EdX Micro Bachelors

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by msganti, Jan 8, 2020.

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  1. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    I agree,
    I think in this case I simply used the previous template and made sure to add the word credential, but if one has freedom of not to use the template then the word degree should be removed.
    If major is removed than category or similar should be added. Many on LinkedIn don't have the option to remove a degree, but they can state next to their credentials a certificate.
    EDX and the University X are using it. When one completes the program in data science or designing distributed software there is a category listed be it Computer Science or Engineering etc.
    And yes X should be added to the University as most of the courses are via extension - X.
     
  2. AlK11

    AlK11 Active Member

    Interesting because Harvard themselves says that saying you have an MA in Religion as opposed to an MLA in Extension Studies with a concentration in Religion is not allowed. If the schools themselves call it a micromasters then I don't see a problem with someone calling it that on a resume. The schools know they're not masters, the people earning them know that (at least they should), and the people looking at the resume know that (at least they should).
     
  3. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    We're both wrong. It's a Master of Liberal Arts, Religion. This does not change the point I was making.

    https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/graduate-degrees/religion-degree/degree-requirements


    I never said otherwise. What I said was writing "Degree: micromasters" WAS misleading because you are implying it is a degree.

    I'm not sure what your point is? I never said that everyone didn't know what the certificate is. I said that if you present it in the same area as degrees and use the word "degree" or otherwise format it in a way so as to mislead one into thinking you earned a degree from Harvard when all you earned was a micromasters then that was misleading. Nothing you have said seems to disagree with that and yet you seem to be arguing against my point anyway.

    At the end of the day, do whatever you want to do. But when you have a job candidacy nixed or get fired for misrepresenting your credentials I doubt that a self-woven blanket of righteous indignation will keep you as warm through the winter as the paycheck might have.
     
  4. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    You can enter a certificate on LinkedIn without calling it a "degree." My (wildly outdated) LinkedIn displays as:

    University of Management and Technology

    Master of Science (M.S.)

    Project Management

    2013 – 2014
    N
    ow, if I copy and paste that (as I did) then it includes headings such as "Degree Name" and "Field of Study." That is not what shows to the public because not all educational credentials are "degrees."

    I don't disagree that one can put:

    Harvard University
    microMasters
    Data Science
    2020-2020

    For clarity, if it were me, I'd probably put

    microMasters (Certificate) or just "Certificate."

    This is a limitation to LinkedIn. It doesn't really have a good place for certificates or military service, in my opinion. Some people put certificates under "Certifications." Others put them under "Education." When composing a resume you have endless flexibility since you aren't bound by a single template.

    Using the word "microMasters" will almost certainly be an interview question. It's a new term and most hiring managers are not going to be familiar with it. I don't think someone would necessarily be misleading an employer just for listing it as the school calls it. Though it will result in some people assuming that it is a Masters. Not everyone keeps up on these trends like we do.

    microBachelors seems to be appealing to a different segment of the population, however. And in the example TEKMAN gave where we compare a resume bearing a micromasters and microbachelors from top tier schools to one with an actual masters and bachelors from a lower tier, my point is that they don't compare. And that any attention grab they have for an employer is based on the fact that our eye is drawn to the institution name and the fact that we easily glance over the words "master" or "bachelor."

    I get that Harvard doing it lends the practice some gravitas. Then again, Harvard has also shown they are not above selling certificates that confer "alumni" status. I still find it odd that anyone would argue that this phrasing is really designed to do anything other than mislead, at a minimum, HR screening software.
     
  5. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    MicroMasters certificate is a credential.

    MicroMasters® programs are a series of graduate-level courses that one takes to earn credentials in a specific career field.
    On a site like LinkedIn, one can provide the link - URL to the program. And if a person viewing candidates profile wishes they can read about the program.
    For example:
    UCSanDiegoX's Data Science MicroMasters® Program

    https://www.edx.org/micromasters/uc-san-diegox-data-science
     
  6. AlK11

    AlK11 Active Member

    Actually it is Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies and then the concentration

    https://www.extension.harvard.edu/resources-policies/completing-your-degree/graduation-honors


    I missed the part about degree. I thought you were saying it was inappropriate to write on your resume that it is a micromasters.
     
  7. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Whatever.

    As an aside, I think it ridiculous that Harvard presumes to tell people how they may display these degrees on a resume. Maybe they are just trying to offer some helpful suggestions, but it comes off a little paternalistic to me.

    Probably because you chose your response before you read the post you were responding to.
     
