Fewer than half of students at the largest nonprofit online institutions earn a degree after eight years. Is it an unfortunate reality or a cry for accountability? Demand for remote degree programs has surged in the past decade, and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic normalized the online classroom. But for students in many exclusively online programs, eight-year completion rates often fall below 50 percent, according to data on outcome measures from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. At Southern New Hampshire University, one of the largest and oldest online institutions in the country, only 36 percent of students who enrolled in 2015 graduated in eight years. At Grand Canyon University, four times as many students attend online as in person—100,000 compared to 25,000 at the Phoenix campus this fall. But only 46 percent of the nearly 26,000 online and in-person students who enrolled in 2015 had earned a degree by 2023, according to IPEDS data.
