What's with the log scale? If we're debating public policy based on data, use the natural linear scale that the public thinks about:

High school students account for 9.3% of undergraduate enrollment at public four-year institutions—but 47% of their enrollment growth from 2022–23 to 2024–25. The composition of enrollment is important to understand. Building on CCRC’s new dual enrollment analysis, my latest On EdTech post looks at where the growth is coming from, by sector and institution. Across the institutions included in our analysis, high school dual enrollment students accounted for 38% of undergraduate growth. Some colleges are adding both high school students and other undergraduates. Others are growing overall because dual enrollment gains offset declines elsewhere. And this pattern extends well beyond community colleges. Rising headcounts alone don’t establish financial recovery or stability. onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/du… #HigherEducation #DualEnrollment

I think we can stop asking whether online education has “staying power.” The more interesting question is what the post-pandemic market actually looks like. The latest 12-month IPEDS data make the first part surprisingly clear. After years of steady growth, followed by the obvious Covid disruption, online participation appears to have found a new equilibrium. We now have four consecutive releases showing essentially the same pattern. This is starting to look less like the lingering effects of Covid and more like the emergent structure of US higher education. But the top line numbers hide quite a bit. Undergraduate and graduate students use online education very differently, despite apparently similar participation rates. And institutional online growth can mean actual enrollment growth—or merely offset losses elsewhere. I dug into all three, including why the newer 12-month data provide a better lens for this question than the Fall enrollment data getting attention this week. onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/on…

IPEDS Fall Enrollment data gets most of the attention, but it has an important limitation for understanding online education: it is a snapshot taken in the fall. That increasingly misses how online education actually works, particularly with multiple starts, shorter terms, and working-adult students. The newly released 2024-25 IPEDS 12-month enrollment data gives us a different view. And there are some interesting results. Two-thirds of students took at least one online course during the year, considerably higher than the Fall Enrollment measure. The post-pandemic modality mix also looks remarkably stable at this point—not a continued return toward pre-pandemic patterns. And at the institutional level, WGU and Southern New Hampshire continue to operate at a scale that is hard to appreciate from the usual fall enrollment numbers. I pulled together the latest data, including trends by modality and sector and the largest institutions by online enrollment. onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/20…

I don’t often cross-post articles from other newsletters, but occasionally @morganmundum 's On Student Success covers a topic that deserves a broader audience. This is one of those cases. The post tackles a subtle but important shift in higher education. For years, growth mostly meant attracting more students into the system. Increasingly, however, growth means taking students from someone else. Particularly in the US and the UK. That may sound like semantics, but it changes how institutions should think about strategy. It also changes how we interpret stories about enrollment gains, partnerships, and “winning” in the market. It’s a useful framework for understanding why some colleges and universities are doing well despite a flat—or shrinking—overall market. Worth a read if you’re trying to make sense of where higher ed is headed. Original OSS post: onstudentsuccess.morganedtec… Cross-posted at OET: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/wh…

CalMatters found a genuinely indefensible online course in the California Community Colleges: decade-old recorded lectures, multiple-choice quizzes, and the professor handing students the answers before the test. They're right to be appalled. So am I. But then the article does something the evidence doesn't support — it extrapolates that one bad course across a system where 40% of courses are now online, as if the modality were the diagnosis. It isn't. Bad course design is bad in any modality. The variable that actually predicts course quality is not online vs. in-person — it's whether a campus chose to invest in quality. And the system's own 2024 POCR Landscape Report already documents both halves of that story: where peer course review is applied, success rates rise (12% at Chaffey, with the same faculty pre/post) — but the process is optional and unevenly funded, which is exactly how a course like the one CalMatters found still slips through. None of that infrastructure — the course-design rubric, POCR, the data showing the online/face-to-face performance gap nearly closed — made it into the article. It wasn't hard to find. It just didn't fit the story. My full breakdown, including what the current and former CVC executive directors told me on the record: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/wh…

