Employers grew more positive about online education during the pandemic.
Education credentials earned online have been gaining credibility among employers for the past decade, but when the pandemic forced so many workplaces to make the remote switch themselves, something significant clicked: Many more top execs at companies and other workplaces began to think more highly of online credentials.
That finding — from a new report by the Northeastern University Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy — didn’t get a lot of notice when it was first published in December. But the more I think about it, the more I regard it as an important milestone for higher education.
The center surveyed a nationally representative sample of some 1,000 “C-suite” executives about their regard for online credentials when hiring: Nearly half said their view of such credentials “had been elevated by the experience of the pandemic.” Another 40 percent said their views were unchanged, and 14 percent said their perception of those credentials’ quality had decreased. Notably, 71 percent said they considered an online credential generally equal to or of higher quality than one completed in person.
The report doesn’t dig into how these perceptions were formed, and I am wary about drawing too many conclusions from a few sets of survey stats. But as Sean Gallagher, the center’s executive director and one of the report’s authors, pointed out to me, this is a striking spike in employers’ confidence in credentials earned online from even just a few years ago. (In the center’s 2018 survey, credentials earned online were viewed positively by 61 percent of respondents.)
Gallagher and I have been exchanging thoughts about online education for decades, and I appreciate his historical perspective. A slide he likes to showcase at his talks highlights a study from 2005, when only about 2 percent of employers were particularly excited by credentials earned online. That feels like a world ago. In fact, Gallagher says he’s starting to wonder if it’s time to retire that question about online credentials altogether. As he wrote to me recently, that “old online-education stigma is fading.”
Of course employers’ attitudes aren’t the only metric that matters. Student satisfaction and faculty attitudes, among others, also count for a lot. And while the Covid “pivot” certainly gave a jolt to online education, remote education during the pandemic was hardly a universal success.
Still, if it’s true that so many employers now seem willing to accept credentials earned online without even a second thought, that does seem to augur something important. Maybe it’s not the start of a seismic shift. But at the very least, it’s a sign that the momentum continues.
Check these out.
Here are some education-related items from other outlets that recently caught my eye. Did I miss a good one? Let me know.
- Scholars from Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute — two organizations that aren’t always ideologically aligned — recently came together to make the case for shifting government spending away from older, wealthier adults in favor of children. “Childhood is a consequential and cost-effective time to make investments that last a lifetime,” a joint working group writes in “Rebalancing: Children first,” a summary of which appears on the Brookings website. “Yet, many children in the United States do not have the resources or relationships they need to build a strong foundation for their future.”
- Teachers shortages are prompting states to allow hiring teachers without the usual credentials — or academic training. While these are often stopgap measures, as Politico‘s Weekly Education newsletter reports, some of these proposals are being pushed by conservative political organizations.
- Risk-adjusted metrics aren’t a new idea for accountability in higher ed. But can the sector take lessons from how they’ve been applied in the health-care funding system? In this paper from Third Way, Shelbe Klebs, a policy adviser, argues yes, and highlights four key lessons for higher ed to consider when doing so.
- Historically black colleges and universities face financial struggles and report lower-than-average graduation rates, but according to a new post on the Urban Institute’s Urban Wire blog, Black students who attend those institutions are more satisfied with their college experiences than Black students who attend other kinds of colleges. That was one of several findings drawn from a larger Urban Institute report on “Understanding Racial and Ethnic Differences in the College Experience,” by Erica Blom and Dominique Baker.
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