The Pulse of Higher Ed

For more than a decade, higher education leaders have relied on IPEDS data to understand the growth of distance education.

Since distance education reporting was added to IPEDS in 2012, the number of students enrolled exclusively in distance education courses has more than doubled. Today, more than 5.3 million students are enrolled exclusively in distance education courses, representing a substantial share of postsecondary enrollment in the United States. Yet despite this growth, a surprisingly basic question remains difficult to answer:

Who are online students?

That question became the starting point for a new white paper released jointly by UPCEA and the International Distance Education Benchmark Project (IDEBP), Seeing Part of the Picture: Who We Can (and Cannot) See in U.S. Distance Education – What Student Demographics at 100% Online Institutions Reveal About Exclusively Distance Education Enrollment. Developed through the UPCEA-IDEBP partnership, the report examines what publicly available data can, and cannot, tell us about students enrolled exclusively in distance education courses.

At first glance, the question seems straightforward. IPEDS collects demographic information about students. It also collects information about distance education enrollment. Many assume that means we can easily identify the characteristics of students learning online.

The reality is more complicated.

While IPEDS tells us how many students are enrolled exclusively in distance education courses, it generally does not connect instructional modality to demographic characteristics such as age, gender, race and ethnicity, or attendance status. As a result, for most colleges and universities, we know how many students are learning online, but we cannot fully determine who those students are.

This distinction matters.

Institutional leaders routinely make decisions about program development, student support services, enrollment management, retention strategies, and workforce alignment. Those decisions are most effective when informed by a clear understanding of the students being served. Yet for many institutions, publicly available data provide only a partial picture of the online learner population.

To better understand what can be observed, the white paper examined a unique subset of institutions: colleges and universities where total enrollment and exclusively distance education enrollment are identical. In Fall 2024, 89 institutions met this definition, enrolling more than 651,000 students. Because every student at these institutions was enrolled exclusively in distance education courses, institutional demographic reporting effectively becomes a direct reflection of online student demographics.

The findings confirm several characteristics often associated with online learners.

Among students enrolled at these institutions:

• 84% were age 25 or older.
• 82% resided outside the institution’s home state or jurisdiction.
• Women represented 62% of total enrollment.
• Graduate students accounted for one-third of total enrollment, nearly double the proportion observed across all degree-granting institutions.

These findings provide valuable insight into a segment of the online education landscape. However, the most important takeaway may not be what the study revealed. It may be what the study could not reveal.

The institutions examined represent only 2.5% of institutions enrolling exclusively distance education students. Most online learners attend institutions where online, hybrid, and face-to-face students are reported together. At those institutions, online students remain embedded within aggregate institutional reporting, making it difficult to distinguish their demographic characteristics from those of the broader student population.

In other words, we can clearly see part of the picture, but not the whole picture.

That reality has important implications for higher education. As online learning continues to mature, institutions need increasingly sophisticated data to understand student participation, outcomes, and success. Existing federal reporting systems remain enormously valuable, but they were not designed to answer every question institutions now seek to address about online education.

The white paper does not argue for replacing IPEDS. In fact, the analysis depends entirely on IPEDS data. Rather, it highlights both the strengths and limitations of the nation’s most comprehensive higher education data system and underscores the need for complementary approaches that help institutions better understand online learners.

For UPCEA members and higher education leaders, this challenge extends beyond research. Institutions are increasingly being asked to make decisions about online program growth, student support services, enrollment strategy, resource allocation, and workforce alignment. Those decisions are most effective when informed by reliable, comparable data.

Benchmarking plays an important role in addressing this challenge. While IPEDS provides an essential national foundation, the findings of this white paper illustrate that publicly available data can only take institutions so far. Understanding how online students compare across institutions, programs, and student populations often requires data that extend beyond federal reporting. Effective benchmarking helps institutions place their own enrollments, demographics, and outcomes into a broader context, transforming data into actionable insight.

This is one of the goals of the International Distance Education Benchmark Project. Through the partnership between UPCEA and IDEBP, institutions have an opportunity to contribute to a broader understanding of online education while helping build a more comprehensive picture of online learners across higher education. By combining the strengths of national data resources with institutionally reported benchmarking data, the higher education community can move beyond what is partially observable today and develop a richer understanding of online students, programs, and outcomes.

As online education continues to evolve, the conversation is no longer simply about enrollment growth. It is about developing a more complete understanding of the students we serve. The more clearly institutions can see their students, the better positioned they will be to design programs, allocate resources, and support student success in an increasingly digital learning environment.

Download the white paper here.

 

Kevin N. Shriner, Ed.D. is an education executive and strategist focused on expanding access to meaningful college credentials and improving institutional outcomes through data-informed innovation. He currently serves as a UPCEA Fellow and Founder and Executive Director of the International Distance Education Benchmark Project (IDEBP), a national initiative dedicated to advancing transparency and collaboration in online education.