools/programs.
- 28% of the total were in a mix of online and f2f. (The numbers don’t quite add up due to rounding.)
Comparison to K-12
We do not have K-12 data sets that are as good as post-secondary, but in broad terms some comparisons are apparent.
- Both the full-time online student percentages and the “mixed” are far higher than K-12 numbers.
- Full-time online post-secondary numbers are a bit more than 10x K-12.
- Mixed (or part-time online) are harder to estimate because there aren’t good estimates of these data for K-12. But a rough estimate might be that the post-secondary part-time number is about 5x higher than K-12.
A more interesting comparison—which is beyond the scope of this blog post—would be the percentages of post-secondary online students versus high school students, not all K-12 students. Maybe an even better comp would be against high school juniors and seniors.
I would certainly not suggest that these numbers demonstrate that post-secondary as a field is 10x ahead of K-12. But there’s no question that post-secondary is somewhat ahead of K-12.
Comparison to pre-COVID numbers
We have anecdotes and limited data sets suggesting that more K-12 students are in online and hybrid schools and courses than pre-pandemic. The post-secondary numbers are more clear. Quoting Phil:
“it now appears that we had roughly a 12% jump in students taking some online courses from what we would have expected before the pandemic for 2023. The view that Covid caused students and faculty to not want online education is not borne out by the data…Covid accelerated the shift to online even beyond the campus shutdowns.” (Emphasis in the original.)
It’s important to clarify what Phil means here. It’s not just a 12% increase from pre-pandemic numbers. Online enrollments were increasing pre-pandemic. The 12% increase is a jump up from the numbers if we just extrapolate the prior trends.
Again, the K-12 data are not nearly as comprehensive, and I can’t say that online enrollments jumped by 12% against the baseline trends. But the available data do suggest that we saw a similar step-function increase in the trend line.
Implications for K-12
These numbers suggest three summary points for our field and policymakers in particular:
- Online learning is more accepted in post-secondary education than in K-12.
- Many students who are college-bound will end up in at least some online courses.
- Recent trends, including the pandemic, strengthened the move to online and hybrid learning, despite the poor experience that some students and teachers had with emergency remote learning during COVID-19.