Harvard Business Review
Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles by Mike Colias
Published in February 2025
Fully online degrees = fully electric vehicles
Hybrid degrees = hybrid vehicles
Fully residential degrees = internal combustion vehicles
The analogy is imperfect.
Unlike fully electric vehicles, fully online programs are not inherently superior from an environmental perspective. However, to understand the future of higher education, the transition from gas to electric in the automotive industry offers a helpful perspective.
Inevitable, written by Wall Street Journal automotive reporter Mike Colias, offers an in-depth (and highly entertaining) analysis of the past, present and future of electric transportation. Released at a time when the near-term prospects of electric vehicles are questionable due to the Trump administration’s successful push to roll back incentives and defund public charging, Inevitable might seem poorly timed (or at least poorly titled).
The reality, however, is that in the medium to long term, economics and technology—and not politics—will drive the transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles. At some point (Colias predicts by 2040), the cost and performance advantage of battery-powered vehicles will drive a tipping point in which the majority of cars and trucks sold in the U.S. will be electric.
For graduate education, we’ve already reached that online tipping point. For the past few years, we’ve seen more master’s degrees conferred for programs with an online option than for residential-only programs. Nor is this only a graduate student story. Richard Garrett, Eduventures chief research officer at Encoura, predicts that 2025 will be the year that “for the first time, the number of fully online undergraduates will surpass those enrolled in no online classes.”
One way to think about EVs and online learning together is through the lens of organizational change. Inevitable does an excellent job of detailing the challenges for legacy automakers of making the gas-to-EV shift. Car makers must decide to make huge investments and absorb short-term losses to position themselves for long-term success as battery technology improves and the charging infrastructure matures. The risk for legacy automakers is that without investing today, they will be unable to compete with either electric-only vehicle manufacturers or Chinese car companies in the future.
Like auto companies, universities must decide that future-proofing their educational offerings (and in particular graduate and nondegree programs) requires long-term and sustained investments in building a robust online learning institutional infrastructure. Learning how to build, market, enroll and run successful online programs is not a change that can happen overnight. That institutional muscle needs to be built over years, not months.
As detailed in Inevitable, considerable leadership skill and fortitude have been required to convince stakeholders (including shareholders) that electric vehicle investments are necessary for the long-term resilience of the automotive companies they lead. I suspect that a similar level of skill and fortitude will be required of our university leaders to make the long-term strategic investments in developing institutional capabilities in online learning.
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