Ignoring the fact that prestige may be a poor proxy in the first place, the problem for online learning (and new universities primarily offering online courses) is that building prestige takes a longtime and requires considerable resources.
Unemployment numbers will continue to climb long after the official start of a recession, and typically will take considerabletime to correct after the official end of a recession.
As the information came back up each week it had to be aggregated and summarized and before long a number of people in various parts of the organization were spending considerabletime producing this report.