New NBER Study on Online Education is Deeply Flawed

Caroline Hoxby from Stanford University just published a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claiming to analyze “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Education”. tl;dr This report is a hot mess that that conflates online students, enrollments, programs, institutions and uses a bizarre and misleading data set for its analysis.

The headline for most coverage of this report will likely follow the highlighted section of the abstract: