PROOF POINTS: Most college kids are taking at least one class online, even long after campuses reopened

The Hechinger Report

Jill Barshay

January 29, 2024

The pandemic not only disrupted education temporarily; it also triggered permanent changes. One that is quietly taking place at colleges and universities is a major, expedited shift to online learning. Even after campuses reopened and the health threat diminished, colleges and universities continued to offer more online courses and added more online degrees and programs. Some brick-and-mortar schools even switched to online only.

To be sure, far fewer college students are learning online today than during the peak of the pandemic, when online instruction was an emergency response. But there are far more students regularly logging into their computers for their classes now than in 2019, according to the latest federal data. In fact, there are so many more that online enrollment hit a new post-pandemic milestone in the fall of 2022 when a majority – 54 percent – of college students took one or more of their classes online, a nearly 50 percent increase from the fall of 2019 when 37 percent of college students took at least one online class.

The sheer numbers are staggering: more than 10 million college students were learning online in the fall of 2022. Compared to before the pandemic, an additional 1.5 million students were taking all of their courses online and 1.35 million more students were taking at least one course online — even as the total number of college students fell by more than a million between 2019 and 2022.

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