How to Get an Ivy League Education at Home

Remote learning has been a staple of higher education since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Many colleges and universities have robust online learning programs that offer students of all ages and experiences an opportunity to enhance their understanding of the world and improve their performance in their respective fields.

Newsweek recently collaborated with global data firm Statista for the third year in a row to present the best online college and learning providers in the country.

The ranking is based on a survey of over 9,000 online learners as well as research about the institutions. In the category of top online colleges, Newsweek includes 200 institutions that offer online undergraduate and graduate programs. Each college has been awarded either five stars, indicating an aggregate score above the median of all recognized institutions, or four stars, signifying a score right below that threshold.

Among those 200 schools listed, three Ivy League universities are included: Yale (10), Harvard (11) and Columbia (19).

Kirsten Horton has worked in early education for 13 years and is currently enrolled at the Gesell Institute, an early childhood research, program development and training center that operates out of the Yale Child Study Center. Horton is also a married mother of two working full time in Raleigh, North Carolina.

She said going to school online has saved her a lot of time on commuting, leaving more time to work, take care of her family and complete her coursework.

“Just having the logistical piece taken out of the equation to have a better learning experience is just so much more productive,” she said. “I could make my kids dinner, put them to bed and then hop [online] and get a little bit of my work done every night. It’s much more efficient and it really goes along with the stage of life that I’m in.”

Ryan Lufkin is the president of global strategy at Instructure, the makers of Canvas, a learning management system that creates a digital classroom experience. Many schools, including Yale and Harvard, use this program to run their online courses.

He told Newsweek that the early days of online learning were considered the domain of for-profit institutions, which he calls “diploma mills,” that did not offer a very full, in-depth learning experience. This added to a stigma that students could not get a great education online. But Lufkin said that reality is changing.

“What we’ve seen now, especially with the technology adoption post-COVID, is you can deliver very close to an in-person experience online using tools correctly,” he said.

That means using the right technology and designing courses in a way that creates interaction and engagement points between the educator and the student.

For Ivy League schools, Lufkin said the online programs are highly selective and can still deliver “a superior product.”

“There’s a lot of ways to differentiate the offerings of an Ivy League [school] versus an offering from a different institution,” he said. “I think that’s been a perception battle more than the actual ability level.”

Harvard offers over 130 courses in several major areas of online study, including digital data, health care leadership, and communication and law.

There are opportunities for graduate degrees and certificates in business and management, media and literature, sustainability, technology and life science, as well as undergraduate and post-baccalaureate programs for working adults through Harvard’s Extension School.

At Columbia, there are opportunities to continue one’s education online through open courses. Both degree and non-degree programs are available via the university’s law school, medical center and business school, as well as the Earth Institute, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, School of Social Work, School of Professional Studies and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Yale offers a slew of online learning opportunities—free open enrollment courses, professional certificate programs and degree programs—that cater to different types of students.

Lucas Swineford is the executive director of digital education at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale. He told Newsweek that the open courses appeal to “lifelong learners” of any age who are “constantly curious,” while the certificate programs include mid-career professionals who are currently working and are “emerging leaders in their fields.”

The online degree programs at Yale serve the same students who would enroll in residential, on-campus learning, but they often tend to be older applicants with more professional experience and who are balancing personal or professional obligations and cannot relocate to New Haven.

All of these courses, Swineford said, are intentionally designed to deliver the same value and rigor as in-person learning while providing flexibility to a diverse cohort of students.

“The way we approach our engagements with instructors who are designing online courses is extremely similar to the way we engage with faculty when they’re teaching residential courses,” he said.

Online learning is more than a professor uploading a two-hour lecture online or sharing a laptop screen with dozens of students over a Zoom call.

Lilia Pavlovsky is the director of the online Master of Information Program at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information and began developing online learning courses for Rutgers in 2002 to cater to nontraditional students who were unable to make it to campus for class.

Many online programs are asynchronous, meaning the students learn at different paces, on their own schedule. This provides more flexibility for students but requires them to have more agency and self-discipline.

“You need to be better at time management because nobody’s telling you when to go online, you just have to go there,” Pavlovsky said.

Despite the proliferation of remote learning during the pandemic, many stigmas and misunderstandings persist about receiving an online education.

Swineford pushes back on the misconception that online learning is “categorically less than” in-person learning. He said online programs use the latest technology to provide meaningful, interactive experiences with fellow learners.

“The modalities are different, but we have instructional experts and faculty working together to design extremely rigorous online learning experiences,” he said. “We want to design programs in a way to make community, to make those connections so you are benefiting from a learning community, and it’s not just something you’re doing on your own—watching a video and filling out a non-interactive quiz at the end of it.”

The quality and value of education is dependent on the instructor and design of the class, not just the medium. Online learning differs from in-person instruction, but Swineford insists that Yale’s online programs are designed to be as challenging and provide similar learning outcomes as on-campus programs.

“We should take advantage of the differences to ensure that we’re designing the [online] courses for the most effective outcomes and really aligning that with student expectations,” he said.

Pavlovsky adds that employers are starting to overcome some of the industry prejudices against applicants with online degrees or certificates.

“Over the last 20 years, I think there might have been a little bit of skepticism in the beginning, but once [employers] meet the student, it’s really about the student portfolio,” she said. “When our students get out into the world, they do really well.”

Luis Aguirre-Torres was pleasantly surprised with his experience in the virtual classroom after he decided to expand his education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While working to fully decarbonize Ithaca, New York, as the city’s director of sustainability, he was looking to gain a better sense of the technology, policy and financial components of sustainability.

Aguirre-Torres enrolled in Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate—a 10-month program out of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment that trains “rising leaders to catalyze an equitable transition to a clean economy,” according to the course website.

“The course was not only good for me coming from local government and having experience in the private sector, but it was really good for me to better understand the role of government in innovation that is needed to fight climate change,” Aguirre-Torres said.

Stuart DeCew, the executive director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, said the program is shorter than an in-person class—with an eight-week as opposed to a 13-week semester—so the work is more focused in terms of how students will use what they learn in the professional world right away.

He noted that the completion rate of the program is “astronomically high” and comparable, if not better, than the retention rate of an in-person equivalent.

“When they’ve made that decision to be online and be there and be in this program and be connected to these other people, they really stick with it,” DeCew said. “And we’ve seen people come to the program on a consistent basis and get a promotion or a new job or a new opportunity after having done this because you’ve got a field right now where this is a massive expansion of investments and development, and all the different sectors in clean energy.”

Programs like this, he said, are preparing people to immediately apply what they’ve learned in class to the real world, to help solve their industries’ toughest problems.

During the course, Aguirre-Torres completed several modules that were directly applicable to his real-life job and connected with people from around the world from various backgrounds and experiences. He now works as the director of financial planning and analysis and financing solutions for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Despite the positive experience of many virtual learners, negative perceptions about online education still exist some 20 years later. But Swineford remains optimistic about the future of online learning.

“I still feel that we have some work to do as a community to ensure that the learners and prospective students have a full understanding of online learning,” he said, “that it can certainly be rigorous and that it can be a community activity.”

As technology evolves and the mediums of learning change, the goals of educators remain the same. Pavlovsky said online learning is all about the basics—”How can you make sure that you convey what you want to convey in your class and that your students get something real and transformative out of what you’re doing?”—and that the delivery is almost secondary.

“Technology has always been the tail that wags the dog,” she said. “Whenever I get a question mark in my head, I always go back to the foundation of what we do. As educators, we try to teach and we try to make our students understand and get excited about what we do.”