OT-Anyone why UA doesn't do more with online degree promotion/additional degrees offered?

Check this out https://online.ua.edu/degrees/

Yeah, I agree with that. Wild that mechanical is the only engineering program. I think UA sees online as a necessary evil for professional leaning degrees and people just looking for any bachelors (military service members and veterans most often). They really believe their value add is the “student life” and they want people on campus. That’s why our campus was almost immediately saying there’d be classes in the fall of 2020. UA without the trappings of the undergraduate night life is replaceable by anything else.

I agree being on campus is/was (for me anyway) a really great experience but not everyone can do that. Some people can’t afford to live on campus. Some people have small kids. Some people have jobs/careers.

Are you talking about undergraduate or graduate education?

Focusing just on undergrad: since the mid-2000s, the primary strategy has been to grow out-of-state, on-campus enrollment to increase revenue, and that approach has been highly successful. However, there are natural capacity limits. At the same time, the college-going population in Alabama is fluctuating overall. While more out-of-state students are relocating to Alabama before starting college—making the in-state population appear larger—the reality is that it’s actually declining. To sustain the current model, the institution will need to rely increasingly on out-of-state enrollment. At some point, there likely needs to be a greater emphasis on academic research to balance things out, but with research funding potentially tightening due to political headwinds, other options may need to be explored.

As for expanding undergraduate online programs at a well-established, residential institution, it’s far more challenging than it sounds. Of the three schools mentioned, Arizona State is the closest comparison—and they’re essentially a more extreme version of this model. Historically, ASU has been known for massive enrollment growth and chronic undergraduate housing shortages. It’s possible they’ve reached the limits of what they can do on campus and are now turning to online expansion as the next pathway. That said, framing online growth as a response to exhausting a profitable residential model doesn’t strike me as an ideal position. If you’re willing to invest heavily and plan carefully, it might work, but it carries significant risk. In my view, ASU has never had a particularly strong institutional identity beyond being a party school; while that has drawbacks, it also means they don’t face the same cultural or alumni pushback that schools with more deeply rooted identities might encounter.

Alabama, by contrast, is built around the undergraduate campus experience—that is the school’s identity—so any major push toward online undergrad programs would almost certainly generate resistance. We’ve discussed before the challenges of recruiting and retaining faculty for on-campus roles; scaling online education would either require significantly expanding the faculty base or increasing existing faculty workloads, neither of which is likely to be well received. Additionally, Alabama currently lacks the infrastructure and student support systems geared toward non-traditional students. Building those resources presents a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and the funding for robust online infrastructure probably isn’t available right now. I’m also unsure how much of the online learning infrastructure remained after COVID, as many schools in conservative states significantly rolled back their LMS investments.

There’s also the risk of cannibalizing out-of-state, residential enrollment by shifting students into online programs, which could actually reduce net revenue. Since Alabama is neither a small institution like Liberty, have a long standing online program like Purdue global nor completely at capacity like ASU, the financial impact could be negative. Retention is another major concern—when I was there, stop-outs were the biggest issue, and online programs tend to increase that risk, though it’s possible those dynamics have shifted since then.