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Inside Higher Ed published an article from Kathryn Palmer yesterday with the headline Post-Pandemic, Online Ed Has “Staying Power,” based on Fall 2024 IPEDS enrollment data. The basic finding is hard to argue with. In Fall 2024, 54% of students took at least one distance education course, compared with 36% in 2019. Online enrollment surged during Covid, came back down, but did not return to anything resembling its previous trajectory.

A quick explanatory note for On EdTech readers, however, because the timing here might be confusing. When Palmer describes “newly released federal data,” she is referring to the Department of Education (ED) releasing a new trend generator that creates ready-made charts and downloads from the Fall 2024 enrollment data released in January. For those keeping score at home, compare this release with our coverage starting January 6th.

Given the article’s coverage of online education and nontraditional students, the newer 12-month enrollment data (unduplicated headcount) give us another way to look at what has happened since Covid—and, I would argue, a more revealing one than fall data (census based). Furthermore, the usage of “taking online courses” (which I label as ALO, a combination of Some DE and Exclusive DE) has its place, but it can mask important underlying trends and differences.

The following charts use our Enrollment Explorer tool that combines fall and 12-month enrollment data from IPEDS and National Student Clearinghouse data.

Inside Higher Ed describes the Fall data as evidence that online education has “staying power.” That’s true, but I think it understates what the data are now telling us. We have four consecutive releases of the 12-month IPEDS data covering the post-Covid period, and the remarkable finding is not continued growth or continued decline. It is how little the distribution has changed. In fact, over the past three years, both shares have remained within a range of just 0.4 percentage points. Most recently, 65.6% of students took at least one online (ALO) course and 34.4% took no online courses.

We are no longer watching online enrollments settle back down after Covid. They appear to have already settled.

This looks like a new equilibrium for US higher education, and one that is quite different from the pre-pandemic market.

And there are two other places where the aggregate numbers obscure important changes underneath. Undergraduate and graduate students now appear to have almost identical rates of online participation when the categories are combined, but they are actually using online education quite differently. And growth in online enrollment can represent very different enrollment dynamics for individual institutions.

The more interesting story to follow is a new equilibrium that has emerged.

One challenge is that the 12-month distance education enrollment numbers have only been available since the 2019-20 academic year, while the fall distance education enrollment numbers have been available since 2012. What the fall data show is that pre-Covid there was a remarkably linear growth in the share of students taking at least one online course. Covid was a massive disruption in 2020 and somewhat in 2021, and then the 12-month data show the new equilibrium.

If we impute 2012–13 through 2018–19 12-month enrollment values from the Fall Enrollment data (adjusting based on recent ratios), you can see the two linear trends in context. Treat the following chart as showing the big picture, not to match exact percentage details.

From 2012-13 through 2018-19, there was steady, linear growth of online participation, adding roughly 1-2 percentage points per year. Covid caused a nonlinear disruption, followed by what increasingly looks like a new equilibrium.

Where IHE describes the following, it is worth looking deeper.

Remember that this measure combines Exclusive DE (i.e., fully-online students) and Some DE (i.e., students taking a mix of online and non-online courses). And if you break the chart down by Exclusive DE, Some DE, and No DE, you see that there are significant differences between undergrad and grad students in terms of online participation.

There are significantly more undergrads taking some online courses within a face-to-face program than there are fully-online undergrads (37.3% to 28.4%). But there are far more graduate students in fully-online programs than there are taking some online courses (44.5% to 20.6%). And that spread is growing.

The aggregate data are masking some underlying dynamics that are important to understand.

Recently Morgan looked at the variation in online growth from 2019–20 through 2024–25 compared with overall institutional enrollment growth (or decline), identifying six different patterns. And she noted that there were different patterns between two-year, four-year undergraduate, and graduate cases.

The more recent—and for this purpose more useful—12-month IPEDS data tell a much richer story than “online has staying power.” Four consecutive releases point to a new post-pandemic equilibrium, not a market still settling back toward its old trajectory. Within that equilibrium, undergraduate and graduate online enrollment look quite different once we separate mixed-modality from exclusively online students, despite nearly identical topline participation rates. And at the institutional level, online growth can represent genuine expansion or simply offset losses elsewhere. The headline question is settled; understanding the structure underneath those aggregate numbers is where the interesting analysis now lies.

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