Huge Surprises From the 2024 Online College Students Report

It now seems like every month, a new survey of online college students appears that contains unexpected surprises. One of the more interesting recent polls comes from Education Dynamics (EDDY), the Kansas City-based higher education enrollment consulting firm that counts 500 colleges and universities across America as clients.

The firm’s 2024 Online College Students Report seems curious because it provides different perspectives about online students not shared by many of the recent surveys and reports we’ve covered in several feature articles here at OnlineEducation.com. As suggested by Forbes education expert Derek Newton in his insightful 2023 analysis of an earlier Education Dynamics survey, one concern is that some results might not align with online learning’s inspiring and optimistic promise to expand access to higher education among certain constituencies. Those were groups largely shut out of—or passed over by—higher education before the internet era. And because a university’s brand is its promise to students and alumni, the data also might not align with certain brand promises made by the online divisions of some American colleges and universities.

The beneficiaries of this expanded educational access offered by online education during the past 30 years mostly fall into two groups:

1. Communities traditionally underserved by higher education, including first-generation students along with marginalized minority and disabled students. This group also includes folks with commitments that conflict with attending college classes in person, like those with employment, family, and childcare obligations.
2. Folks for whom regular attendance at classes on a college campus is geographically challenging or impossible. This group includes those who live in rural areas long distances away from campus and those unable to relocate to attend the college of their choice or the best college program that admitted them.

Because the internet provides universal access to convenient and economical instruction, many had hoped that huge numbers of folks in these groups who had passed up chances to study in person at colleges and graduate schools would now take advantage of those opportunities through online course delivery. Those online education advocates had also assumed that instruction via the internet would serve to “democratize” access to transformative, life-changing degrees and credentials–life advantages that only elite factions in the past could access and afford.

Let’s first examine how this survey’s data compares with promises that the online delivery of instruction would expand access to higher education. Then we’ll look at a few more controversial surprises this poll disclosed.

First, here’s a telling excerpt from the survey’s overview section:

In general, respondents tended to be female, white and employed, with no children living at home. Most are not the first in their family to enroll in college. The majority enroll in their state of residence and tend to live in suburban areas throughout the country.

Undergraduate respondents are most commonly white women with a median age of 29 who are not of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin. More than half are single, and 49 percent have no children living at home. About half are employed full time, with the largest proportion working 40 hours per week. They have a median of five to six years of work experience and a median household income of $48,400.

That analysis doesn’t appear to describe the profile of a disadvantaged sample. And neither do many of this poll’s individual statistics.

According to their report, about 72 percent of EDDY’s sample of online undergraduates are white. That compares with the national average of 53.4 percent of college students who are white—which is actually a 35 percent increase when compared with that national average.

Black or African American students only accounted for 21 percent of the sample, and Asian students accounted for only seven percent. Separate polling revealed that students who identified with some degree of Hispanic ancestry didn’t make up more than one-fifth of all respondents.

This is also a relatively affluent sample, with the majority (43 percent) living in suburban areas. The sample’s median household income is just under $50,000, and that might not sound like much in the way of earnings in 2024. However, three-fifths of the sample are single adults, and this sample’s median age is quite young—only 29 years of age.

Almost half the sample—44 percent—have no children or dependents to support. Other things being equal, the lack of dependent-related expenses would substantially boost their disposable incomes. Moreover, about 28 percent of the undergraduate students actually earn more than $70,000 per year.

Now we come to a set of polling results that, in the view of online education advocates, seem to defy logic—and will leave a lot of observers scratching their heads.

Because America’s largest mega-universities like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University have massive budgets for TV and social media advertising that enable them to recruit students from across the nation, a widely-held belief has developed that the online divisions of most other universities also recruit students from all 50 states. But based on this undergraduate sample’s surprising preference for colleges near their homes, that can’t possibly be the case for the vast majority of American online college programs.

