How They (Online Graduate Programs) Get You
Many online graduate programs from the nation’s top universities promise an experience that’s nearly indistinguishable from studying on campus. They offer live seminars taught by tenured professors, close collaboration with talented classmates, and degrees identical to those granted by traditional programs. But in one area, even the best online programs differ drastically from their in-person counterparts: the intensity of the recruitment. Prospective students—many of whom are busy professionals unfamiliar with online education and apt to rely on brand names as heuristics—must often navigate slick, insistent marketing operations run by for-profit third-party companies.
I personally experienced this higher-education hard sell last year when, eager to return to school but tethered to home and family, I began researching education degrees I could pursue online. I immediately found several intriguing programs run by prestigious nonprofit universities. There was the doctoral program at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College: Leadership and Learning in Organizations. There were doctor of education programs at the University of Southern California and Baylor University, also focused on organizational learning and leadership. There was the master’s in counseling at Northwestern, or the master’s in school counseling at NYU.
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The program websites looked eerily identical—just a school logo and text dropped into a common template. They listed tuition figures comparable to those for on-campus degrees (many exceeding $100,000 for two- or three-year programs), alongside tempting sketches of each program that promised the investment would be worth it. These descriptions were invariably short on detail: For instance, Vanderbilt’s program, the first I investigated, promised a curriculum “designed for current and aspiring leaders [that] bridges the divide between theory and practice, equipping students with relevant skills to lead organizational change.” To learn more, I’d need to provide my contact information. So I filled out a half-dozen forms and waited for my materials to arrive.
Instead of the written brochures I
