As High School seniors scramble to complete college applications stories abound about rising tuition costs and shrinking endowments. I wondered if online universities might be benefiting from the recession. Visits to online universities are up 43% year over year compared to a 22% decline in visits to the Education – Institutions category as a whole. The data for online universities is based on a custom category of the 20 top online universities (based on website visits last week).
The following chart illustrates that online universities (plotted on the right axis) have been growing for the past three years while the Education Institutions category (left axis) has been declining.

The top ranked Education Institutions are Online Universities. One of the University of Phoenix websites has ranked #1 for the past three years. This remains unchanged.
But University of Phoenix is not the only online university seeing strong growth. In fact, 16 of the top 20 online universities have seen visits increase over the past year. And all of the top 10 online universities have seen an increase in visits in the past year.
Using our soon to be released upgrade to the Hitwise Demographic and Lifestyle tool, I found that online universities appeal more to lower income segments, in particular those earning a household income of less than $30,000 a year.
In thinking about how online universities will weather the recession, it is important to keep in mind that lower income groups will be hardest hit by the recession. But, at the same time, those looking for lower cost options for education may turn to online universities.
Addendum
In response to Kate’s request, here is a ranking of the 20 Online Universities I used in my custom category to prepare this analysis. The ranking is based on weekly data to 29th November 2008 and the share refers to share of visits within the custom category.