Jason Delonais may be a police chief today, but in the mid- to late-2000s, he was an Iraq War veteran wrapping up his service as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman and trying to find a pathway to a bachelor’s degree.

Right around that time, he found Excelsior University, an online-only school in Albany, N.Y.

“You can work on it anytime, day or night,” he says. “And when you run into situations the military – you get deployed or you have to pull a watch, or something happens – I was able to reach out to an Excelsior professor and let them know what was going on. They were very understanding.”

He finished work on his Bachelor of Science degree soon after leaving the Navy in 2008.

Years later, even while remaining on the job as police chief in Fletcher, Oklahoma, and becoming a new father, he returned to Excelsior to earn a Master of Science degree in criminal justice.

The idea of college may initially conjure up grassy courtyards, brick and stone buildings, ivy walls, and cramped dorm rooms for most people. However, for the 53.2% of postsecondary students the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found enrolled in distance education courses in 2023, it likely also evokes computer screens and time spent studying at home sweet home.

While higher education enrollment overall has been flat or declining in recent years, online enrollment nearly doubled from 2017 to 2022, an Education Dynamics analysis of NCES data found. And more than 30 percent of students used distance education exclusively in fall 2022, according to Education Dynamics.

Online Education Is a Broad Category

Strictly online institutions tend to serve working-age or older adults requiring flexible schedules constructed around family obligations and work.

“Folks arrive at higher ed for a multitude of reasons,” says Julie Uranis, senior vice president of online and strategic initiatives for UPCEA, the online and professional education association.

“Online learning gives them an ability to engage where otherwise they might not be able to simply because of time and schedule and location, and a whole variety of personal factors.”

But the 53.2% that are distance learners also includes more-traditional students at brick-and-mortar colleges.

“Post pandemic, the world has changed,” Uranis says. “More learners are expecting and wanting online learning, even if they’re an 18- to 24-year-old living in the residences on a campus.”

Ashley Finley, vice president of research and senior advisor to the president at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), cites a personal example.

“My partner teaches at Colorado Mountain College, and they offer both online and in-person classes,” she says. “And when they ask students, ‘What do you want?’ They’ll say, ‘Well, we want to be face-to-face.’ But then they’ll register for online classes.”

Increased Competition in Online Ed

Faced with such student preferences, many in-person schools have maintained online capabilities built up during the pandemic to offer students a mix of teaching modalities.

Some traditionally in-person schools have even recently built up entire divisions to compete directly with predominantly remote learning institutions, the largest of which include Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, and University of Phoenix.

“I think higher education institutions, colleges, and universities have figured out this can be another revenue stream,” Finley says, noting that competition for students is becoming fiercer as the number of college-aged students in America shrinks.

She adds that a remote modality also can work for people who can’t afford the increasingly expensive traditional college experience, which can include not just tuition and an investment of time, but also housing or commuting costs, meal plans, fees, and perhaps even childcare or elder care.

However, while a study out this month from Educause shows older students continue to support online learning as a modality, it also finds traditional college-aged students increasingly shifting back towards a preference for in-person learning experiences over online.

Pandemic Did Not Help Remote-First Institutions

Besides sparking increased competition from traditional schools, the pandemic hit existing remote-first institutions such as Excelsior University, where the average student is 35 years old, in other ways, says David Schejbal, Excelsior’s president.

“Online programs had the largest enrollment drops along with community college programs during Covid,” he says. “All of a sudden, students that had particular structures in their lives that allowed them to study were working at the kitchen table with two kids crawling all over the place, the dog barking, the spouse is trying to work in the same space, and something had to give.

“For many of them,” he adds, “you couldn’t get rid of the kids, you couldn’t get rid of the job, so you had to let the learning go.”

But Excelsior has deep roots as a remote-learning institution and was able to persevere. Its history goes all the way back to 1971, when it was founded as the Regents External Degree Program by the New York State Board of Regents, which oversees education in New York.

“It was simply an office in the Board of Regents, and the purpose was to help students aggregate the credits that they had, do a gap analysis, and then help them figure out where to finish their degrees,” Schejbal says.

“At that time, there were many Vietnam vets that were also returning to the U.S. and many of them had military experience that was applicable to college,” he says. “And so the Regent’s External Degree Program was serving adult students, but with a large percentage of them being either active members of the military or veterans.”

Military Servicemembers, Adult Learners, and Remote Learning

The program, which evolved into Regents College, then Excelsior College in 2001, and eventually Excelsior University, serves large numbers of service members to this day.

