Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories this past week. The University of Texas’ online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. And in Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium.

Those and other predicaments reflect the growing pains of public online education. As programs mature, their business models have come under more scrutiny. The Texas and Utah cases speak to difficult questions facing states: What role should those programs play? How should states pay for them? Or should they?

Technology growth in the 1990s prompted a surge of online-learning collaborations. The groups prodded member colleges to put classes online, pooled courses…

An up-and-coming pilot with a commuter airline, Rebecka Shaw was paying her dues.

The 24-year-old old lived with her parents near Seattle, Wash., and worked at a coffee shop there on her days off. When the time came for her to fly, she commuted to work at Virginia-based Colgan Air.

As a copilot, she was paid $21 an hour, but only for flying time – not for layovers, typically in the New York area, or her cross-continent commute. She grossed $16,254 in her first year of work.

“I had gone back to visit with her, and she actually shared what she was making. ‘Well, it’s … $1,000 a month, Mom,’ ” said her mother Lynn Morris, in an interview with a Washington news…