Why So Many Online Programs Hit a Quality Ceiling in Their Third Year
Universities launch online programs with significant investment, then watch quality plateau. A 2025 study identifies the management decisions behind the pattern.
La mayor parte de los programas de estudios en línea de universidades en los Estados Unidos pasan por tres fases: un primer año bien financiado, un segundo año con un aumento en la matrícula y evaluaciones positivas, y un tercer año con un desafío para sostener la calidad de los programas de estudios en línea.
Online Programs Lose Quality in 3 Years. Most online degree programs at US universities follow a certain pattern. In the first year, when a new program is launched, things are well resourced and courses are developed and new hires are made. In the second year, programs experience growth in terms of enrollment, and new program holders tend to be very satisfied with their online Master’s program. In the third year, though, things can decline. In their 2025 study of 64 online Master’s programs launched between 2018 and 2022, the Online Learning Consortium studied the degree of quality loss in online education programs over time. The main author of the study is Dr. Reema Atallah. Of the 64 online Master’s programs that were studied by the authors, 41 reported lower student satisfaction than in the programs’ first year. Also, the percentage of students who completed all of the individual courses of a program declined in 38 of the 64 programs studied. That there is a quality loss in online Master’s programs in the third year is therefore not an isolated case, but rather part of a program life cycle that most online Master’s programs go through. Pick wisely.
What Happens in Year Three
First, there is typically minimal staff supporting a launch of a new online program. A small core of committed faculty and instructional designers will have designed and launched the program. By year three, many of these same faculty will have cycled out of the program. Institutional commitment to backfilling the spots of those who have left will not typically match the initial commitment to launch the program.
“Year one, every email gets answered in two hours,” continued Dr. Atallah. ” Year three, students wait three days for an answer to their questions, because they don’t see the staffing chart.”
Course Content Goes Stale
While getting an online program up and running is challenging, sustaining quality over time is even more difficult. For online courses, this means that the material will become stale over time. Online courses are typically developed in a ‘burst’ and then left to run for long periods of time. Updating recorded lectures is very difficult to do well and thus is often not done. (I keep a small notebook for things like this. Half of this article is culled from my notebook.)
In a 2024 audit of 22 online MBA courses from 12 providers (across 3 countries), 60% contained references to historic events or data that were more than 3 years old at the time of the audit. 35% of the courses contained at least one factual error that had been introduced because of the passage of time. Comments from students in program reviews for years 3 and 4 include complaints that the material in the courses was already out of date.
Tuition Discounting and Mission Creep
But in many cases, successful programs are seen as profit centers that can be used to subsidize other university programs. So the financial incentive is to grow as large as possible as quickly as possible. The educational incentive is to select the best students and to invest as much as possible in them. These two incentives are in tension, and in the end, the financial incentive usually wins out. This is borne out by a 2025 paper in the Journal of Higher Education: The Relationship Between Online Program Admissions Selectivity and Student Outcomes, which tracked 14 of the largest online programs in the country. The researchers found that as the admissions rate for a program went up, the rate at which students completed their first year of courses went down by an average of 8 percentage points.
“Unfortunately, the financial incentive to run an online program is to grow. And the educational incentive is to be selective, to really invest time and resources to provide a high-quality program. And unfortunately, those two incentives are in conflict, and the financial side generally wins. There are many programs out there that have the noblest of intentions but are not willing to make the financial investments to really achieve those goals.
Programs That Avoid the Plateau
Programs that have maintained quality in the third year of their programs have certain design features in common, including a dedicated team of ID specialists who are responsible for the ongoing design of program courses; a content review process that occurs on a term by term basis rather than on an annual basis; and student feedback processes that have named owners.
An example of a program that is meeting quality criteria for online masters degree programs in Year 3 is the online MBA offered by Northeastern University. In the OLC study, Northeastern’s online MBA had a designated quality steward for each course, had conducted one-year reviews for all of its courses, and had built into its budget money for content refresh for its online offerings. The program’s completion rates for its online students as well as its graduates’ post graduate employment rates had held at a high level over the last six years. The instructional design team was large and included a number of designers who were creating new course work for the program as well as revising already launched courses. The faculty were highly involved in their online courses and there were small student to faculty ratios for the program’s online students. This is a middle program that taught me a lot.
What This Means for Prospective Students
Online programs are very different from traditional campuses so even good programs are a challenge for students to evaluate. In addition to understanding the typical life-cycle for good quality online programs it will be important for prospective students to evaluate programs by asking a number of tough questions regarding the quality of their content, the instructional design staff, and their student-faculty ratio, especially for the past 3 years. If a program cannot answer any of these questions then the program is likely to fall into the 3rd year plateau and decline pattern.
Findings presented in this study are also relevant to accrediting bodies and to organizations that rank programs online. Current approaches to ranking typically look at a program at a single point in time. The study team is working with regional accreditors to develop a number of indicators that can pick up on the slide in quality prior to its affect on students.
The Broader Pattern
As the online education market matures, our field is moving from fully grasping the launch of an online program to a deeper understanding of how to sustain a high quality online program over time. A single strong launch does not equal a program of excellence over time. As I told a group of young, emerging higher education leaders recently, building an online program is hard. But keeping one good is even harder. That is the challenge of our time and that is the challenge which we as a field are just now beginning to fully grasp.
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