Interesting Facts About
Distance Learning

• The two colleges in the U.S. with the largest number of students getting Pell Grants are both for-profit schools that give a large number of online degrees. University of Phoenix is #1, with over 230,000 students getting a total of $560 million per year in Pell Grants, while Kaplan University is #2.
  


• A 2008 study by Eduventures states that today's typical adult learner is 38.8 years of age, and has a higher income than the average American.
  


• According to a study by Thompson Learning, online students tend to have higher intelligence, more emotional stability, and are more compulsive, self-sufficient and introverted than traditional on-campus students.
  


• A 2008 study by The O'Keeffe Company and CDW-G found that 85% of students feel that mastering digital technology is an important part of their majors, and that 25% of them believe that a professor's lack of tech skills is the biggest obstacle they have to achieving their technology goals.
  


• Eighty-five percent of Capella University's 20,000-plus students are enrolled in graduate programs.
  


• Eduventures, a Massachusetts firm that does studies of educational trends, is now predicting that one out of every 10 college students will be in an online degree program by 2008.
  


• Several different studies have found that more than fifty per cent of online learning students are married with children.
  


• In 1913, Thomas Edison predicted that books would "soon be obsolete in the schools" because of motion pictures.
  


• For-profit schools lean heavily on part-time professors. According to The Chronicle Index of For-Profit Education, America's top 5 for-profit schools currently have 5,985 full-time faculty and 37,249 part-time professors and instructors.
  


• 77% of American corporations now use online learning, often blended with traditional teaching styles. In 1995, only 4% of corporations were using online learning
  


• Yale University recently announced it will create digital videos of undergraduate lecture classes and make them available online to the public at no charge.
  


• Some very well-known colleges have failed in their efforts to create online divisions. Temple, New York University and Columbia have all had e-learning flops. Columbia, in fact, spent $15 million to start an online program that was eventually closed down.
  


• During 2005, over 1.2 million adult students were signed up for purely online degree or certificate programs, according to Eduventures.
  


• Market analysts at International Data Corp (IDC) predict that the worldwide market for corporate e-learning will rise from $8 billion last year to $26 billion by the year 2010.
  


• 65 percent of American graduate schools now offer online courses.
  


• About 2,500 for-profit schools are accredited to offer federal student aid.
  


• The Gartner Group says that by 2008, 41 million corporate employees will be functioning in a “virtual workplace” at least one day every week.
  


• The number of students seeking a higher education is expected to grow by at least 13 per cent between now and 2015, adding an additional 2.3 millions students to colleges and universities, according to the Education Commission of the States. It is possible, however, that college enrollments could increase by as much as 50 per cent, for a total of 8 million more students by 2015, the ECS says.
  


• The United States currently spends more money on higher education than any other industrialized nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation.
  


• The University of Phoenix is today the largest private university in the U.S., with almost 300,000 students on 150 different campuses. Phoenix also has well over 200,000 taking its degree courses online.
  


• Every year, between 6 and 8 billion dollars is spent placing and servicing computers in American K-12 schools.
  


• Traditional 18 – 22 year olds living on the campus of a four-year college or university actually now make up only 16 per cent of America’s higher education population, according to the U.S. Department of Education. A majority of students today are either studying part-time, attending two-year institutions or over the age of 22.
  


• Michigan was first state to require all students to take some online learning to graduate from high school in 2006.
  


• Approximately one in six students enrolled in higher education - about 3.2 million people - took at least one course online in the fall of 2006, according to The Sloan Consortium.
  


• According to Newsweek magazine, the ten most “wired” colleges in the US, in order, are:
  1) Villanova (where first-year students get laptops, and replacements after their second year)
  2) MIT
  3) Indiana University
  4) Swarthmore College
  5) Creighton University
  6) The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  7) Michigan Technological University
  8) University of Southern California
  9) Quinnipiac University
  10) The University of Oklahoma
  


• C.I.A. recruiters say that 5 percent to 10 percent of their new employees completed at least some of their schooling online.
  


• Boeing estimates that of its 2,293 employees who earned a degree in 2005 while on the job, 40 percent completed their course work online.
  


• According to the Association for Computing Machinery, jobs in computing will grow more than jobs in any other career category from now through 2014.