From: Carolyn Fast, Negotiator for Consumer Advocates/Civil Rights (Primary) 

Barmak Nassirian, Negotiator for U.S. Military Service Members, Veterans, or Groups 

Representing Them (Primary) 

To: Department of Education and Negotiation Committee Members 

Date: March 4, 2024 

Re: Analysis of Distance Education Enrollment Data

Throughout negotiations, we have proposed changes that would enable institutions to meet state 

authorization requirements through reciprocity agreements that meet certain conditions -- but require 

them to seek direct approval from states in which they enroll at least a certain number of students. In 

other words, states would continue to have direct approval and oversight of institutions enrolling a 

significant number of their students; but institutions that enroll only a handful of students across state 

lines would instead participate through a reciprocity agreement that streamlines their access to student 

enrollment and federal financial aid. This helps to conserve both institutional and state resources, by 

focusing authorization efforts on institutions with the largest presence in their states.

In past proposals, we suggested that 1,000 students in a state might be adequate to warrant direct 

authorization. However, we recently analyzed federal data suggesting that such a figure might be too high. 

States should have adequate resources to provide oversight directly of institutions with a much smaller 

footprint in their borders.

Institutions with More Than [X] Students in Exclusively Distance-Education 

From Another State or an Unknown Location

Number of Students Number of Institutions Percentage of Institutions

0 2,924 49%

50 1,696 28%

100 1,281 21%

200 877 15%

300 669 11%

500 471 8%

1,000 246 4%

2,000 139 2%

3,000 105 2%

5,000 63 1%
Source: IPEDS 12-Month Enrollment and Fall Enrollment data, 2022. Because some of the largest online 

institutions are better represented by 12-month enrollments than by fall enrollments, this analysis 

multiples the percentage of distance education fall enrollments that are among students who are out of 

state or in an unknown location by the 12-month distance education enrollment figures to estimate 12-

month out-of-state/unknown location enrollments. For instance, if a school had 1,000 exclusively distance 

students according to the Fall Enrollment survey and 1,500 exclusively distance students according to the 

12-Month Enrollment survey, and 500 (50 percent) of those fall enrollments were out-of-state, we 

estimated that 750 of the 12-month enrollments (1,500 * 50%) were out-of-state or in an unknown 

location.

In fact, nearly half (49%) of institutions have no exclusively-online students in another state. Only 4 

percent have 1,000 students or more. Since our policy proposal relates to the number of online students 

in each individual state, it is clear that 1,000 students would not be an appropriate threshold to 

appropriately balance the responsibility of states to oversee and authorize institutions enrolling their 

residents with the resource constraints of doing so.

Instead, we propose to require direct authorization in any state in which an institution enrolls at least 100 

students online (as well as in the state where the institution is located). Just 21 percent of institutions 

have at least 100 out-of-state online students anywhere; even fewer will have at least 100 students in a 

single given state other than their own. We believe this level would be both more justified and more 

appropriate as the Department considers ways to balance resource constraints of states and institutions 

with the need to ensure faithful implementation of the state authorization requirements in the law.