Younger Students Drawn to Online Higher Education

Interest in and comfort with online programs is growing among traditional college students, experts say.

More younger students are flocking to online education to save money on college expenses.
Josh Perez struggled to understand the letter he received accepting him into the University of Florida's online Pathway to Campus Enrollment initiative, or PaCE.
For one thing, he had applied to be a residential undergraduate at Florida, and he had never heard of the online program. For another, the letter read like a rejection.
Eventually, though, he realized Florida hadn't admitted him to the residential freshman class. But the school liked his application enough to offer him a spot in a new alternative program, which promised a pathway to becoming a residential student as a junior after earning 60 online credits.
"My initial reaction was, 'Oh, this is like a half admission,'" Perez recalled.
Perez consulted with family and friends, and eventually took the offer, joining a growing number of online college students who are younger than 25. A survey this year from Aslanian Market Research and The Learning House found that a third of online undergraduates are 18 to 24 years old, up from a quarter of those surveyed in 2012.

But Perez's lukewarm initial reaction to PaCE echoes another assertion that experts make about young online students – that, like most older students, they are choosing the online medium as a necessary alternative rather than a preferred one.
That's not to say younger students are in need of more alternatives now. But they've often been steered away from online programs, experts say, partly because they are perceived not to have the same self-discipline or time-management skills.
However, recent trends in K-12 education are giving younger college students more familiarity with learning online, experts say. In Florida, for example, students are required to take at least one online course to graduate high school. And at community colleges, one of the largest providers of online learning at the undergraduate level​, many dual-enrollment high school-college courses are offered in an online or hybrid format.

"They're a lot more comfortable than, I think, even five years, 10 years ago, just in terms of using that technology," says Andrea Reese, the chair of online studies at Daytona State College, a primarily two-year institution. "That intimidation factor is gone."
At Pennsylvania State University—World Campus, Karen Pollack, the assistant vice provost for undergraduate online and blended programs, also suspects the increase in younger undergraduates she's seen may correlate with tougher financial times.
In the 2013-14 academic year, nearly 1,800 students were age 18-24, accounting for a 60 percent increase from the year before, school officials said. In terms of the entire undergraduate student body at PSU—World Campus, 18- to 24-year-olds made up 21 percent in 2013-14, compared with 18 percent the year before.​
"Possibly living at home, not paying room and board, having the flexibility that they can work 10-15 hours a week to help fund their college education – that is their reality," she says of many younger students. "Given the circumstances, it's their best option."

Others, like World Campus senior Hannah Hernandez, have lifestyles that require flexibility. An Arizona native who first discovered online courses at Pima Community College, Hernandez worked toward her bachelor's degree while interning in Geneva, Brussels and now Dakar, Senegal, where her mother is working.
Hernandez loves the international ​experience she's received, but has some concerns about what she lost by forgoing campus life. She even considered completing her final semester in State College, Pennsylvania, but worried she wouldn't have enough common ground with her classmates.
"Sometimes I feel sad that I don't have the bonding experience with friends that other students get," Hernandez said. "Because I've moved around so much and have this unstable lifestyle, I have what I sort of refer to as three-month friends."

In that context, what makes the University of Florida's PaCE initiative unusual is its promise to online students of a fully on-campus experience down the road. With that promise, some students have gotten a head start on making a home near campus.
Of the 350 students who enrolled in the program for its inaugural fall semester, roughly 100 moved near campus in Gainesville, says Andy McCollough​, the associate provost for teaching and technology at the University of Florida.
Perez is in that group. He found fellow students to room with off campus through the Internet, plans to use the proximity to visit with teaching assistants and professors when needed, and has already attended a couple of in-person lectures for his microeconomics course.
McCollough hopes to double the program's freshman enrollment next fall partly by catering to those students who want to feel a part of campus life. For example, PaCE students will be able to opt into student fees that cover extracurricular activities typical for on-campus students, including the ever-popular student tickets for Florida Gators football games.
"Before we kicked off, we had thought about doing that," McCollough says. After the new online students moved to town, he says, they realized "We should've explored that more completely."