Online Learning

Last week I heard an academic friend talking about his Australian university ‘selling degrees on the internet’.

For a minute there I thought he was being literal and that they were selling degrees without any requirement for learning or assessment. It’d surely be a more profitable business model.

A related thought; with limited places and (hopefully) more demand than supply you would also think they would auction their degrees to overseas (mainly Chinese) students rather than sell them for a fixed price. They could also sell gift vouchers redeemable for any degree.

The possibilities are endless once you disconnect the educational certificate from the quality of graduate capabilities.

I suppose there is in reality some relationship between graduate salaries and the demand for a degree. So just selling degrees without training or assessment could be a problem – after a while employers might catch on that the graduates are useless. And when this happens demand for those degrees might drop.

One solution to this would be to sell degrees through an affiliate institute (say some cheap-arse university bought in liquidation) and then let graduates that have bought their degrees online (without any actual education) upgrade their degrees to the head institute if (and only if) their salaries reach a certain threshold.