“About 40% of our students are either active members of the military or veterans,” Schejbal says. “For active members of the military, the online modality is essential because almost no student that starts with us ends up living in the same place by the time the student graduates. … Our programs are designed with the kind of flexibility that those students need and the ability to study at a distance whenever it works for them.”

He says family also is a theme at the school, with multiple generations sometimes walking the stage together at the school’s in-person graduation ceremonies.

“Even though you’d expect most [Excelsior learners] are doing it for professional mobility, many of them are doing it for their families,” Schejbal says. “Many tell me, ‘I want to set an example for my kids. I’m the first-generation student to go to college and I want my kids to go to college, so I want them to see how it’s done.’”

Courses are scheduled in eight-week terms year-round to allow maximum flexibility for students to engage when they need to and take brief breaks when their lives or jobs intervene. Schejbal says the curriculum also distinguishes Excelsior.

“Just because other schools offer courses online doesn’t mean that they do it well,” he says. “And there’s a big difference between teaching via Zoom – which…most started to do during Covid, but some still continue to do – and developing really well-structured, asynchronous courses that incorporate multimedia components, have synchronous components with faculty, engage students in various ways, et cetera.”

The name change to Excelsior University in 2022 came about “to better reflect the comprehensive portfolio of offerings that we offer,” says Schejbal, who has been Excelsior’s president since 2020. “We have degree programs from associate’s through master’s. Our three primary areas of programmatic focus are business, technology, and health care.”

Focus on Health Care Education

He points to the school’s nursing program, touted as the largest in New York State, as an example of Excelsior’s educational ethos: “to take students in where they are in their academic journeys and then help them get to the next stage without requiring them to repeat learning that they’ve already done.”

“We admit individuals only if they have prior clinical experience in health care,” he says. “The students that we admit are LPNs, licensed practical nurses, or corpsman in the military, or paramedics, and they have to have at least 200 hours of clinical experience in order to be admitted into the program. And then we expect them to continue to work in a clinical setting while they’re doing their studies.”

Sena Amegbletor, a schoolteacher in Ghana before arriving in the United States in 2002, was already working as a licensed practical nurse and had some community college credits in America when she found Excelsior. She has since earned her associate’s degree in nursing and a bachelor’s degree in health care management from Excelsior.

“I felt that the professors were present with me, including my advisors, my mentors and the program itself,” she says. “We had access with phone calls, emails, Zooms.

“The most important thing, I would say, is (to be able) to schedule the classes you want to take at your own pace,” she says. “But it also has a deadline and creates the opportunity for you to do self-management or improve your time-management skills, your ability to maneuver or go through two or three tasks, especially if you are a working individual and have a family to uphold.”

Now a registered nurse, she is working as a public health nurse at the Virginia Department of Public Health as she pursues a master’s degree in public health through Excelsior.

From Navy Corpsman to Police Chief Via Online Learning

Delonais also entered the Excelsior orbit through health care. Soon after leaving the Navy in 2008, he built upon his experience as a Navy hospital corpsman and earlier college course work to earn his Excelsior bachelor’s degree in liberal arts with a health science technology concentration.

While working a corrections officer, he “was able to use that degree to leverage my way up to becoming the health services supervisor for the county jail.”

He transitioned from corrections to a law enforcement career in Oklahoma, becoming Fletcher Police Department chief in 2017. Around the same time, he began pursuing his master’s degree in criminal justice through Excelsior.

“I used the PD as a lab, as synergistic,” he says. “So every time I would take a course, I would take what I learned from the course and implement it to the police department.

“The last eight years we’ve done phenomenal things that a department our size never does and (won) awards that we typically don’t ever win,” he says. “I’ve attended some trainings that less than 1% of the nation have attended. And I’m from a little, bitty, 2,000-person town on a good day. Okay? I’m very proud of that. … And that’s all based on the credentials I’ve received from Excelsior University and the success they’ve helped me get.”

First Graduation Ceremony: ‘I Get Goosebumps Thinking About It’

As someone who entered the Navy without a college degree a few years after high school, he couldn’t have imagined such accomplishments, let alone speaking at Excelsior’s graduation ceremony after earning his master’s degree in 2022.

“That’s the first university graduation I’d ever been a part of, and I didn’t think I’d ever get a chance to do it,” he says.

“Not only did I get to do it, I got an award and I got to go to a fancy banquet dinner. And then I got to speak to my whole graduating class, and I got to tell my story up on stage in front of all these people, and they streamed it all over the place.

“It sounds silly, but I get goosebumps thinking about it because when you start to get into your late 40s, you only have so many academies, so many graduations. I was kind of thinking, ‘Well, that time has passed for me,’ and I got it. I got everything I ever wanted in Excelsior. They made every academic dream I ever had come true.”