Colleges across the country are shutting down or merging because they’re hemorrhaging cash as the number of 18-year-old applicants continues to drop. Thriving schools have moved fast to build up online programs and short term certificates. But scaling too quickly comes with plenty of risk: giving out diplomas can crater the value of a degree.
Yet over half of the country’s 19 million students now take at least one class online, and a quarter will never set foot on a campus. For university leaders, the question isn’t whether to go digital, it’s how to expand without diluting their school’s brand.
More institutions than ever now view growing their adult and nontraditional learners as a primary route to keeping tuition dollars coming in and keeping doors open. But in the sprint to online supremacy, high-profile hiccups have the higher-ed world also keeping a close eye on schools’ reputations.
“Online is the future and there’s undoubtedly a path forward for schools to thrive,” said Kevin Kinser, professor of education at Penn State, whose expertise focuses on adult education and alternative learning. “But it can only happen when done diligently and correctly.”
Kinser, along with a trio of other interviewed scholars and consultants, believe that for higher education to survive, schools must target new groups of learners instead of clinging to the same traditional student pools. They shared their thoughts in recent phone interviews with Volt.
Growing the Pool without Lowering the Bar
Jim Fong, chief research officer at D.C.-based online-education advocacy group UPCEA, said most colleges trying to bulk up their online programs have understandably moved carefully to avoid compromising their academic standards. Or even worse, cannibalizing their own on-campus programs.
But Fong warned against that “zero-sum” mindset. If universities only focus on students from their existing applicant pools, they risk missing out on tuition bucks from motivated learners who just can’t relocate to campus or attend full-time.
Steven Girardot, vice provost of undergraduate education and student success at Georgia Tech, cites the school’s online master’s in computer science as a model example. Since launching the massive online program in January 2014, Georgia Tech has enrolled nearly 100,000 professionals with “strong backgrounds” who otherwise wouldn’t have applied to the campus program. The presence of online students, including a record enrollment of over 16,000 students for spring 2025, has also raised the on-campus program’s average applicant credentials, Girardot said.
“By opening it up online nationally and internationally, we’ve been able to pull in a much higher caliber of student,” he told Volt. “We’ve expanded the pool, not lowered the bar.”
At Penn State’s World Campus, online students earn the same degree as campus students through classes taught by the same professors with the same syllabus. Instead of just throwing open the gates for their online programs, PSU’s admissions staff prioritizes applicants’ real coursework and, if applicable, job experience. The World Campus also allows students right on the admissions cut line to take prep modules and eventually earn their way in.
Kinser warned that scaling without guardrails would only lead to chaos.
“That’s the vacuum model, where you just vacuum up as many students as you possibly can,” he said. “Plenty of schools are out there doing it, but then what’s the real value of the degree?
“Employers are paying attention and they’re getting better at spotting what’s quality versus what’s not.”
Stackable models and micro-credentialing offer the best of all worlds
Not every prospective student wants to commit to a full degree. That’s when microcredentials and certificates come in, especially when they stack toward future degrees. UPCEA’s Fong frames microcredentials as a funnel toward degrees instead of an alternative to them.
He argues that 120 credits is often a “bridge too far” for many students to handle at once. But at least 40 million Americans without a degree have some college credit, leaving a giant potential market for universities to serve with the advent of widespread online and micro-credentialing programs.
“Smaller credentials that also count toward degrees offer halfway points that build momentum,” Fong explained. “When schools can build a stackable model, the student will look at the long game of earning a degree more positively.”
Online program manager Coursera found in a 2024 report of 1,000 higher-ed professionals that 87 percent of respondents believed microcredentials increase student satisfaction. Seventy-five percent also felt students were more likely to enroll when they could receive credit toward a degree. A separate Coursera survey from earlier this year claims that 96 percent of employers believe microcredentials strengthen a job candidate’s application. Fong called the data “a shift in mindset”: students and employers alike now see credentials as offering actual on-the-job value, not just empty academic accolades.
At Harvard, longtime learning technologies professor Chris Dede draws a line between students who simply complete a course and those who can actually perform what the course teaches. Dede calls the latter types of programs “credentials with warrant” and argues they mirror real-word portfolios more than academic transcripts. According to Dede, institutions offering microcredentials that require project-based grading and supervised work generate stronger signals to employers.
“This isn’t a dichotomy,” Dede said, over the phone. “It’s not choosing only between a microcredential or degree. There’s a continuum, and smart universities are getting into the middle of that continuum where you can have the best of both worlds.”
Growing access without destroying the brand
Big online expansions, when not done correctly, can put a school’s brand at risk. Kinser warns that employers will see degrees from certain universities as weaker over time if standards slip or if admissions get too loose. To avoid that, he said schools need a clear vision for how large they wish to expand. Then, they need to commit to the vision through honest marketing and faculty trained to teach online instead of just on-campus.
He contends that Penn State’s World Campus provides a perfect model. Because the university built it from scratch starting nearly three decades ago with common oversight and shared faculty, PSU’s online programs offer a program that’s “in no way inferior” to on-campus instruction. As a result, it attracts quality new students. The World Campus now offers 200 degree and certificate programs, boasting over 19,000 global students from 87 countries and a top-tier ranking on U.S. News’ rankings for online programs.
On the flip side, schools that outsource to online program managers (OPMs) risk creating a one-size-fits-all program that results in students simply paying for the name of a university. Results with OPMs have been mixed, as some schools report success in added tuition revenue but other schools struggle with OPM-related lawsuits.
“The value in building it from scratch is that it’s your own and it’s completely unique to your school,” Kinser said. “It’s not as easy as simply bringing on a third-party, but the results speak for themselves.”
For marketers, that means scaling is a natural byproduct of the process, not necessarily a be-all-end-all goal. Schools that thrive over the next decade will grow substantively without watering down their product.