  8. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    While I believe it's possible to mislead someone into thinking it's a full degree, my real objection to the term is the "Micro" part. To me it makes it sound small, insignificant, trivial, etc. I would much rather have a Post-Graduate Certificate on my resume than a Micro-Masters, even if they both had the same number or courses, credits, etc. Just my opinion.
     
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  9. LearningAddict

    LearningAddict Well-Known Member

    I just don't really care for the name "MicroMasters" or "MicroBachelors". To me, you either have the full degree or you don't. Besides, you just know people are going to abuse these things. They get the MicroMasters, put it on the application as a Masters in the "degree" field (especially a possibility for the ones that allow you to write-in information), then get the job. Later someone discovers it's not an actual Masters degree and the scammer is already prepared with "Ohhhh, I MEANT MicroMasters! I guess I really didn't think of it as much of a difference. My bad!"

    Please.
     
  10. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member

    Any employer, hiring manager, HR rep, etc in a click of the mouse can get this info.

    Maybe there is a need for faster university-level education. Modular degrees.


    MicroMasters Programs are a Pathway to Today’s Top Jobs

    MicroMasters programs are a series of graduate-level courses from top universities designed to advance your career. They provide deep learning in a specific career field and are recognized by employers for their real job relevance.
    Students may apply to the university offering credit for the MicroMasters program certificate and, if accepted, can pursue an accelerated and less expensive Master’s Degree.

    MicroBachelors programs are designed for adults without a college degree who believe they need additional education to advance in their careers. This group is affecting the global workforce means that adults need immediately transferable skills that can be delivered in months, not years.
    Corporations like IBM see value in new kinds of programs such as these to meet workplace upskilling and employability needs.


    Development of MicroBachelors programs is funded by Boeing, Lumina Foundation, SunTrust Foundation now Truist Foundation, Walmart, Jeremy M. and Joyce E. Wertheimer Foundation and Yidan Prize Foundation. This diverse group of supporters recognize the importance of addressing the global workforce education challenges that companies and workers face.

    edX is also launching the MicroBachelors Program Skills Advisory Council — a groundbreaking group of select foundations, corporations and academic institutions that will work to identify the core skills and learning pathways that MicroBachelors programs should deliver on.
     
  11. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member



    If your potential employer has to google anything about you just to understand what the hell you're talking about, your resume has failed.

    No one is going to research a candidate, even just a few clicks away, to try to fill in gaps in a narrative. Sorry, but when I post a job I get on average 70 applications for that position. Most are trash. Most very clearly didn't read the description and were just applying for anything with a generic cover letter.

    The job market is such that people are showing up to entry level positions with much more on their resumes than a degree. Your education is a very small component of your overall qualification. We have too many people and there are too many rock solid candidates to be screwing around with trying to decipher someone's clever wording.

    It is your job as a candidate to ensure that between the resume and the cover letter you have eliminated my need to google you. If you cannot do that job then I have zero confidence you can do the job you're applying for.

    Look, I think we're degree happy in this country and it annoys me. I see nothing wrong with education for education's sake. Let's say I was hiring someone for a government affairs position. They come in with a full career established but they want to make a fairly small pivot. Say they want to move from a communications role where they liaised with government agencies before but now they want to take on a greater role with working with the government and less about communications. Having a few graduate level courses in say, political science or government, SHOULD be seen as a good thing. We should not only see that as a good thing if they were able to walk away with a MicroMasters in Government.

    Naming conventions like this don't actually help the degree inflation problem. As a matter of fact, I'd argue they make it worse. There has always been a role in workforce development for certificates and diplomas. They were never replacements for degrees, mind you. But I can assure you that the three course certificate in HR I earned in the course of my BSBA in Management absolutely helped me convince a hiring manager that my degree was "equivalent" to a bachelors in HR when there was some level of skepticism.

    Certificates can do great things when leveraged properly. These new words are not for the benefit of the student. They are designed to sell more certificates which is a nice way of saying it further moves education from a pursuit of wisdom to a commodity to be bought and sold. Worse, the naming reinforced the idea that degrees are the ultimate goal. LEave a degree plan? You're a dropout. You should be walking out with some form of credential. I think that's a toxic way of looking at higher ed. The person with three years of education at Harvard who then goes off and starts a successful company has some valuable education under their belt. Yet, we as a society dismiss it readily since they never earned the piece of paper.

    This wasn't even a push to keep people in to earn the piece of paper. This is just a move to ensure that everyone gets a piece of paper no matter how many or few courses they take. Within a national framework where we can consistently view that, I can understand that just fine. If we called this a Level 1 Qualification, employers could readily identify where it fits and how it compares. Barring that, it makes a very confusing field even more confusing.
     
