This article misses a significant point: access to online learning is different from and cannot replace motivation to learn, which is what's investigated in the article. The business model of most online universities is based on number of enrolled students, not number of graduating students. Since the barrier to entry is low and the enrollment associates sell well, people often end up enrolling without sufficient motivation to study and quickly drop out after getting overwhelmed by the responsibility they overtook. A more fair evaluation would take students of equivalent motivation to study a degree/subject, and then compare their performances in offline and online classroom settings (of course if you truly want to understand before you speculate with "dirty little" titles).