Ph.D. or Microdegree?

The early adopters of an unbundled university education are not teenagers looking for a low-cost alternative to a campus. The vast majority of those seeking out new microdegrees and à la carte university experiences are working adults looking to update their skills.

As the job market is changing and technology appears to accelerate change in what employers need, more people are now looking for what some university leaders call “upskilling.”

One of those upskillers is Johann Posch, a researcher at GE Global Research, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was one of the first to sign up for and complete the data-science-specialization sequence offered by the Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Posch wanted to move to GE’s data-science team, but felt he didn’t have the education he needed. “I have a master’s degree, but most everybody here has a Ph.D.,” he says. When he learned he could earn a microdegree online, he thought it would give him the focused knowledge he needed to persuade his employer to grant him the transfer.

Johns Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, in partnership with Coursera, the MOOC provider, began offering its data-science microdegree last year. So far 478 students have completed the program’s nine four-week courses and capstone project.

Mr. Posch would log on to the courses each morning before work and watch some of the video lectures. Then he’d find time on the weekends to do homework, and, eventually, the capstone project, in which he demonstrated his new skills.

The courses were offered free, but he paid just under $500 in fees to get the certificates proving he had completed all the work. “It’s really nothing,” he says of the cost. “My son is still in college, and I know what education costs.” And he says the material was a good mix of the practical and the theoretical.

Even though the microdegree is new and untested, it was enough to help convince his employer that he knew the material, he says. “This gave me a good credential.”

Related: College à la Carte

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