Ground-level Impacts of the Changing Landscape of Higher Education
Evidence from the Virginia Community College System
Glenda Morgan
October 22, 2025
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At On EdTech, we do a solid job describing the broad trends shaping higher education: regulation, demographic shifts, the growth of online learning, dual enrollment, and the rise of micro-credentials. Many of these forces begin on individual campuses, but how they are experienced locally often diverges from the big picture.
That’s why it’s useful to periodically shift our focus and examine what’s happening within specific institutions and systems. Understanding the organic roots of sector-wide trends matters, but watching the tension and interplay between structural forces and campus dynamics deepens our grasp of both.
I think of this institutional–structural articulation as a higher-education version of C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination”: the link between personal experience and larger social structures.
In that spirit, in this post I examine a report from Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) on Virginia’s Community Colleges and the changing higher-education landscape. The report offers a rich view of how several major issues are evolving at the institutional level over time, an instructive case study in big changes and their implications.
Its empirical depth also prompts broader questions we should ask across higher education.
What does the shift toward career education and short-term training mean for institutional costs and funding?
How do we deliver effective student supports as enrollment moves online?
As demand shifts away from on-campus learning, do physical campuses need to get smaller?
The three big issues
In exploring these topics, I want to focus on three issues raised in the report:
The growth of online learning
The increased focus on career and technical education
The rise of short-term training and microcredentials
Before we dive in, a bit of context. The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) includes 23 community colleges across 40 campuses in a state that is surprisingly large and varied, spanning both dense urban regions and rural remote areas.
Online learning
Readers of On EdTech are intimately familiar with national online-learning growth; you can probably see Phil’s pincer diagram charting that growth in your sleep. But the expansion of online and hybrid learning at Virginia’s community colleges brings that story down to the campus level. VCCS classifies instructional modality into five categories, which helps illuminate where and how growth is occurring.
Counting synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid courses as online, there has been a significant shift over the past decade away from in-person instruction toward online options.
Including hybrid in that mix does blur the lines a bit, those students still attend class on campus, just less often. But looking at courses rather than the students taking them shows how profound the shift has been. And that shift has been sharpened by a substantial enrollment decline: enrollment fell 7% between 2015–16 and 2024–25, from 252,800 to 235,700. The number of courses has declines even more sharply.
Naturally, this shift hasn’t been uniform across campuses: purely online enrollment ranges from 60% at Eastern Shore Community College to 25% at Northern Virginia Community College. The report examines two major impacts of this shift.
Student success - There is a small performance gap between students taking fully online courses and those in in-person courses. The pass rate for in-person courses was 76%, compared with 73% for asynchronous online courses. Notably, online versions of several large gateway courses—such as Communications 100, History 101, and Business 100, had lower pass rates than their in-person counterparts, sometimes substantially (by 10 percentage points in Communications). The reasons are unclear; but I suspect scale may play a role.
The report notes that colleges “appear to be implementing some, but not all, key practices to ensure online courses are high quality and to identify needed improvements.” Based on literature reviews and interviews, it highlights five practices as critical to student success:
Clear rubrics and criteria for high-quality online courses
Specialized online-teaching training for instructors
Technical and instructional-design support for instructors developing and teaching online courses
Evaluation of instructor adherence to standards for high-quality courses
Review of student-outcome data to identify where current practices fall short
While important, this list leans heavily toward process and compliance and omits direct student supports, such as specialized online advising, coaching, or mental-health services, that many institutions have found essential to online student success.
Space - The report also surfaces a frequently overlooked issue: what happens to physical campuses as more students learn online, especially amid enrollment declines? Many community colleges show low space utilization, with some classrooms used as little as 12 hours per week and only 12% of seats occupied. System-wide medians are 24 hours per week and 40% seat utilization, both well below state guidelines. The cost implications are significant.
