The Adoption and Use of Distance Education: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Organizational Change in American Colleges and Universities

Abstract

In this dissertation, I examine the adoption and use of distance education by baccalaureate-granting colleges and universities in the United States. Although distance education, a departure from traditional face-to-face instruction, gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, its origins in American higher education actually date back to the 1880s. Despite its widespread use in recent decades, the reasons behind this instance of organizational change remain underexplored. This is somewhat surprising given that distance education has a mixed record of effectiveness and cost-efficiency. To address this knowledge gap, I examine how institutional characteristics, along with their social, economic, and political contexts, influence colleges’ and universities’ use of distance education over time. I draw on three theoretical frameworks: classical organizational theory, academic capitalism, and neo-institutional theory. I use a mixed-methods approach to analyze the influence of technical imperatives, market forces, and institutional pressures on distance education use. First, in an historical analysis of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I focus on the emergence of collegiate correspondence courses—the earliest form of distance education. Second, I use multilevel repeated measurement models to analyze a unique panel dataset of American colleges and universities from 1987 to 2019. This dataset combines institutional characteristics from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) with state-level variables, from publicly available sources, and network data from HEC-Net, a novel dataset of institutional consortia membership that I created from archival sources. While my analyses show that technical imperatives and market forces do influence the organizational behavior of colleges and universities, I find that the organizational behavior of peer institutions plays a far more significant role. This strong, consistent relationship across time periods and sectors provides support for neo-institutional theory. Indeed, my findings show that organizational change in higher education is not just a process internal to colleges and universities but is also embedded in a wider institutional field and influenced by the decisions of peer institutions.