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  12. Lerner

    Lerner Well-Known Member


    I think there is more than a commercializing side to this. I remember a while ego some universities offered job skill certificates online. Rutgers, Cal State maybe others.
    This was a welcomed but weak initiative that wasn't accepted well and eventually the project was discontinued.
    Here we have a better initiative that is welcomed by employers. I don't like the certificate naming conventions such as MicroXXXXX, it sounds gimmicky but for me, a MasterTrack certificate by Cursera is more acceptable. I'm fine with the undergrad and grad certificate as it used to be. This is not misleading.
    As to checking a candidate's information on the internet, it depends on the stage in the process.
    I'm not the hiring manager at this time, I'm one of the interviewers and someone who gets resumes and provides documented feedback about the candidates.
    Usually, we detect a "BS - not the degree" relatively fast.
    My colleagues and I take time to prepare for the interview, I go over the resumes, draft questions based on the experience, education, and training.
    All of us bother to check things on the internet. It can be about a previous employer that I'm not familiar with and other items that include education providers, certification providers, etc.

    What I'm saying we will take time to check what credential means, what school standing is etc, but this would be of the secondary importance.
    The most important aspects would be the ability of the candidate to fill the position, attitude, team work, knowing the filed and be able to answer questions, provide solutions and many other factors.
     
  13. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    This might be true but I've seen no evidence of it. In fact, the whole thing is so new I'd bet that most employers have never even heard of it.
     
  14. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    Please, tell me more about how hiring works and how you do it better than the industry dedicated to hiring people.

    I get what you're saying. What I'm saying, however, as an HR manager in a high volume shop is that most employers are not dedicating the same attention to detail that you seem to be. Do we catch glaring omissions? Of course we do. But if you write something in a "degree" field in our HRIS, generally speaking, no one is going to ask you about it. Why would we? The vast majority of the jobs we have are not for people who only have a degree on their resume. Even an entry level engineer typically has at least one or two internships on there.

    The SNL-style interviews where someone says "So, I see you graduated from Syracuse University..." just don't happen. And before you tell me that it's just the culture of my workplace, remember, I worked as a recruiter for a very large international recruiting firm.

    As an aside, I was swapping war stories with a colleague who works at a major hospital. He was telling me how an unlicensed person got dangerously far in the interview process for a nurse by filling in boxes they weren't supposed to.

    Degree Awarded? He wrote in an associates in some health field that, upon closer inspection, was healthcare related but not clinical.

    But the big issue was that there was a field that asked you to list states where you are licensed. He wrote in Georgia.

    Now, the reason he did these things was that he was in the Army (not a medic) and did a combat lifesaver program. This being a course of a few days that is probably, at best, aligned with New York's Certified First Responder course. Because they taught him how to run an IV he was certainly qualified to be an IV Nurse. Why did he write in Georgia? That's where he took the course -taps head-.

    There is, of course, a verification process. He was stopped just short of it because an interviewer found some of his answers odd and deviated from their approved script to directly ask "So you're licensed as a Registered Nurse in Georgia?" At which point he readily admitted he was not and was hoping they would hire him to do some sort of on the job training which, of course, would be highly illegal.

    Degree fields on applications for most jobs are check the box fields. The hiring manager doesn't typically care if you have a bachelors in art history for many jobs. So there is no reason to discuss it or focus on it. Heck, even if it IS in the field of the job, no one talks about their degree. We have so many other questions to ask and since 95% of all candidates accurately list their credentials, it isn't worth a process change. You say you have a degree in engineering, you have some engineering internships on your resume, I'm going to ask you some engineering questions. If all goes well then we'll hire you as an engineer. The verifying the degree thing is something we'll outsource and is largely a formality (as well as being a process that is filled with holes).

    Even if I concede that one might not INTENTIONALLY mislead, the fact is that it still WILL mislead. And may not get discovered until the degree verification process, if that employer even does one, when some lackey faxes the signed consent form to Harvard and gets a reply that there is no student record under that name.

    Again, I'm not saying these things are intrinsically bad. Someone who has a bachelors and an MBA might very well like to add a microMasters in Data Science. I'm just saying that it would be better for all involved if we instead called that a Graduate Certificate. The MBA holder with the microMasters on the side isn't going to misuse that degree. The unscrupulous person who thinks they can now apply for Masters required jobs will. And it just makes everyone's life more difficult.
     
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  15. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

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