(By the way, another nice feature of the LearnLaunch conference was its morning-long showcase of school-age innovators. I particularly enjoyed the virtual-reality tour of the White Mountains, developed by kids from Fitchburg Middle School. It wasn’t super slick, but the students’ comfort with this technology made me stop and wonder how ready higher-ed professors will be for the students heading their way in six or seven years.)
From the folks who brought us the Micromasters, here come the MicroBachelors.
Five years after the debut of its first MicroMasters program, edX and several college partners have begun a new program that will offer online educational programs on its MOOC platform in short, modular chunks that can eventually stack up toward a bachelor’s degree. Like the MicroMasters program, these MicroBachelors programs will be open admissions, with readily transferable credits (edX has even trademarked the names). One of the first two programs comes from Western Governors University; the other from New York University.
For all the mockery out there about MOOCs, I’ve always been intrigued by the MicroMasters idea. That’s not because I thought that particular credential would be all that valuable in its own right but because giving students a low-cost, low-risk way to earn as much as half of their master’s degree seemed a smart way for universities to attract students to their full-fledged master’s programs. Would the same be true for the MicroBachelors?
I thought looking at the record on MicroMasters was a good place to start to find that answer. Today 33 universities offer a total of 57 MicroMasters programs on the edX platform, and a total of more than three million people have enrolled. If access is a goal, it’s hard to argue with those numbers.
What I wish I could tell you is how many have gone on to enroll for a master’s or even completed a MicroMasters. I asked, but edX’s CEO, Anant Agarwal, told me they “don’t share super granular” data like that. The most he would say is that three-quarters of MicroMasters students say they intend to earn a full master’s degree, and that across the entire edX platform, 60 percent of people who enroll in certificate programs complete them — although in some cases that “completion” could mean finishing a single course. Still, according to edX, 87 percent of people who completed a MicroMasters reported positive career outcomes. Take that self-reported survey stat for what it is, but it could indicate that students found more value in the credential than I expected.
Each MicroMasters program is endorsed by at least one employer. The MicroBachelors have a similar career focus. In fact, the program was developed with financial support and advice from several companies and foundations. “They’re looking to upskill their workers,” Agarwal said of the corporate donors.
For now the MicroBachelors programs don’t include enough credits to stack to a full degree, but Agarwal envisions a day soon when more institutions join the program and there are enough offerings to hit that mark. That’s “our vision and plan,” he told me. At the current price of $166 a credit, that could amount to a pretty affordable price for a bachelor’s. Why, I asked Agarwal, would colleges want to even do that? Wouldn’t they be competing against themselves?
We were holding this conversation a few weeks ago on the telephone — me on an Amtrak Acela train from Washington to New York and he in a car, on the road from the Taj Mahal to the airport in Delhi (what a world, eh?!) — so I could only imagine him shrugging as he offered the reply. It’s a proactive move, he said, “before waiting for someone else to come and eat your lunch.”
Quote of the week.
“I’m a higher ed professional with nearly 30 years of experience, yet we struggled to fill out the @FAFSA correctly with our son. Report arrived today saying we did it wrong; read it twice; still don’t understand what we need to do; I am good at deciphering bureaucratic prose.”
— Steve Robinson
Robinson, the president of Owens Community College, in a tweet last week describing his own travails completing the application for federal student aid. (The discussion that grew from the tweet is illuminating, too.)
More scrutiny is on the way for companies that manage online programs for colleges.
Online-program managers have been under the gun of late, particularly those that rely heavily on tuition sharing for their income. Even the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has gotten into the act, with an ongoing review of such companies’ practices.
Now some U.S. senators are getting in on the action. In a letter to five leading companies last month, Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, and Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, left little doubt on where they stand on OPMs. “Available evidence suggests that tuition-sharing arrangements in OPM contracts create perverse incentives that lead to aggressive and deceptive recruiting practices, similar to those that pervade the for-profit college industry,” the two Democrats wrote. They didn’t stop there. They’ve also asked the big five — 2U, Academic Partnerships, Pearson Learning, Wiley, and Bisk — to send them a heap of information that could shed more light on the companies’ marketing and financial practices.
It’s hard to know what all this will amount to. At the very least, it seems to be making several college and company folks antsy — although at LearnLaunch I heard most of this anxiety in the hallways, not in the formal sessions.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
