Colleges Rush to Ramp Up Online Classes

Melissa Korn & Douglas Belkin:

Purdue University’s plan to buy for-profit Kaplan University to expand its reach is the latest twist on an old idea: boost enrollment by attracting students online.

For-profit colleges like University of Phoenix and American Public University expanded rapidly in the early 2000s by offering convenient, web-based classes to working adults who couldn’t take time off to go back to school. Enrollments then plummeted amid tighter regulations, along with bad publicity from low graduation rates and high student debt loads at some institutions.

Despite some lingering concerns that an online degree lacks some of the benefits of face-to-face instruction, nonprofit and public institutions are racing to fill the void.

The potential to appeal to a broader base of students, without the overhead of dorms and classrooms, has set off a mad dash among big public universities like Arizona State University and the University of Massachusetts, as well as private, nonprofit institutions with more modest roots, like Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University.

More than six million postsecondary students took at least one class online in 2015, up 11% from 2012, according to federal data.