A Quora user recently asked if Coursera and Udacity will kill non-top universities. In the long term, it will kill some – but not all – of them, and only once they carry the accreditation that regular universities do.
Coursera and Udacity’s promise is to provide less expensive and better quality classes than traditional online schools like University of Phoenix. However, they lack online college’s accreditation – you simply cannot get a degree from Coursera or Udacity. In November, the American Council on Education began evaluating whether to give official credits for Coursera’s classes, the first step towards a degree earned on that service. It is almost certain that real degrees are not too far in the future.
Once Coursera and Udacity can give degrees, it is not clear whether employers will recognize them. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, only1/3 of organizations surveyed in 2010 treat an online degree as favorably as a “brick-and-mortar” degree. Until that number reaches 100%, online degrees cannot compete with even below-average universities.
Once Coursera and Udacity can offer degrees that get students jobs, they will begin siphoning students from for-profit online colleges and lower- and mid-tier universities. The appeal of Ivy League-caliber content and a recognized degree will be enormous. However, the quality of classes and the official degree are only one part of the college equation. Many students will seek out opportunities for training, socialization, networking, and other experiences that online degrees cannot replace.
Trying to put a number on the demand for (and even supply of) experiences like that can be challenging. For example, there is no canonical definition of “top tier” universities. A good proxy measure is U.S. News’s rankings of “national” and “regional” institutions. 532 colleges and universities make it to this top tier, around 13% of the 4,140 undergraduate institutions in the US. Let’s assume they’re all the same size, so that 13% of students attend top-tier schools. The question then becomes “Will Coursera and Udacity be the schools chosen by 87% of students?” That seems impossible.
The question about demand for online courses is harder to answer. According to the Babson Survey Group, 6.1 million students, representing 31% of the undergraduate population, took at least one class online in 2010. Unfortunately, neither this survey nor any other source lists the total number of students who get their degrees online.
Coursera and Udacity, once they have received accreditation, will attract students who are uninterested in or unable to afford the opportunities university students have outside the classroom. They will also attract students who are interested in access to the top-tier professors who participate in the programs. Accreditation will be a vital step, after which Coursera and Udacity can begin to steal students from non-top universities. However, some students will still value the experiences that only a college can offer, and those students will keep non-top universities from being killed off.
Online education faces significant hurdles that must be overcome before it could possibly replace non-top universities. Employers must be willing to hire students with online degrees, and online enrollment would have to expand from 31% to over 87%.[1] But there is more to university than getting a degree and getting hired, and I believe that more students will want that than could possibly be accepted to only the top tier schools.
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