United States—Commentary

Abstract

There are more than 4700 institutions of higher education in the United States. These include technical institutes, community colleges, state colleges and universities, a landgrant university in each state, private liberal arts colleges, private research universities, and, more recently, for-profit degree-granting companies. While distance education was once primarily the purview of land grant universities and, later, community colleges, online learning has greatly broadened the diversity of institutions that provide programs to students away from campus. One factor that makes it difficult to discuss a “national system” of distance education in the United States is that higher education tends to be organized at the state level rather than nationally. At the national level, distance education innovations tend to be shared within families of institutions through their own professional associations (American Association of Community Colleges, University Professional and Continuing Education Association, etc.). One major exception is the Online Learning Consortium, which was formed when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation brought together institutions that it had funded through its “asynchronous learning networks” grants program in the 1990s. That said, there is a long tradition of institutional collaboration that cuts across many distance education technologies and governance boundaries.