Analysis: University of California Lifts Ban on Fully Online Undergraduate Degrees

In February 2023, the University of California stopped enabling undergraduates to earn 100 percent, completely online degrees. We covered that story in our March 2023 feature article, “University of California Bans Fully Online Undergraduate Degrees.”

But only a year later, the university lifted that ban in a landmark endorsement of online education. Since then, the nine undergraduate UC campuses have been free to begin developing fully online degree programs. Meanwhile, details have emerged about how that sharp policy reversal came about—and why it’s likely to stick.

Shared governance refers to the joint responsibility of faculty, administrations, and governing boards to govern colleges and universities. The trustees on governing boards exercise final institutional authority over a university’s actions.

However, they typically delegate strategic planning and daily management to presidents and their administrations. Trustees also typically delegate responsibility for educational delivery to faculty, who participate in the institution’s governance through representatives on a Faculty Senate.

At the University of California, the institution’s governing board of trustees—the Board of Regents—delegates limited authority over certain educational and academic policy matters to faculty through their Academic Senate. These delegations are codified in a set of bylaws and standing orders.

In other, non-academic areas of university life, the Senate exercises an active advisory role; that means the body has no governing authority in such matters but can offer recommendations to the administration and the Board. What appears to have led to the online degree policy reversal was a shared governance conflict that developed between the Regents and the Senate.

That conflict followed the adoption of Senate Regulation (SR) 630.E, which created a new “campus experience” residency requirement. A set of complex rules in SR 630.E required students to earn at least six course credits per term during three quarters or two semesters—one year out of an undergraduate program’s four years—in courses where at least 50 percent of instruction takes place in person on a UC campus. That requirement also specified that UC campuses seeking to offer fully online undergraduate degrees first needed to win an exception from the Senate.

The minutes of the Board of Regents’ meeting on February 14 show that two of the regents—both appointed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2017—consulted with the university’s Office of the General Counsel shortly after the Senate enacted SR 630.E. They wanted to know if the Faculty Senate had the authority to enact such a regulation, or if SR 630.E would necessitate approval by the Board of Regents to be effective. And both of those trustees have extensive career experience in the management of online education programs.

One of those regents is Maria Aguilano. A Stanford MBA, Regent Aguilano is the executive vice president of Arizona State University’s Learning Enterprise division, one of the university’s three college divisions.

The ASU Learning Enterprise offers instruction for reskilling, upskilling, and lifelong learning. Unlike traditional colleges, the Learning Enterprise provides accessible and flexible postsecondary education irrespective of learners’ background or location—and that location-independence means that most LE courses are online, just like most ASU courses.

With 178,182 students, Arizona State is America’s sixth-largest university by enrollment, and based on the latest 12-month 2022-2023 data, ASU educated 156,323 online students during that academic year. Put another way, only 12 percent or 21,859 Arizona State students studied entirely on campus in Phoenix without taking any online courses.

In October 2023, Regent Aguilano spoke during an online panel titled Shaping the Future of Online Education in California. The event was sponsored by the Oakland-based interest group California Competes, which we profiled in our April 2024 feature article “‘Comebackers:’ How Colleges Can Help Returning Students Re-Enroll and Graduate.” Also speaking was Ajita Talwalker Menon, the president of the entirely online Calbright College, which we covered in our December 2023 article “Calbright On a Roll: Enrollment Up 201 Percent Plus New Accreditation & Programs.”

The other regent who questioned the Faculty Senate’s authority is Lark Park. Regent Park is the director of the California Education Learning Lab, a project of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, and established by the California Legislature in 2018. This grantmaking office funds innovative faculty projects at California’s public colleges and universities that improve learning outcomes and close equity gaps, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.

In 2020, Regent Park wrote an op-ed for CalMatters titled “Here Is the Next Wave of Online Learning for Higher Education.” Her essay explained what projects the Learning Lab was funding to create a more equitable and successful online learning model for California higher education. And in October 2023 she contributed to another California Competes project, a policy paper titled “Reimagining Online Education in California: A Roadmap for Advancing Access and Quality.”

