Stop Confusing a Zip Code with a Quality Education
How a 1990s Mentality Is Undermining Access, Affordability, and Excellence in the Digital Age.
Somehow, in 2025, we are still stuck debating whether online education is "real" education. Despite decades of technological advances, a global pandemic that forced the entire academic world online, and a generation of learners raised on mobile-first knowledge, we still see policymakers, legacy faculty, and regulators reduce digital learning to a lazy caricature. Disembodied Zoom lectures. Passive students in pajamas. The supposed magic of brick-and-mortar buildings.
A clear example of policymakers grappling with the realities of digital learning is the recently reintroduced Affordable College Textbook Act. This bipartisan legislation aims to reduce the financial burden of textbooks by expanding the use of open educational resources; materials that are free to download, edit, and share. The Act would fund grant programs to help colleges create and adopt open textbooks, require transparency about digital content costs and data use, and ensure that all materials produced are freely accessible to the public. By prioritizing affordability and access, the bill directly addresses the challenges students face in the digital age, moving the conversation beyond outdated debates about modality and toward real solutions for equitable learning. Affordable College Textbook Act.
What should have been a conversation about equitable access, affordability, and innovation devolved into outdated tropes about screen time, attention spans, and so-called real campus life. Somehow, giving students a device to access knowledge in the most flexible, adaptive, and globally connected way imaginable became a threat rather than a triumph.
But here's the inconvenient truth, most of what happens in traditional residential classrooms is not excellence. It is habit.
The Campus Myth Is Already Dead; We Just Haven't Buried It
Let's stop pretending that residential equals rigor. Ask any undergraduate at a prestigious institution what they actually do during the semester. From course syllabi to grades to engagement, almost everything lives in a Learning Management System. Students upload their papers online. Professors post readings and lectures. Grades are calculated and communicated digitally. Group chats and Discord servers often drive more learning than the lecture hall itself.
The "residential experience" students pay premium prices for increasingly resembles online learning with expensive real estate attached. They watch recorded lectures on laptops in their dorms. They submit assignments through digital portals. They collaborate through messaging apps. They research through online databases. The physical classroom becomes little more than a scheduled Zoom call with uncomfortable chairs.
So if a student is doing the same work from a coffee shop in Lisbon instead of a dorm room in New Haven, why is one seen as less legitimate than the other?
Because we have confused geography with legitimacy. We have allowed the myth of place to obscure the reality of learning.
What Actually Defines Quality Learning
Real learning is not about where you are, it's about how you are engaged. Quality education, regardless of modality, requires:
Intentional Design: Learning experiences architected around outcomes, not convenience. Whether delivered through VR simulations, on location, on a campus, through collaborative projects, or Socratic dialogue, great education is purposefully constructed to challenge assumptions and build capabilities.
Active Participation: Students wrestling with ideas, not passively consuming content. This happens in online forums where students debate for hours, in virtual labs where they manipulate variables in real-time, and in digital collaborations that span continents; just as much as it happens in seminar rooms, or on location.
Meaningful Assessment: Evaluation that measures deep understanding and practical application, not memorization or attendance. A student who builds a functioning app, explains a compelling analysis, or solves a complex problem has demonstrated learning regardless of their physical location.
Connection: Learning is inherently social, but connection transcends physical proximity. Some of the most profound educational relationships I've witnessed have been forged between mentors and students who never occupied the same room but shared intellectual passion across digital channels.
Adaptive and Responsive: Education that meets learners where they are, accommodates their constraints, and evolves with their needs. This is where digital modalities actually excel; they can be personalized, accessible, and continuously improved in ways that fixed classroom formats cannot match.
The Real Hypocrisy Is Elitism Disguised as Pedagogy
Let's call this what it is; a convenient gatekeeping strategy.
By clinging to the idea that proximity equals quality, we perpetuate privilege. We tell working parents, military personnel, first-generation students, rural learners, caregivers, and global talent that unless they uproot their lives and live in a dorm for four years, their education is second-class.
This is not academic concern. It is cultural inertia.
We are preserving a power structure that benefits those who can afford it financially, socially, and temporally, while dressing it up as a concern for rigor. Meanwhile, students attending top-tier schools are often passively consuming content behind screens, just like their online peers, except with more ivy on the buildings and exponentially more debt on their backs.
The dirty secret of higher education is that the "premium" residential experience often delivers less individualized attention, less flexibility, and less practical relevance than well-designed digital alternatives. We charge students six figures to recreate the limitations of 19th-century instruction while pretending it's pedagogical sophistication.
The False Binary Must Die
The entire online versus in-person debate is a distraction from what matters. Great teachers create transformative learning experiences regardless of the medium. Poor teachers deliver mediocre education whether they're standing in a lecture hall or speaking into a webcam.
But here's what we're really missing, we need a true multiversity. Not one "real" education with alternatives, but…
a flexible ecosystem where residential programs, online degrees, apprenticeships, micro-credentials, and hybrid models all carry equal legitimacy.
Each has distinct advantages. Each serves different learners. Each should be seamlessly navigable so students can move between modalities as their lives, interests, and needs evolve.
The future isn't about choosing sides. It's about building pathways that let a working parent start with online courses, transition to weekend intensives, maybe do a residential summer program, then return to digital learning for advanced work. It's about creating systems flexible enough that a student can pursue rigorous academics online while gaining hands-on experience through local internships, community projects, or maker spaces.
This is how we create actual lifelong learners; not by forcing them into a single institutional mold, but by giving them multiple ways to engage with knowledge throughout their lives.
Separating Coming-of-Age from Learning
As I have written before, but bares repeating, we also need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth that we've conflated the coming-of-age experience with education, and it's hurting both.
The residential college experience serves a social and developmental function that has little to do with learning. It's about independence, identity formation, social networks, and the cultural rituals of young adulthood. These are valuable experiences, but they're not education. They're socialization.
A 19-year-old might benefit enormously from living in a dorm, joining clubs, and navigating campus social dynamics. But a 35-year-old parent seeking to become career-ready, civically engaged, and environmentally aware doesn't need that same developmental experience. They need knowledge, skills, and credentials that fit their life.
When we insist that "real" education requires the full residential package, we're essentially saying that learning is only for people at a specific life stage who can afford a specific lifestyle. We're making civic competence, career readiness, and intellectual growth contingent on participating in a coming-of-age ritual.
This is backwards. Learning should be available to humans at every stage of life, in formats that work for their circumstances, without requiring them to cosplay as 18-year-olds.
Building Education for How People Actually Learn
The future of education is not about choosing between digital and physical. It's about choosing effectiveness over tradition, access over exclusivity, and outcomes over optics.
Instead of asking whether it's online or in-person, we should be asking:
Is it designed for learning or just delivered out of habit?
Does it promote deep thinking, practical skills, and meaningful connection?
Is it accessible, adaptive, and future-ready?
Does it meet learners where they are rather than demanding they conform to institutional convenience?
Can students move fluidly between different modalities as their lives change?
The modality is not the message. The design is the message. And the best design is one that gives learners genuine choice without artificial hierarchies.
Until we abandon the notion that a zip code confers credibility, we will continue to shortchange the millions of learners who cannot or should not have to conform to a 19th-century format to be taken seriously.
Because the real question is not where learning happens.
It's whether it happens at all.