Report: Online College Programs Rarely Cheaper Than In-Person Learning
Credit: damircudic / E+ / Getty Images- Online college programs offer greater flexibility but are often priced similarly to in-person programs.
- In some cases, distance programs are actually more expensive for students than traditional college programs.
- The gap in pricing, however, has narrowed over the past decade.
Colleges and universities rarely charge less in tuition and fees for online programs than for in-person programs, a new survey found.
Online college programs have skyrocketed in popularity since 2020, in large part thanks to the flexibility distance learning offers students.
However, a recent survey of 171 colleges and universities from the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) found that only 24% charge less for tuition and fees for online-only programs than for face-to-face education.
Nearly 2 in 5 institutions (39.5%) charge more for online education, WCET found.
Source: Distance Education’s Disconnect: Understanding the Relationship Between the Cost and Price of Distance Education
Why the discrepancy? WCET’s report shows that respondents said distance education courses cost the same or slightly more to prepare, teach, assess, and support. The components that tended to cost more for online education versus traditional learning modalities included:
- Regulatory costs
- Technology and software
- Instructional design
- Creation of learning materials
- Accessibility and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance
- Faculty training
The gap in pricing has narrowed over the past decade, WCET found.
WCET last issued a survey of this scale in 2016 and discovered that over half (54.2%) of online programs charged more than in-person programs at the time. Now, just 39.5% of online programs are more expensive than in-person classes.
Still, most respondents admitted that institutions rarely consider the cost of running online college programs when setting the price. Just 10.9% said cost was taken into account, while 79.7% said there was no link.
Cost increases typically aren’t drastic for students.
As part of the total price, 6.2% of respondents said that, for a three-credit course, for example, distance learning was pricier — by more than $250 — than in-person learning. Meanwhile, 23.3% said the online three-credit class was between $1 and $100 more expensive than the face-to-face class, according to WCET.
Just 1.2% of the schools surveyed by WCET were private, for-profit institutions. The majority (73%) of responses came from public colleges and universities.