Online Summers: Why Students Are Choosing Virtual Classrooms and What We Lose When They Do
Every June, something changes on college campuses. The dining halls thin out. The hallways echo a little more than they should. Parking lots that were chaotic in April suddenly feel wide open. And for faculty members who genuinely love their students, the quiet carries a particular kind of ache. As Inside Higher Ed contributor Matt Reed put it plainly: "I can't begrudge students making the best choices for themselves. But I do miss them."
That tension — between respecting student autonomy and mourning the loss of shared physical space — sits at the heart of one of higher education's most quietly significant trends: the steady migration of summer enrollment to online formats.
The Online Summer Surge: By the Numbers
Summer online course enrollment has climbed steadily over the past decade, and the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated what was already a clear directional shift. According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, online enrollment in the summer term has outpaced in-person growth at two- and four-year institutions alike. At community colleges especially, summer sessions have become overwhelmingly digital.
Students are not making this choice arbitrarily. The reasons driving online summer enrollment are practical, deeply personal, and in many cases, financially urgent.
- Work obligations: A significant share of college students — particularly at community colleges — hold part-time or full-time jobs. Online summer courses allow them to stack credits without sacrificing income during a season when employers often offer more hours.
- Caregiving responsibilities: Summer can intensify childcare demands. Online classes offer the flexibility to study around family schedules rather than rearranging family around campus hours.
- Cost of commuting: Gas prices, transit fares, and parking fees add up. Eliminating the commute to campus for a course or two over the summer can represent real savings for students who are already stretching limited budgets.
- Geographic flexibility: Some students return to their hometowns for the summer. Online enrollment keeps them connected to their institution and on track for graduation without requiring them to stay near campus.
- Pace and focus: A concentrated summer term in an online format can suit students who prefer to move through material at their own pace, free from the social distractions that sometimes accompany in-person coursework.
The Case for Online Summer Courses
It would be a mistake to frame the rise of online summer learning purely as a loss. For millions of students, especially those who are first-generation college-goers, working adults, or parents returning to school, online summer courses are not a lesser option — they are the option that makes college possible at all.
Online summer enrollment allows institutions to serve students who would otherwise stop out entirely between May and August. Stopping out, even temporarily, increases the risk of never returning. By offering robust asynchronous and synchronous online summer courses, colleges keep students engaged, progressing, and connected to their academic goals during a period that historically saw the highest dropout risk.
There is also a quality argument to be made. Over the past several years, instructional design has matured considerably. Many online summer courses now incorporate interactive video lectures, collaborative digital discussion boards, project-based assessments, and one-on-one faculty office hours via video conferencing. The gap between a well-designed online course and a mediocre in-person lecture course is narrower than critics often acknowledge.
What the Campus Loses When Summer Goes Quiet
And yet. There is something irreplaceable about the informal ecology of a college campus in summer. Faculty who teach summer sessions often describe a particular intimacy to those courses — smaller class sizes, students who are there by active choice rather than degree requirement, a slower pace that allows for genuine intellectual conversation. When those students log on from their bedrooms and kitchen tables instead of walking through classroom doors, that ecology dissolves.
For faculty, the disappearance of students from physical space is not merely sentimental. Research on student success consistently identifies belonging and connection as critical factors in persistence. The casual conversation before class, the study group that forms organically in the library, the moment a student stops by office hours to ask a question that turns into a twenty-minute discussion about their future — these interactions are difficult, perhaps impossible, to replicate through a screen.
Campus support services also feel the shift. Tutoring centers, counseling offices, writing labs, and food pantries all depend on foot traffic to reach the students who need them most. An online student who is struggling academically or personally may not seek out these services in the same way, and may not even be aware they are available.
Finding the Balance: Hybrid Models and Intentional Design
The most thoughtful institutional responses to this trend have not tried to reverse it. Instead, they have worked to design online summer experiences that preserve as much of the human element as possible.
Some colleges now build mandatory synchronous touchpoints into otherwise asynchronous online summer courses — not as a punitive attendance measure, but as a deliberate opportunity for students to see and hear their instructor and each other. Others have invested in virtual drop-in hours, peer tutoring through video platforms, and online cohort programming that connects summer students to one another even when they are miles apart.
The challenge is significant but not insurmountable. It requires faculty to think differently about what online teaching can accomplish and what it cannot. It requires institutions to resource their online programs with the same seriousness they bring to in-person offerings. And it requires everyone involved to be honest about the trade-offs.
The Human Question at the Core
Matt Reed's brief, honest reflection — that he cannot begrudge his students for making the best choices for themselves, but that he misses them anyway — captures something essential about this moment in higher education. The question is not whether online summer courses are good or bad. They are, for many students, genuinely good. The question is whether institutions are willing to invest the care, creativity, and resources needed to ensure that choosing online does not mean choosing alone.
Students deserve both the flexibility that online learning offers and the sense of belonging that a college education at its best provides. Closing that gap is the work of the coming years.