On the Regionality of Online Learning

There are regional hubs of institutions, but what about students? Adding NC-SARA data to the mix

Author

Phil Hill
January 23, 2026

Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.

In this week’s Future U podcast by Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn, they discussed the IPEDS distance education (DE) data analysis I have provided in this free post and this premium post. In that latter post, I included a map-based view showing the breakdown per state of modality - Exclusive DE (fully online students, Some DE (mixed-modality students), and No DE (fully campus-based students). My point was that distance education participation remains highly uneven geographically, reflecting both institutional concentration and legacy campus systems.

Jeff noted in the podcast our discussion about institution vs. student location views [emphasis added].

Yeah, it was interesting. And I actually ... Let me start with number three because I actually emailed Phil when his newsletter came out to ask him about this. Because he noted, for example, in New York and California, you know, huge systems, you know, largely place-based campuses, in person, there’s low participation there. But in, like, Arizona, where Arizona State's based, there’s high participation in online.

Now one of the things Phil did notice about the IPEDS data, as we know, it's where the institution is located, not where the necessarily the students where the students are learning. So I asked him, you know, there's this NC-SARA data out there that we know where, you know, students live and where they're learning from. So they could be living, for example, in New York and learning from Southern New Hampshire University or Western Governors, University.

It turns out that there is still geographic variation of exclusive DE adoption by student location, just not as much as by institution location and in different patterns. Let’s look at this issue in more depth.

Exclusive DE Institution Locations

This is a view of the Top 100 institutions by Fall 2024 Exclusive DE enrollments based on the IPEDS institution unit (i.e., this view is slightly different than the institution rankings where I have combined campuses that operate collectively). Here we see specific locations and not just state groupings.

With this location view, you can get a better sense of national online brands setting much of the geographic distribution. SNHU dominates New Hampshire, WGU dominates Utah, several institutions dominate the mid-Atlantic region. And then there is Arizona.

This area is home to the University of Phoenix, Grand Canyon University, ASU, and others. In fact, this view understates the concentration since IPEDS is ridiculously out-of-date in updating institution changes and still shows University of Arizona Global Campus as its old name and location: Ashford University in San Diego.

NC-SARA and Student Location

I have been remiss in publicly analyzing the NC-SARA data, so treat this as an initial addition of this coverage.

NC-SARA is the group administering the State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA), of which 49 states participate. California is the one holdout. And as part of this work, NC-SARA publishes data on the student location for each institution’s exclusive DE enrollments, by state.

To get similar measures of the percentage of students per state taking exclusive DE programs, there are different data sources required.

  • By Institution Location - The data comes from the IPEDS data release noted above.

  • By Student Location - Here I take the NC-SARA data on raw student numbers (number of students in each state in exclusive DE programs, regardless of institution location) as the numerator. I then use Census Bureau ACS data to estimate the total number of postsecondary students residing in each state, using that as the denominator.

Here are some initial observations, and note again that California is excluded as that state does not participate in SARA.

  • Greater Variation by Institution - This gets to Jeff’s point that there is less regional variation by student location (ranging from 11% in Rhode Island to 37% in Alaska, not shown) than by institution location (ranging from 12% in Michigan to 81% in New Hampshire).

  • But Still Meaningful Geographic Variation by Students - However, there is still a very meaningful variation to consider. Jeff posited that “even if you have a campus down the street, if online education for the modern learner works for you better, you're going to do it.” We still have a number of states (AK, KY, GA, MS, WY, SD, NM) with 30% or more of postsecondary students in exclusive DE programs and also a number of states (RI, DC, MA, NY, VT) with 15% or less.

  • Very Different Pattern - It is also interesting to note that the states with the highest percentages of exclusive DE enrollments by institution (NH, UT, AZ, MN, WV) all have below average percentages when measured by student location.

We plan to do some deeper analysis at On EdTech+ in future posts.

The main On EdTech newsletter is free to share in part or in whole. All we ask is attribution.

Thanks for being a subscriber.