Young people from rural areas enroll in postsecondary education at lower rates and obtain less postsecondary schooling, on average, than other students. Distance to postsecondary institutions and smaller sets of course and program offerings at rural institutions contribute to this differential. In summer 2021, the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), which oversees Georgia’s 22 public technical colleges, implemented a system-wide “eCampus” initiative to address these disparities. The eCampus initiative allows students to take online courses and enroll in programs hosted by other system colleges through their own college using a common learning management platform. In this report, Jennifer Darling-Aduana, David C. Ribar, and Ross Rubenstein use administrative data from all 22 TCSG technical colleges from fall 2020 until summer 2024 to examine how the availability of eCampus courses and enrollments in these courses have changed over time, particularly for rural students, rural-located colleges, and rural-serving colleges.

We find that most students—including rural students and students at rural-located and rural-serving institutions—attend colleges offering at least one eCampus course. The numbers of eCampus courses and enrollments have grown over time. However, the numbers of course offerings have been modest, averaging 4.9 courses per college each term in AY 2022, 6.3 courses in AY 2023, and 7.3 courses in AY 2024. Total enrollments in eCampus courses have generally been less than 1% of all course enrollments. Multivariate analyses indicate that there is no difference in rural and non-rural students’ eCampus enrollment rates once we take course availability into account. The analyses also show rural students’ enrollments in other online courses are 10 percentage points higher than non-rural students once we control for other characteristics of the groups, suggesting that there is demand for eCampus and other online courses among rural students. However, rural-located and rural-serving institutions may need to offer more eCampus courses to reduce geographic inequities.