A highly touted feature of the so-called global ‘‘revolution’’ in higher education
is the trend to use information technology to reach a broader clientele. Although there is
evidence that students may be learning the material in on-line courses as well as in
traditional face-to-face universities, how well students learn content is not the only reason
they persist to a degree, and student persistence is an important goal of higher education
institutions. In this paper, we make the case that the life conditions for students attending
virtual universities are different from those of ‘‘traditional’’ students in face-to-face
universities, and that this difference puts a particular (largely non-pecuniary) premium on
time to degree. With our data from a Catalan virtual university, the Open University of
Catalonia (UOC), we are able to test this hypothesis directly by using the heterogeneous
degree structure of the Catalonian/Spanish higher education system to estimate whether the
number of courses required to get various degrees (the length of the degree program) is
significantly related to student persistence. The study analyzes several cohorts of students
(those who entered in 2000–2003) studying in the UOC and estimates the factors that
influence their degree completion. We find that the completion rate is generally low, but
that students taking shorter degree courses at the UOC are much more likely to complete
their degrees. This suggests that, given their clientele, on-line universities operate under
very different constraints from their face-to-face counterparts. Our results are important for
higher educational researchers, who have mainly focused on younger populations attending
face-face universities. They also can serve university administrators who launch distance
education degree programs and make high stakes decisions about them with little of no
information on the likely behavior of their older students, and can serve employers who are
deciding whether to subsidize their employees to take advanced degrees through on-line
programs of study.
Keywords On-line universities  Student persistence to degree  Adult learners 
Distance learning  Nontraditional higher education students  Higher education policy

• A highly touted feature of the so-called global ‘‘revolution’’ in higher education is the trend to use information technology to reach a broader clientele. Although there is evidence that students may be learning the material in on-line courses as well as
• Who attends and completes virtual universities: the case of the open University of Catalonia (UOC

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