Low space utilization creates efficiency challenges, especially at small community colleges that already have high per student spending. Funds and other resources are necessary to maintain these spaces. Across all colleges, approximately 14 percent of operating expenses are for facility operations and maintenance, but at individual colleges these expenses range between 7 and 20 percent of operating expenses. Three of the five very small colleges with high online course utilization spend a higher proportion than average on facility operations and maintenance
This is a critical issue as online learning expands and institutional finances face competing pressures. We also need a broader conversation about what happens to the campus—and its role in the community, as online enrollment grows and institutions reduce their physical footprint. That discussion should go beyond lamenting the absence of Bruce Hornsby concerts.
The growing emphasis on Career and Technical Education (CTE)
Beyond the growth of online learning, the report also highlights a major shift toward Career and Technical Education (CTE) and away from a more traditional academic focus, what the VCCS calls “academic transfer” students. Although academic transfer students remain the largest single group, they now make up a smaller share of the student body than they did a decade ago.
If this trend continues, which is likely, given national patterns and students’ increasing focus on career-ready programs, it will probably lead to significant revenue shifts that necessitate changes in community college funding (emphasis mine).
The shifting proportion of enrollment from academic transfer students to CTE stu- dents is also adversely affecting VCCS’s revenue. Historically, VCCS colleges have subsidized CTE programs, which are typically more expensive, with academic program revenues. As student enrollment has decreased in academic transfer programs and in- creased in CTE programs, this subsidization no longer works as well to cover total program costs.
In general, CTE courses cost more to deliver than academic transfer courses. In FY24, colleges spent an average of $242 per credit hour for academic transfer courses compared with $466 per credit hour for CTE courses. Colleges receive an average of $341 in revenue per credit hour for all courses. Consequently, transfer courses yield $126 in excess revenue per credit hour; while CTE courses cost $99 more than revenue per credit hour
Dual enrollment, which has increased by 55% over the past decade, places additional pressure on college finances because most dual-enrollment students in Virginia do not pay tuition.
Shorter, skills based training and microcredentials
Another feature of the past decade’s CTE growth is a substantial rise in students pursuing short-term, skills-based training—what most of us would call micro-credentials. In VCCS, these programs do not themselves confer a credential, but students are prepared for and encouraged to complete an industry credential upon completion. In Virginia, this is exemplified by the Fast Forward program, a noncredit set of short-term courses typically completed in six weeks to six months.
Enrollment in Fast Forward more than doubled, from 13% of all students in FY2018 to 27% in FY2025. Its popularity draws students from CTE programs, unsurprising given the similar focus, lower cost, and faster time to completion.
Completion rates are strong, about 95%, but the share of students who actually earn an industry credential afterward varies widely, from 87% for commercial driver’s license (CDL) students to just 28% for IT programs. While the programs are stackable, leaders describe the stacking rate of 22% as low (though it’s higher than I would have expected).
The programs have grown so rapidly that funding hasn’t kept pace, even though appropriations have increased from $5 million in FY2017 to $24 million in FY2026. I would have liked to see more analysis of the cost implications of this shift toward shorter-term programs, similar to the report’s comparison of academic and CTE courses. From what I’ve heard at other institutions, costs aren’t strictly proportional to program length: these offerings can be expensive to design and deliver while generating substantially less tuition revenue, raising difficult questions about long-term sustainability.
Back to asking bigger questions about trends
Just as we sometimes need to dive into the weeds with specific examples, we also need to lift our analysis back to the broader forces shaping higher education. The VCCS shifts raise several questions, and signal wider trends, I think we should watch. Some I’ve raised before; others are new.
Are we seeing a generalizable movement from academic programs to CTE to short-term options? If so, what does that imply for how community colleges are staffed and funded?
As online learning becomes a larger, permanent share of enrollment, do student services need a true bimodal redesign, built to serve both online and on-campus students effectively? Evidence suggests this urgent question is not being addressed, especially in cash-strapped community colleges.
As online learning grows, what happens to physical campuses? Improving space utilization likely means downsizing, which carries other implications. Campuses are community anchors, even for online students—so finding the right balance deserves serious debate.
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