Joshua Kim who writes the Technology and Learning Blog on the Inside Higher Ed website has a piece today that looks at a recent book by one of the founders of Netflix. It seems that in 2000 Blockbuster had the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million but passed on it. Netflix is now valued at $138 billion and Blockbuster is down to one token store and is bankrupt.
Kim is a techno-optimist of the most Pollyannaish sort. Any innovation is good and whatever negative side effects of technology and “innovation” we see now are just details that need to be ironed out. He also uses “fail” as a noun. You know the type.
So it comes as no surprise that he sees higher education as the Blockbuster of the moment. What’s the Netflix equivalent standing by to disrupt us stodgy, legacy types? The low-cost online master’s degree.
I would be the first to agree that higher education is experiencing a bubble and is probably headed for a major retrenchment. But I don’t think the thing that pushes us over the edge is going to be cheap, online master’s degrees.
There are important differences between a degree and a DVD and not just in the high-minded philosophical sense. One DVD of Frozen is the same as any other DVD of Frozen. Whether I get it online or buy it from a friend or get it from a store or shoplift it from the last Blockbuster, they’re still the same thing and no one or the other copy of the DVD is considered more desirable than another. Netflix killed Blockbuster by selling the exact same product in a way that was more convinient and often cheaper. Similarly Jeff Bezos’ key insight when he founded Amazon was that books were a product that you could buy online without worrying about fit or the quality of the item. John Grisham’s latest book is John Grisham’s latest book whether you buy in a store or online.
This is not the case with master’s degrees. Reputation plays a huge role in the perceived value of a degree. So an MBA from a directional state school is not valued the same way that an MBA from Wharton is. So no matter how may people enter the market offering MBAs online for a quarter the price of Wharton, people will still place a greater value on the Wharton MBA.
It’s also the case that an online master’s is not the same thing as a face-to-face master’s. The “product” is the educational experience of the student not the degree itself and by definition the educational experience of the online student is different than a that of a student in a face-to-face program. And I know that there are people who will argue that students learn just as much or more in online programs as they do in traditional programs. This may be true, but it’s largely irrelevant. It assumes that people value a degree because of what students learn. But there are lots of good reasons to think that the value of a degree is as much about sorting (what programs were you able to get into) and signaling (you showed up for class in clean clothes, have rudimentary social skills, and turned in all your work on time for two years).
An online degree may signal things about a student, but its signals are different than what is signaled by a face-to-face degree. Netflix was able to do what it did to Blockbuster because it took the inconvenience out of renting DVDs. If the inconvenience of a face-to-face degree is, in effect, part of the product and thus what gives it its value, then the online degrees are selling a fundamentally product.
The exceptions to this are the truly commodified degrees like MEds that will get teachers a pay raise or promotion regardless of the reputation of the program. In that area the Blockbuster effect happened long ago. Those programs were swallowed up by the for-profits and OPMs years ago and most Education grad programs are now online and often controlled by OPMs. They have evolved into (or maybe always were) more of a rent imposed on teachers who want raises than they are an educational experience. If you want a reason to be cynical about higher education these programs will do it for you. They siphon money from people in an already low-paying profession into the hands of for profit OPMs and colleges. And there is no evidence that they make teachers any better at their work. They have become a fee that teachers have to pay to advance or earn raises.
But I think the traditional master’s programs are safe from the OPMs and other predators. They are probably headed for trouble as people lose interest in pursuing MAs in English and History and other traditional disciplines, but my guess is that these will just atrophy without being replaced by cheap online equivalents. If there were a market for online masters’ in math or Art History the OPMs would have been all over those program years ago.