The build-down of the military after the wars spawned a bumper crop of College students over the past decade that were looking for both vocational and advanced Education in order to help themselves re-integrate into the economy. As part of the trend, new online universities appeared that became very large overnight.

Unfortunately, as the trend wound down, overnight was exactly how long some of those schools lasted, causing some students in the middle of their education to have to reboot their University experience.

One positive over the past couple of years has been that traditional universities which did not try and outspend the new online schools in order to get students, are now left with a market that is receptive to the types of quality education that they have been providing all along.

One school, Robert Morris University, home of the RMU Pittsburgh MBA program, has shown that they are capable of allowing students to complete their entire education online, giving them the same flexibility as they have with those institutions that are created specifically to service online students only. As students that are taking courses over a number of years find out when they go to a school like RMU, the credits are transferable to a large number of universities and colleges, a feature that they don’t always get when they try and apply credit from a strictly online university that they are attending.

Another set of schools that are traditional like MIT have looked at the coursework that is online thoughtfully before creating a sort of framework of courses that can be taken like extension courses for free to allow students to challenge themselves and get a feel for the type of work that they would be doing at those schools. With a number of political candidates talking about making college and university free, getting experience with the type of class that is at the most difficult institutions to gain admission to can only make your opportunity to eventually take full-time courses there much greater.

For young students just graduating from high school, the future therefore looks bright. Not only may they receive a discount on the courses that they do take at university, the schools that are holding sway online for commuter students are now using the quality of the educational experience to compete with each other, something that raises the bar for everyone.

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