The Master’s degree has a long and complicated history – one that looks very different depending on the part of the world you are from. Briefly: it is either a traditional first degree (e.g. central Europe), a traditional second degree (e.g. here in Canada), a traditional booby-prize for not getting a doctorate (still in some places in the US) or, weirdly, something after a BA, a waiting period of a few years, and the payment of a small fee.  It is also, I suspect, the degree the least likely to survive intact into the next century.

This may seem paradoxical: after all, for the past 30-40 years, Master’s degrees have been the one, huge free-market success of universities.  No one has yet invented a social or economic problem for which universities can’t invent a 2-year master’s degree to sell as a solution.  They can be set up reasonably quickly, often with a lot of casual labour, and governments are less fussy about what universities charge for them.  Why would such a useful thing disappear?

Well, the main reason is that it is the most superfluous degree out there.  The Bachelor’s degree is the base of the whole system: it isn’t going anywhere.  The doctoral degree is the apex of the system: it isn’t going anywhere either (though I have my doubts that the central European/Russian tradition of a “second” doctoral degree required in order to gain status as an academic – basically the equivalent of getting tenure in the western system – will continue for much longer).  But the Master’s degree – well, what is a Master’s anyway?

In some fields, it’s an intermediate degree with a research orientation.  In others, it is a kind of finishing school for professional practice – with some of them explicitly for young professional and others pitched more at mid-career.   In a sense they are not unlike degrees in law or medicine – second degrees taken for the purpose of being allowed into professions, broadly defined (pretty much by definition, the spread of the Master’s degree has been a key ingredient in the professionalization of wide areas of modern life).  The main difference being that for the most part there is a lot less theoretical coherence to your average professional master’s degree than there is to Law and Medicine degrees.  They are, for the most part, applied degrees: the entire point is to get people through these reasonably quickly and into top-end white-collar jobs.

Here’s the problem, though.  With the possible exception of the M.Ed, there aren’t a lot of professional bodies out there which will defend the absolute necessity of most of these degrees.  White collar employers – be they public or private sector – don’t actually care that much about the credential, let alone the curriculum behind it.  What they care about is whether they have access to people with requisite skills.  And if we can find ways to give them that without a Master’s degree, they will be perfectly happy.

A Bachelor’s degree, in most fields, is a signal to employers that an individual has what it takes to process basic information and can stick to a task long enough to be a decent employee.  It’s unclear what a “Master’s degree” actually signifies, but increasingly, it seems to me that what they do is signal the ability to specialize without being necessarily specialist enough to satisfy employers.  Again, it’s the old problem of universities thinking about credentials and domains of knowledge while employers are more focussed on skills and tasks.  And these don’t always map on to each other particularly well.  Employers need workers with grab-bags of skills that don’t always line up well with disciplinary specialization. 

I am fairly sure that this is where micro-credentials are going to play a pretty big role.  I know some Canadian governments seem to be thinking of micro-credentials as some sort of miracle cure to deal with unemployment among the low-skilled, a cheap way to get around all that tedious mucking around with adult education, GEDs and the like.  But that’s probably not the main play: instead, the likeliest use of micro-credentials will be to provide shorter bursts of post-Bachelor’s professional training, allowing people to acquire relevant white-collar skills from a variety of domains.  Probably, these will be stackable into Master’s degrees, but the key point is that they need not be stacked in order to have their own value.  Individuals will be able to build DIY-portfolios of micro-credentials to demonstrate mastery of diverse skill/knowledge-sets which fit their employment goals, rather rely on institutions to do that packaging for them.  And, of course, they won’t require students to take a year or two out of their lives to do so.  

(Some of you with longer memories may remember me poo-pooing this kind of “unbundling” of degrees a few years ago.  This is true, but I was talking about undergraduate degrees, which are a) substantially more about “experience” than they are about skills and labour markets and b) consumed by individuals with substantially less understanding of what they want/need out of a degree than do students who have already finished a Bachelor’s degree).

There is a long way to go before any of this this becomes a reality, of course.  Some kind of pan-Canadian definition of micro-credentials is a necessary but insufficient start (a number of provinces are coming up with provincial definitions, but that’s only stage one: if provinces are under the impression that big employers are going to pay any attention to a credential which means ten different things in ten different provinces, there is some technicolour dreaming going on).   But in the long-run, if the choice is between a professional credential that requires learners to take a year or possibly two out of your working life and a more flexible system which allows learners more flexibility and less time out of the labour force, the latter is probably going to dominate. 

We’ll still have Master’s degrees, but they will be competing with a whole host of boutique sub-master’s qualifications.  They won’t be the go-to post-bachelor’s credential anymore.