The Pulse of Higher Ed

By Bruce Etter

Picture the classic upward promotion. A bigger title, a nameplate on a new door, an invitation to the standing meeting that used to happen without you. But the levers you actually needed to run the thing, budget authority, decision rights, a team you can call your own, sometimes stay right where they were before the move. The address is new. The job, mostly, is the same.

That is one of the main takeaways from UPCEA’s 2026 Benchmarking Online Enterprises (BOnES) study. Online enterprises are becoming increasingly administratively centralized. Most online enterprises (57%) now reside within the provost’s office. While high-performing enterprises exist in other locations too, the overall pattern is unmistakable: online learning is increasingly being invited to the table where institutional strategy is set. The BOnES data reveals a question quietly asked; does that seat comes with the authority, resources, and governance to match?

When an institution places its online enterprise in the same suite as the senior academic officer, it signals that digital learning is not a side project. But the survey also reveals what the invitation didn’t come with. Eighty percent of Chief Online Learning Officers (COLOs) report that institutional leadership has indicated online learning is a strategic direction for their institution. And yet, the single biggest challenge cited to enterprise success is strategic direction and governance itself (21%), ahead of even funding and resources (19%). This disconnect between the strategy of the institution and the operationalization of that strategy yields considerable tension. It costs an institution nothing to say online learning matters. It costs something real to hand over decision rights, budget authority, and reporting lines to match.

That gap is felt acutely in the scope of what today’s online enterprise is expected to hold up. Responsibilities include instructional design (87%), accessibility (72%), faculty development (72%), marketing (70%), recruitment (70%), and many more that, anywhere else in the university, would each justify a department of their own. Even when the actual service provided by the enterprise is leveraged throughout the University, such as LMS administration, OPM management, or the helpdesk, the enterprise is often the one funding the function. Broad responsibility, dispersed employment, and central accountability is a difficult combination to sustain without control over the operating levers.

Fees offer one of the clearest illustrations of that missing control. Roughly half of institutions (51%) assess an online or distance education fee, most often on a per-credit basis (74%). Yet in only 6% of cases does the online enterprise itself set the amount. Half the time (50%) that decision sits with institutional central administration, and another 27% with system administration. The enterprise responsible for the outcomes tied to that fee has almost no say in what the fee actually is.

The field has also begun to sort itself into groups pulling ahead and groups bracing for contraction. Forty-one percent of respondents expect their budgets to increase next fiscal year, at a modest median of 5.0%. Twenty-three percent expect decreases, with the median expected cut at 10.0% in 2026, double the 4.8% expected in 2025. The share expecting no change dropped from 53% to 36%, meaning institutions are getting clearer about their financial trajectories even when that clarity points toward contraction. The revenue side sorts the same way. Median revenue is up from $11 million in 2025 to $16 million in 2026, and unlike the average, which is pulled around by outliers, the median tells you the typical enterprise really is bringing in more. However, the rising tide is no longer lifting every boat. The share of enterprises clearing two dollars of revenue per dollar budgeted has climbed from 32% in 2024 to 36% in 2025 to 43% in 2026, even as the median ratio barely moved.

The uncomfortable truth in that sorting is that investment is a precursor for efficiency, not a reward for it. The enterprises pulling ahead were resourced early and grew into what the resourcing made possible, not the other way around. The enterprises bracing for cuts are being asked to demonstrate returns before their institutions have handed them the tools to generate them. When governance ranks as the number-one barrier ahead of funding itself, it is because online leaders understand that budget conversations held without clear authority tend to end the same way: with the enterprise doing more with less, until “less” becomes a cut.

Which brings the corner office metaphor back around. A seat closer to institutional leadership is a real signal that online learning has been taken seriously, but visibility and authority are not the same asset. Being closer to the decision-maker is not the same as being the decision-maker. Absent an intentional handoff of governance, resourcing, and decision rights to match the new address, the corner office becomes a stage rather than a seat. The enterprise becomes accountable for outcomes it does not fully control, and its leaders start playing defense on institution-wide issues that were never uniquely theirs. Fifty-five percent of COLOs already say academic integrity issues get raised in the context of online learning before any other modality, even though we know that academic integrity issues (AI) impact traditional programming as well. That is what an unresourced corner office looks like from the inside.

The report’s five recommendations are best read as one argument delivered in five moves. Convert strategic priority into resourced authority. Resource and govern the enterprise you have already built. Understand your operating model before negotiating budget. Report up with the median, not the average. Do not let your enterprise absorb institution-wide risks alone. Each insists on the same discipline: the resourcing has to match the responsibility. The administrative centralization visible in this year’s BOnES data is a genuine signal that digital education is part of the institution’s strategic direction. Whether that signal produces more than a symbol depends on whether the resourcing follows it.

The corner office has been offered. The door has been opened. The question BOnES leaves institutional leaders sitting with is whether they intend to hand over the keys.

Bruce Etter serves as the Senior Director of Research and Consulting at UPCEA, where he leads the development and management of research initiatives for UPCEA’s Research and Consulting division and its clients.