The City University of New York will soon unveil an online baccalaureate degree program intended to lasso former students in the city who dropped out of college with decent grades and want a convenient way to complete their education.

Planning for the program is in the beginning stages, CUNY officials said. The university is aiming to enroll 300 online students by the fall of next year, a number that is expected to rise sharply in ensuing years. Tuition has not been determined, but officials at CUNY say they expect the program to become self-supporting and even profitable, as the cost to educate a student online is significantly lower than in brick-and-mortar classrooms.

While educators have questioned the quality of online courses and one recent study has shown that employers are more reluctant to hire applicants with online degrees, the number of students educated online nationwide is expanding rapidly, at three times the rate of overall higher education enrollment.

Many of the largest public universities in the country, including the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois, and Pennsylvania State University, offer online baccalaureate degrees. The SUNY system introduced a bachelors of science in business, management, and economics from Empire State College eight years ago and now has 28 programs with concentrations ranging from English to global studies to mathematics.

CUNY has about 200 fully online courses, and hundreds more “hybrid” courses that are conducted both online and in the classroom, but not a complete degree program.

The university is bucking the trend in one important respect. Unlike SUNY’s online degree programs, which enroll across the nation and the globe, CUNY is targeting students locally, in the five boroughs.

“This is the next phase of CUNY’s mission to serve people in New York City,” CUNY’s executive vice chancellor for academic affairs, Selma Botman, told The New York Sun. She did say it was unlikely that CUNY would prohibit students from enrolling who do not live in New York City.

The university is planning to offer a liberal studies degree with several so-called tracks from which students could choose, such as political science, biology, and history.

CUNY wants to enroll former students who maintained at least a 2.0 – or C – grade-point average but dropped out for personal or financial reasons. The targeted applicant would be someone who wants to earn a baccalaureate degree but cannot make it to a campus, even if they live or work nearby, Ms. Botman said.

“We know there are literally tens of thousands of people in New York City who fit this description,” she said.

Online students would log on to a CUNY Web site for course instruction from a faculty member, to ask questions, and to submit assignments. The instructor would schedule a class discussion time at which students would log on and post messages on a board. Science courses may include virtual labs with 3-D imagery. Students may have “occasional” face-to-face meetings with the instructor, Ms. Botman said.

“Most of the action happens on a discussion board,” a professor of English and CUNY’s director of instructional technology, George Otte, said. Students, he said, “show their attention by producing text.”

CUNY’s online degree program will be based at CUNY’s School of Professional Studies in Midtown, rather than at a senior college campus. Although she expects to hire additional faculty members to teach the online courses, Ms. Botman said professors involved in the program would have joint appointments with both their home school and the School of Professional Studies, which does not have its own faculty. She is convening task forces composed of faculty members that will design the curriculum and figure out how students who rarely come to campus might be advised.

A professor of English at Kingsborough Community College who is the chairwoman of the CUNY faculty senate governing body, Susan O’Malley, said the professors at CUNY she has talked to have strong concerns about how an online program would meet the university’s academic standards, and about the level of control the faculty would have over the curriculum.

“How do you do languages? How do you do labs? How do you know the student is doing his or her own work?” she said.

Another potential problem for CUNY is the low opinion that employers have of online degrees. One just-completed study, co-written by communication scholars Margaret DeFleur of Louisiana State University and Jonathan Adams of Florida State University, found an extreme bias against online degrees among employers. Contacting managers through help-wanted ads in newspapers, they found that 96% would choose an applicant with a traditional degree over one with an online degree.