In perhaps the greatest show of support yet for the viability of online educational programming, a congressional budget bill eliminates the requirement that a student must earn at least fifty percent of his/her college credits on a physical campus to qualify for federal student aid.

Many experts indicate that the new provision is a signal that online education, once considered second rate to the traditional college campus setting, has fully arrived in the educational landscape. Others insist that congressional Republicans, always supporting entrepreneurial ethic, are simply trying to support the commercial education industry.

Though many traditional colleges have expanded their online degree offerings in recent years, the proposal is a benefit to those universities that are fully Internet-based. Most of those schools are also for-profit entities.

Support for lifting the restriction on online education was seen by the Bush administration as a way to promote education for the non-traditional student. The fifty percent rule, as it was called, was enacted by Congress in 1992 in response to some online schools that fraudulently awarded diplomas even as they accepted federal student loans.

But the growth in the online educational industry has led enrollments growing faster at for-profit schools than at traditional colleges.