Personally, I think one of the major problems with online universities is that they often victimize the economically disadvantaged. Here’s oftentimes what happened to students at my husband’s school:
-Student is accepted into a school without providing any SAT/ ACT/ GRE scores (and unfortunately, many students are simply not smart enough to hack it at a brick and mortar college, and see online universities as the next best thing)
-Student proceeds to fail out of numerous classes. However, the college does not put them on academic probation. Students are allowed to take classes as many times as necessary to pass
-Student then takes several years to graduate because of multiple retakes. Oftentimes, there is also misinformation/ poor communication about deadlines and requirements, so students oftentimes have to enroll an extra semester for some stupid administrative reason
-Student graduates with a huge debt (some had upwards of 90k by the time they finished)
-Student learns that the program was not accredited, and now is unable to get licensed/ employed with their expensive degree.

Could online education work? Sure. Can it as effective as brick-and-mortar schools? You bet. From what I hear, Fielding is a good example of a school that seems to get it right. Unfortunately, there are some really bad schools out there with unaccredited or failing programs, and the people who tend to end up in them are ones who simply don’t have the resources to know that these issues are a problem. So I think until these schools start behaving ethically and ensuring that their students are treated as students rather than cash cow, this mode of education is going to be dismissed by the greater public, and for good reason.