HES has increased their course fees to $1550 for UG & $2700 for grad classes.

And again, apples and oranges. When I graduated from my PhD program, total PhD production for the department that year was 2. It can go as high as 10, apparently. Not the scale of any decent extension school or an online program.

You try to compare programs with vastly different missions. Besides, most doctoral students serve in various assistant functions (I was a teaching assistant most of the time), and all produce research that adds to the university's production.

 

So why is it that when whenever people on Degreeinfo talk about HES, there's always so much interest in 'Harvard prestige'? 'Harvard' and 'HES' don't seem to be regarded (by this board) as 'entirely separate categories' in that regard. They only become 'apples and oranges' when somebody inquires into how Harvard generates and sustains its prestige.

My point is simply that prestige isn't dependent on price. Prestige is a function of institutional history, star-studded faculty lists, research productivity and (yes) admissions selectivity.

 

I'd prefer to go by outcomes, by what equivalent groups of students learn in equivalent programs at different schools. That determination would be difficult but should be doable.

 

If you're looking for a job in higher ed you could consider replacing Drew Gilpin Faust

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/us/harvard-president-resign.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feducation&action=click&contentCollection=education&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

 

Offering a Faustian bargain? I've had my doubts about you but this...

 

I would rather judge educational programs on outcomes too.

At the doctoral-research level, that's possible to some limited extent through research reputation, I guess. One would assume that the best graduate/research education takes place where the most creative and exciting research is taking place. One would have to consider how involved the doctoral students were in the work that's produced.

I once observed a newly minted PhD (from the U. of Washington in this case) being interviewed by the research director from a local biotech company. It was very much along the lines of who did you work with and precisely what did you work on, along with the interviewee's professional views on some technical issues the company was encountering perfecting a new oncology drug. Different universities have different research strengths and specialities, and a USNews top 50 school might be relatively weak in a particular research area while a school with a more average ranking might be more prominent and productive.

At the bachelors, masters and professional degree level it's a lot harder. Some fields require licenses and licensing exams, so it's possible to look at different programs' graduates' success rates on the exams. We often do that with law schools and bar exams (US News even weights bar-pass rates fairly highly in its law school rankings), but we don't see that deing done as much with other subjects that require exams like clinical psychology.

But some subjects at some levels don't really lend themselves to either approach. History at the bachelors or masters level doesn't produce a whole lot of research and it isn't subject to standardized exams. The latter would be problematic since different students study different syllabi and emphasize different periods or historical issues. The same thing is true in my field of philosophy, and I'd assume that it's true in business too. Not every business student studies the same syllabus or emphasizes the same areas (finance, management, marketing, accounting, HR, IT...). So a single standardized exam wouldn't work very well.

So these programs often seem to be prestige ranked based on inputs rather than outputs. Faculty strength is an important variable, but that one can be difficult at the bachelors and masters level since most faculty aren't big name scholars (with a few exceptions). It gets kind of generic. So perhaps the most visible and easily quantifiable variable in these cases is the nature of the incoming student class. The most prestigious universities only accept a small proportion of their applicants and their student populations have the highest SAT/ACT scores, the highest GPAs, lots of AP credit and so on.

I've never seen schools or programs prestige-ranked based on how expensive they are. We do see affordability rankings at the bachelors and masters level. But affordability is not the same thing as prestige. The local community college would score very high on affordability, but not on prestige most likely (some community colleges do have notable nationally-known programs in unusual niche subjects).

When it comes to HES, we often see Degreeinfo participants trying to place it above other DL programs. That can't be because of research productivity, if HES doesn't produce much research in its own name and its students aren't even involved in most of Harvard's cutting edge research. It isn't because of its graduates' success in passing standardized exams. It isn't due to it's selectivity and the nature of its incoming student class. I think that it does in some cases have excellent teachers, even if some of them are adjuncts and not regular Harvard faculty.

