Counting the Online Population

Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed

The Babson Group now uses a combination of enrollment data from IPEDS reported by 4,891 colleges and universities (most recently from fall 2013) and additional survey responses from 2,807 of them (from fall 2014), but it is more interested in trends than totals. Across all of higher education, the growth from 2012 to 2013 in the number of students taking at least one online course — pegged at 3.7 percent for a total of 5.2 million students — is the smallest year-to-year increase since the inception of the survey. The growth still is triple that of overall enrollments, which during the same period grew by 1.2 percent.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/05/babson-survey-research-group-considers-changes-annual-report-distance-education