People ask the strangest things of pseudonymous internet randos instead of subject-matter experts.

Doing it well requires a different approach and skill set than in person learning, which can be difficult to retrofit into an existing institution, especially when budgets are tight. Plus established institutions tend to be a bit conservative about things. Even if the administration is on board, getting faculty to adjust their curricula and adopt the new technology can be near impossible.

Online is only really better for lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. As you work your way up from default memorization, in person learning starts to shine.

Also, a bachelor’s degree isn’t supposed to just teach you hard skills, but also soft skills to make you a leader. It is a lot harder to teach leadership when students don’t have to deal with people.

People still want to see people.

And, of course, you can make more money when you force everyone to come in.

I’ve done online education both as a student and as an instructor of adults. The truth is that it doesn’t come close to matching an in-person classroom experience.

As an instructor it is really hard for me to create engaging lessons even in person. I get a lot of blank stares and zoning out. That may be partly on me but I think it’s because a lot of students are just there because they’re required to be there. They aren’t interested in what I am teaching even if I’m excited about it. At least in the classroom I can give them gentle nudges to engage and there is some live interaction to encourage them.

If I have to teach the course online it is likely to be very hands-off. The general format is read some content, watch some videos, do some homework and maybe a quiz, and engage in some forced online interaction. At the place where I was learning, that interaction was one response to a prompt, posted on a student forum, and two responses to other students’ posts. Those posts had a mandatory minimum word count requirement to meet the grading requirement. There is sometimes interaction with the instructor on the forum if they are very motivated and aren’t too busy, but most instructors are adjuncts and probably have other work they are doing. Some are, like students, not motivated and are just there to do the minimum to get paid. Also, group projects are difficult to manage. There are no in-class labs, and in some situations an online simulation does not come even close to a hands-on learning experience.

We have done live online classes where I teach but we have very small class sizes and it tends to work better since we can encourage interaction with each student. This isn’t possible with larger classes and again, there is no social incentive if students are all sitting alone staring at their phones/tablets/laptops.

So from my experience online education tends to be isolating for students and not at all motivating. It is also a surprising amount of work for the instructors and does not tend to add value to the course.

I think there’s an element of prestige people are missing. At least in my country there were online options prior to the pandemic even, they however lacked the prestige / name recognition that other institutions had. Keeping mandatory in-person classes is another way to maintain this prestige, a differentiating factor, from the other institutions.

I also have to agree with most of the comments here. From an instructional point of view online classes are lacking, they can be less engaging, and pedagogically neutered. And in fields with lots of laboratory work, it’s frankly impossible to get rid of at least part of the in-person educational component. Even for the humanities, having access to a large on-campus library of scholarly resources is integral to research.

In my personal experience I’ve been quite grateful to have access to a large archival collection, items that could not be shipped to remote students because they are too old to leave a temperature & humidity controlled environment. An online experience would prevent someone like me from doing some manuscript / original publication related research.

Now, I do think online options are helpful. ESPECIALLY for summer classes, where students may wish to retake a class while also moving away for summer work. But I do not think they should become the default, they should be an option where possible, but not the new normal.

A lot of people here are saying it’s cheaper to run in person…

For purely theoretical degrees, that’s not true: having to maintain a campus is way more expensive than just doing things remotely, but for more vocational degrees it definitely is: imagine having to send a fume hood or injection moulder or oscilloscope out to every student as well as chase up getting it returned, along with shipping any hazardous materials like batteries, acid, biological samples etc. out, and verifying that people are actually handling those correctly?..

For science, medical and engineering degrees, online tuition is just going to produce people vastly underprepared for work in anything that requires the skills & knowledge the degree is meant to provide you, and as they’re the most expensive programs to run you can subsidise them with the other degrees, but only if they’re treated as comparable, ie being on the same campus.

I went to UCSB for 5 years and can confirm that I actually learned everything on khan academy for free

More profitable if you’re onsite.