I'm personally considering enrolling in some Stanford Continuing Education classes, since Stanford is near my home. Unlike Harvard, Stanford Continuing Education doesn't offer degrees (with one interesting exception), just individual classes and a few certificates. The class titles are interesting and the faculty are often very good, though they aren't always regular Stanford faculty. Students seem to be drawn from the broader Silicon Valley population.

The exception is a Masters in Liberal Arts MLA degree. They call it 'highly selective', and it probably is in terms of the percentage of applicants they admit. But the selectivity criteria are rather different with this one than with the conventional Stanford graduate programs, since they want an age mix and a mix of diverse backgrounds.

Master of Liberal Arts | A graduate degree program designed for working adults

The regular continuing education classes are open to everyone. Leonard Susskind (the string-theory guy) tells about teaching a physics for laymen continuing education class and discovering that most of his students were from the Silicon Valley tech industries and already had a basic calculus background. Susskind says that he found that he liked his continuing education students better than his regular Stanford students, since the regular students were most concerned with passing tests, while the continuing education students were really interested in physics. They wanted more than just the 'Oh,wow!' account of physics found in popular presentations, they wanted to really understand the basics of how working physicists conceive of the world and of physical problems. That led to Susskind presenting a whole series of 'Theoretical Minimum' continuing education courses and to the writing of the 'Theoretical Minimum' books:

The Theoretical Minimum

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/046502811X

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-The-Theoretical-Minimum/dp/0465036678

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Susskind

So this might arguably be an interesting example of intellectual productivity from a continuing education program.

 

Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

My less thoughtful answer is that outcome analysis would be difficult and lacking but that 'lacking' could well describe current measures of educational quality.

 

With psychology, they look at placement rates in internships.

 

Well that's a surprise, I thought you'd be older.

 

Hiring first from the name schools?

It seems that every measure can be argued down.

 

You can't become fully-licensed if you can't land an internship. Low-ranked and non-APA-accredited schools do tend to have lower placement rates.

 

I've been told that in the B&M world, schools have ongoing relationships with internships sites making for almost automatic placement. In the DL world, with students spread all over the country/planet, no school can guarantee a placement for everyone. Students are often forced to find their own internships. From the other perspective, the placement site is forced to consider a student they don't know from a school that they are unfamiliar with. Even the best student might get stuck without a site.

 

I think that the ideal way to compare academic programs is subjective evaluation by a subject matter expert, if you have one ready to hand. Their narrative evaluation may be subjective, but if they’ve been around long enough, they can take on board the variables of individual talent and drive, or reported graduate performance outside of academia.

That said, the way I tend to think about the outcome measures starts with doctoral programs. Which doctoral programs are successfully transforming students into scholars? Independently capable scholarship can be measured by good publications: books with university presses, and articles in the most rigorous* peer-reviewed journals. From there, one can look at the undergraduate or master’s degrees held by the students who gained admission to those doctoral programs, which should reflect on their quality.


* I know, I know, that’s subjective too.

 

I wasn't talking about doctoral programs. At all. HES doesn't offer doctoral programs. I'm going to assume that you're using doctoral programs to point out that universities don't keep prices high to maintain prestige since they basically give away doctoral education for free.

The problem with that argument is that there are many more undergraduates than doctoral students. So you're talking about a very select group within an already very select university receiving a free education. It's like going to a casino, seeing that they give the high rollers cheap top shelf drinks and saying "See? They aren't even making money off of the spirits!" Of course they are just not off of that top 1%.

I cannot find the source but I recall one article quoting an alumnus who felt that the fact that it was "online" was problematic but that "giving away" the degree for such a low price cheapened his own.

There are many schools offering online degrees. Nobody stood up and threw a fit over Penn State offering the M.S. in Applied Statistics or with Columbia doing the same (in Stat and Actuarial Science). But neither school dramatically dropped the price tag for the online programs, either.

Claims that an online program will be less rigorous go hand in hand with tuition when the tuition price drops. It would be like if Subaru turned around and decided to sell the 2018 Outback for $5,000. Amazing bargain? What was compromised?