I recently stumbled upon a Washington Post article entitled “Online Learning Still in High Demand at Community Colleges” where through various interviews and a few studies, the author Sara Weissman details how community colleges across the country are still offering an astounding number of online courses, some institutions with over 50% of their sections offered in fully online or hybrid modalities. Unsurprisingly, the administrators Weissman interviewed justify such outsized online offerings because, according to one vice president, “students have made their preferences clear via their enrollment trends - online course sections at the college have filled much more quickly lately than in-person courses.” Unfortunately, I am not sure these trends, which are usually undergirded by college “data,” reflect what is really happening on the ground, as it is usually difficult to decipher what kind of data these administrators are actually analyzing. Are they looking at fill rates in the same departments, for instance, or over the entire college, comparing departments that are primarily online against those that are primarily in-person. Nevertheless, these “trends” certainly haven’t reflected my experiences with students.