Go back a few years and all the “in” talk among higher education fad merchants was how online education was going to disrupt universities, put 9/10^ths of them out of business, yadda yadda.  It was all nonsense of course – most of the predictions were predicated on the idea that undergraduates were prepared to forego a primarily social experience in favour of a mostly solitary, online experience.  This was always palpable nonsense peddled by people who seemed to think that as long as something was new and cheap it be “disruptive,” without first checking to see if there was demand for such a product.

Things have moved on over the past few years and while I remain extremely skeptical in about the prospects for radical changes to undergraduate studies, I am becoming increasingly convinced that there is a major change coming to the market for Master’s degrees.

Master’s degrees are the least well-defined credential universities deliver.  Everyone knows what a bachelor’s degree is – it’s initial training in a field.  And everyone understands what a doctorate is: it’s a degree that demonstrates excellence in research.  Neither of those is likely to be disrupted.  But Master’s degrees?  Those are vaguer.   There several different types of master’s degrees, though broadly speaking we can divide them into  two types: “professional” and “research”.  And neither of these degrees is on especially solid footing.

Take the professional masters programs.   These run the gamut from MBAs to Meds, to LLMs and all sorts of other programs, often designed for early-career professionals.  These have proved very popular over the years.  The problem is twofold.  First, they are really profitable for institutions – in many ways, it has been the increasing margins of professional master’s programs that have kept North American universities afloat these past few years – and fat profits always invite competition.  But, second, it’s not always clear that people *need* these designations.  Precisely because they are so profitable, there is no labour market problem universities can’t look at and say “hey!  There’s a master’s program in that!”

And so, not surprisingly, competition is coming in these fields.  It’s coming in the form of cheaper online master’s programs.  It’s going to come in the form of alternative credentialing (if there is anywhere that nano-credentials are going to take root it is right here in Master’s Land, where employers want certification of specific skills beyond the Bachelor’s level but don’t necessarily require a student to have 1-2 years of extra schooling.  This is genuinely a market ripe for disruption.  It may of course be universities themselves that do the disrupting: there is nothing saying they won’t be the ones to come up with cheaper master’s degrees or alternative credentials (in fact, I think that’s the likeliest outcome though it won’t happen without some outside prodding).

And then there are the research Master’s programs.  As recently as 60 years ago, these didn’t really exist: you just went from a Bachelor’s program to a doctorate and a Master’s degree was what they gave you if you failed out halfway through (I believe some Ivy League schools still take this approach).  In practice, they still perform a similar function – they are a filter for graduate school rather than a desirable degree in their own right.  One wonders, if research master’s disappear, whether people will continue to see a need for research master’s programs or whether they go back to being folded into doctoral programs.

I’m not making any hard predictions here or anything.  I am just suggesting that since Master’s degrees are the newest and least-obviously-necessary degree out there, the most profitable, and (in the case of professional programs) the least likely to actually require face-to-face contact, I think there is an awful lot of room for innovation here.  Every institution is going to need to think about how it might innovate, or defend against innovation, or face some potentially quite significant financial consequences.