After the COVID-19 pandemic forced an emergency switch to online learning, students have embraced the modality for its flexibility and convenience. This is particularly true of community college students, who are more likely than others to have jobs and family commitments that make coming to a campus tough. In a recent report by Bay View Analytics, 94% of community college students gave their online courses a passing grade, and 58% expressed a desire for more. However, a new study offers a reason for caution: for Black, Hispanic, and low-income community college students, online courses only increase degree attainment when taken in relatively low proportions.
Dr. Justin Ortagus, associate professor of higher education administration and policy and the director of the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Florida
Ortagus believes that the results fit with what we know about the lives of community college students and the limits of virtual interaction.
“It makes sense that a flexible course schedule allows community college students to be more likely to make progress towards a degree and ultimately graduate,” he said. “But all those positive things about face-to-face education, a sense of belonging, community engagement, interacting with faculty members and advisors, those things can be harmed if [students] are left to be self-directed learners who are only learning in an online environment.”
Dr. Shanna Smith Jaggars, assistant vice provost and director of the Student Success Research Lab at the Ohio State University
The effects—both positive and negative—were particularly strong for minoritized and low-income students. Black students who took a low proportion of online classes were 23 percentage points likelier to earn an associate, but Black students who took all online classes were over 18 percentage points less likely to earn that degree. The numbers for Hispanic students were nearly the same. Low-income students who took few online classes were nearly 19 points likelier to earn an associate, but those who took all online classes were nearly 17 points less likely to do so.
Black, Hispanic, and low-income students may have more competing priorities, which would explain the particular benefit that they get from taking a few online classes. However, the study cites evidence that Black, Hispanic, and low-income community college students perform worse in online courses than face-to-face ones, which may explain the especially strong negative effect of an all-online curriculum.
Smith Jaggars attributes this to systemic barriers.
“Students from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds are more likely to be from low-income neighborhoods and to have gone to high schools that were underserved and that didn’t provide them with the prior proper academic preparation,” she said.
Whatever their background, students who take only online classes seem to really like them. The Bay View Analytics report found that 62% of community college students taking exclusively online courses in the spring of 2022 gave them an ‘A’ grade. But the appeal of online classes can be dangerous, according to Ortagus.
“Students, like everyone else, love flexibility,” he said. “Students may be extremely satisfied with the notion of working on their laptop from home and not making the trek to campus. But that doesn’t remove the risk associated with their lower likelihood to graduate.”
Ortagus recommends that community colleges try to encourage students who are facing time and location constraints to supplement online courses with face-to-face classes. And he says that schools should be extremely cautious when offering exclusively online degree programs to students.
Community colleges should offer both in-person and online options when possible, said Smith Jaggars, so that individual students can do what is best for themselves.
“I think it is really useful to have a choice of modalities so that they can make that personal choice,” she said. “Because different students are going to make a different choice.”
Smith Jaggars also pointed out that online course types are shifting—while most of the courses covered in the study may have been asynchronous, with students and professors logging on at different times, an increasing number of classes are now synchronous, more akin to an in-person session with everyone together at once.
“The research that exists suggests that synchronous courses with real-time interaction are substantially better than asynchronous courses in terms of the quality of the connections and supports that students feel,” she said. “So, it’s possible that we will start to see more of a growth in the synchronous online sector and that the results there could be quite different.”
Nevertheless, Ortagus’s study provokes important questions about exactly how much online learning, synchronous or asynchronous, is ideal.
“If the goal is to provide students with the best educational experience and optimize their likelihood to graduate, I don’t think exclusively online courses would be the pathway,” he said. “Taking a few online courses with a healthy dose of face-to-face courses seems like the right mix.”
Jon Edelman can be reached at [email protected].