Inside Higher Ed’s Lauren Coffey traced the 13-year history of previous University of California online undergraduate degree initiatives that had been killed by faculty opposition, beginning with a Faculty Senate measure that failed to win approval in 2010. More recently, the Senate’s Online Undergraduate Degree Task Force had issued a mostly negative report in September 2020, and a related task force attempted an update a year later that was postponed because of the pandemic.

Another Senate study in 2022 argued in favor of a new residency requirement that would block online undergraduate degrees, which set up the vote enacting the residency requirement in February 2023.

Then, as recently as late in 2023, the university set up yet another effort to evaluate online instruction for undergraduates. UC launched a 20-member presidential task force to evaluate the effectiveness of online degree programs and various in-person and online instructional modalities, including asynchronous, synchronous, and hybrid instruction. This time the members weren’t only from the Senate but were composed of ten faculty and ten administrators. This task force aimed to “provide for high-quality in-person, hybrid and online offerings for students, including innovations that promote engagement and learning no matter where students are located.”

Along with that history, Coffey reported that “at its core the tension at UC is over the quality of online education.” But that is not at all how Scottsdale, Arizona-based higher education industry analyst Phil Hill interpreted the conflict between the Academic Senate and the Board of Regents.

Hill points out that the new residency requirement set up a shared governance “mini-crisis.” At the October meeting of the Board, the minutes show that the president of the university, Dr. Michael Drake, warned Senate representatives about the potential consequences of this governance dispute:

While the Regents have delegated various decision-making authorities to the president, Senate, and other parties, the Regents still possess ultimate decision-making authority. Several Regents oppose the new campus experience requirement, considering it a significant change in the conditions of an undergraduate degree that should have warranted their consultation. President Drake expressed his concern that unless the Senate finds a way to address Regents’ concerns in this regard, they may revoke the Senate’s authority.

Hill first argues that although the debate ostensibly seemed to focus on the “quality” of online instruction, the Senate’s changes in SR 630 actually did nothing to ensure that quality:

Note that the changes from the Senate do not call out specific metrics or processes to ensure that quality in the online modality. Instead, the Senate essentially bans online undergraduate education, effectively making the argument that they have already determined that online education cannot provide quality.

In other words, Hill asserts that if the debate was really about quality, the Senate would have defined the criteria for quality in all the modalities: in-person, blended hybrid, and completely online instruction. But the Senate did not do that in SR 630.E or any other regulation.

Second, Hill argues that the faculty Senate’s policy did not address the wishes of various stakeholders for expanded access to a University of California undergraduate degree. This was a point emphasized at length by various experts we cited in our article on the online degree ban. “There are plenty of letters to the task force and Senate arguing that this policy would preclude reaching the increasing number of students who are looking for a fully-online option—you know, expanding access. The policy ignores the implications,” Hill says.

Hill sums up his analysis this way:

I believe the Faculty Senate has the right and obligation to have a strong role in academic standards and the definition of offered programs, but this solution by the Senate instead relies on unilateral strategic decisions that are in reality much more focused on power and shared governance. You will not find useful definitions or guidance on what quality online education should mean, or even the cited term of “UC quality” that encompasses face-to-face and hybrid modalities.

The Senate never did find a way to address the Regents’ concerns. On February 14, the Board revoked the Senate’s authority to issue the residency requirement—just as President Drake had warned—effectively reversed the ban on online undergraduate degrees.

This vote wasn’t close, with the Regents voting against the requirement by an overwhelming ten-to-one margin after only about 40 minutes of deliberation, as this YouTube video shows. And because the Regents exert the final decision-making authority on all university matters, reconsidering their approval of online undergraduate degrees seems unlikely.

“We’ve been trying to find the best way forward to uphold the rights and responsibilities of the board while maintaining the respect and boundaries of shared governance,” said Richard Leib, the chair of the Board of Regents, in remarks to Inside Higher Ed. “Ultimately, we decided to follow bylaws and take the matter as a recommendation from the Senate.”

While the university’s nine undergraduate campuses are now free to develop 100 percent online degree programs, one campus is continuing a limited experiment in online education authorized a few months before the Board’s vote.

UC Santa Cruz gained approval in October 2023 for a new online major in creative technologies. And even though this is only a two-year program that wasn’t precisely subject to the campus experience residency requirement, the new major nevertheless had to win a special exception vote in UC’s Academic Senate.