Most of the opposition to the Do No Harm earnings accountability rule is arguing about something Congress already settled. Of the 8,719 public comments in the AHEAD docket (as of today), 83% reject the rule outright—defending cosmetology, massage, allied health, or another sector. But the framework itself is now statutory, codified through OBBB. ED can't withdraw a statutory requirement in response to public pressure, and litigation against the underlying law faces a much higher bar than litigation against regulatory choices. The comments that will actually matter—the ones ED's lawyers are reading carefully and that will surface in the inevitable court challenge—include a small cluster of filings (McGuireWoods, AACS, Aveda Institutes Cooperative, Association of Chiropractic Colleges) arguing that ED lacks statutory authority to extend earnings-premium accountability to undergraduate certificate programs. One of them is meaningfully cleaner than the others, because it uses OBBB itself as the limiting statute rather than relitigating older HEA text. Other findings from the AI-enabled classification of all 8,719 comments: → Career-school operators filed 35% of comments directly; roughly half the docket came from the regulated industry or its direct representatives → Only 1.5% of comments are purely pro-rule → The citizen voice is mostly genuine—1.8% of citizen comments use coordinated industry talking points, vs. 6.7% on the operator side → Total cost of the analysis: $9.68 in API spend plus about seven hours of work, on tools that didn't exist six months ago Full post—who filed, what they said, which arguments will shape the final rule, plus methodology and four charts: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/in…

New post at On EdTech: The new graduate loan caps are being discussed as a federal finance policy issue. That is true, but it is also incomplete. Using data from PEER Center’s new report, I created a set of visualizations to show a point that is hard to grasp from tables alone: the impact will not hit evenly. At California, Oregon, New York, Nevada, and Vermont institutions, more than 40% of graduate borrowers already borrow above the new OBBBA loan caps. In Arizona, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Utah, the share is 15% or lower. The geography matters, but it is not the whole story. What the data really suggest is a geography-plus-program-portfolio problem. Professional programs such as medicine, law, and dentistry face one kind of pressure, while MBA, nursing, social work, PT, and physician assistant programs face another. Same federal law, very different local consequences. I also included a downloadable PDF with all 52 images (50 states + DC + US view) for anyone who wants to explore the state-level patterns more directly. The post is here: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/th…

With the talk of anytime-anywhere access from online education, there is often an assumption that location doesn't matter. The competing view is an overly-simplistic view that students-choose-local. The data say otherwise. In this post, I take a closer look at where online students actually come from—and the patterns don’t match the mantras that too often enter EdTech discussions. Even in fully online programs, institutions show very different geographic realities: some operate at national scale, others extend regionally, and many still serve primarily local demand. That leads to a more interesting takeaway: Online education isn’t replacing local markets. In many cases, it’s reinforcing them. This matters for how institutions think about: Enrollment strategy Competition (who they’re actually competing against) And policy frameworks that assume programs are interchangeable across regions It also can raise bigger questions: Are we designing accountability and ROI metrics based on a model of online education that doesn’t really exist? This is an early look—more to come—but the goal is to challenge some core assumptions and put better questions on the table. Full post: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/th…

Earnings data are now driving federal higher-ed policy. But are we measuring what we think we’re measuring? The new OBBB accountability rules treat post-graduation earnings as a direct proxy for program and institutional quality. Miss the threshold → risk losing access to federal student loans. Recent research from Ithaka S&R (focused on South Carolina, but the dynamics apply nationwide) shows why this is more problematic than it first appears: graduate earnings are shaped far more by labor markets, geography, occupational pathways, and time than by anything colleges directly control. We are not measuring institutional quality. We are measuring systems—and then blaming or rewarding colleges for the results. Rural institutions serving rural students, high-variance fields that drive innovation, and socially vital low-floor programs all get penalized under this logic. The policy risks exactly the distortions it claims to prevent. @morganmundum unpacks the data in this week’s On EdTech (with clear charts and a revealing industry-concentration table). It’s the clearest explanation I’ve seen of why refining the earnings metric won’t fix the underlying problem—we’re still measuring the wrong thing. → Full post here: onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/ea… #HigherEd #EdPolicy #Accountability #WorkforceOutcomes #OBBB