How far away an online college’s campus might be from an online student’s home or employment is extremely important to 34 percent of this sample. What’s more, an overwhelming proportion of undergraduates (84 percent) told the pollsters that proximity to an institution was a determining factor in their selection of a program—even though that program was delivered online and they could study anywhere.

Sixty-five percent sought an institution less than an hour’s drive away from their home. Despite that online delivery is available anywhere, only five percent were willing to consider a program offered by a school farther away than a two-hour drive.

It may be true that the pollsters uncovered one exception to this compelling preference for online colleges within driving distance, in that three-fifths of the undergraduates reported that they’d “enroll at a school regardless of location, as long as the program met their educational goals, or it was the right program for them.” At the same time, only 20 percent reported that they’d enroll at a school one or more hours away by car, and 15 percent said they would only enroll close to home.

Why does this curious local college preference exist for online programs? As suggested by Newton, it might be that potential students strongly prefer schools in their local area they already know well, and which can also offer them resources available in person.

So many unexpected findings appear in this survey that it’s challenging to keep track of them all. Here are more of the surprising results:

Almost All Online Students Previously Stopped Out

This survey’s next jaw-dropping conclusion is that 90 percent of respondents had stopped out of college or graduate school before their re-enrollment in an online degree program. That’s a staggering 131 percent increase over the 39 percent of respondents with some college but no credential reported by last year’s edition of the survey.

One reason we’ve published so many articles about some college, no degree (SCND) students lately here at OnlineEducation.com is because observers have suspected since mid-2023 that this segment of students has been growing rapidly. But now, we finally have good evidence for this trend, and colleges now have a strong motivation to address this market.

“The schools that see the best results will be those that can validate the concerns of these students and provide options to help them seamlessly enroll,” write the study’s editors, Carol Aslanian and Steven Fischer. Aslanian ran a marketing research firm for 20 years before Education Dynamics bought her company, and Fischer is the senior market research manager at Education Dynamics.

Cost Isn’t Most Important

Another surprising finding is that cost is not necessarily the most important factor to this sample’s respondents. The conventional wisdom is that cost typically ranks on top of online students’ priority lists when they’re selecting degree programs. But in this sample, fully one-third said they’d choose a more expensive institution—so long as it offered an ideal location, schedule, or program format.

Lightning-Fast Online Enrollments

Yet another unexpected result depicts the blistering, lightning-fast pace at which online students decide to enroll.

Two-thirds of the sample only sent inquiries to no more than two schools, and almost half only applied to a single program. Then, as soon as students identified the colleges in which they were interested, 55 percent sent inquiries within only 21 days.

Once they decided where they wanted to file applications, half applied within seven days—and 80 percent enrolled at the college that admitted them first.

Online Students Expect to Start Classes Promptly

Another insight was that more than half of the sample expected their online classes to begin within only one month of their admission date.

This means that colleges unable to give up the traditional semester and quarter systems with new students starting only in the fall term might face challenges competing for online students against the institutions who’ve switched to year-round operations. For example, CalPoly (California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo) recently attracted coverage in the education press as the first state university in California to switch to year-round operations. Some universities, such as the University of Waterloo in Ontario and Dartmouth College, have conducted year-round operations for many years.

Social Media’s Compelling Role

But wait, there’s more. Yet another unexpected finding revealed the compelling role played by social media as prospective students shift from awareness to consideration of degree programs.

This study showed that nearly every respondent was active on social media, with Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok the most common platforms overall. About two-fifths of the sample followed schools on social media in which they had developed an interest in enrolling—and more than three-quarters followed or awarded “Like” reactions to the colleges they were considering.

Most of us think of LinkedIn as a career platform for employed professionals. However, this website also played a role as the social media platform that most potential students used to find information about online education programs, cited by 42 percent of the respondents. Interestingly enough, although 38 percent of undergraduates in the sample relied on LinkedIn as an information source, even more of them (42 percent) actually relied on a newer and less well-known platform called Bluesky as their go-to web platform for information about degree programs.