Dartmouth Announces Online Master’s Program

Would you rather: (a) earn a Dartmouth degree but learn nothing in your four years; or (b) receive no degree but experience four years of learning? This question, from economist Bryan Caplan, asks whether the signal of the degree (that is, what knowledge or traits one is perceived to possess based on one’s degree) or what one actually learns in college is worth more. 

It is the estimation of this author that 80% of students would say they’d rather have the Dartmouth degree with no knowledge attached to it. This reveals something crucial: For those who attend the College, Dartmouth is more about signaling than it is about the actual human capital formed. The rare students who might value the knowledge over the signal likely study computer science or, even more likely, engineering, in which fields there are consequences for not knowing the expected material upon graduation. 

On September 14, 2023, Alexis Abramson, Dean of the Thayer School, announced a fully online master’s of engineering degree, in partnership with Coursera. Admission to the program will take into consideration performance in prerequisite online work. The program will run fully online for up to two years, and, we are told, it will not be comparable simply to a self-paced YouTube education: Virtual office hours will be held in realtime. As jobs increasingly shift to an online space, so should education—so the reasoning goes. Abramson has also noted a large shortage of engineers; Dartmouth’s new online degree, she says, can help to fill that gap.

It is unclear how this new program will actually turn out. What is clear, however, is that Dartmouth is excited about it and that it is likely to be the first of many such degrees at Thayer.

The creation of this new degree at Dartmouth makes one ask what university education is truly about. It is in his book The Case Against Education that the aforementioned economist Bryan Caplan identifies signaling and human capital as the two ways to understand university education. In that book, Caplan highlights various strange aspects in the human-capital model of universities. For example, he points to the “sheepskin effect”: Among those with an identical amount of knowledge but with or without a degree, the former will earn much more. Additionally, students (perhaps rationally) tend to pursue easy “A”s rather than devote themselves to learning the most, and they forget what they learn over the summer. Relatively few courses accrete. The evidence indicates overwhelmingly that college is about signaling as opposed to knowledge formation.

The new online graduate program presents an acid test for the question of human capital versus signaling. Why does one think the College created the program in the first place? Was it really to fill a gap in engineers? Perhaps so, and thus Dartmouth endorses the human-capital model. But was it not also to earn still more money off of the Dartmouth name, putting yet another Dartmouth degree on the market? I think this is undeniable, and so the College is tacitly subscribing to the signaling model, at least in part. 

Perhaps, then, we existing students should be worried about the Dartmouth name wearing thin. If college education is only about signaling, we should be strongly opposed to the creation of this new degree.

However, as a matter of practicality, I am optimistic and am inclined to think that the program will vindicate Caplan’s human-capital model. As previously mentioned, it is in engineering that one finds those rare students who will experience true consequences for not actually knowing the material that their diplomas indicate. So long as Dartmouth’s instructors provide this capital—virtually—in a scrupulous, workable way, this degree is not to be dreaded. In fact, online degrees overall may help work towards a college experience oriented more towards the accrual of human capital.

That said, ultimately, the important question is this: How will employers treat graduates of this new program? If employers hire graduates as if they had obtained an in-person rather than online degree, Thayer certainly should consider creating more online Dartmouth degrees.

I’ve already stated the bigger problem for existing Dartmouth students, and that is: What happens when more people can get a Dartmouth degree? In standard supply-and-demand fashion, the degree’s value would go down. Many Dartmouth students and alumni proclaim the importance of a small, tight-knit community. Surely that is valuable. But if a Dartmouth education is so wonderful, let’s see if it can transfer to a new realm.

Even if you intrinsically don’t approve of this new degree, at least watch and see what happens. Peter Thiel once compared the university system to the Catholic Church, pre-reformation. An online master’s in engineering degree from an Ivy League institution is far from 95 theses, but let’s hope it will succeed. The university is an antiquated model for an antiquated country. We have had little innovation in the institution of the university since Gutenberg. Anything that takes the drunken man in a stupor that is the university, shakes him violently, and puts him on his way in a different direction is worth one’s attention and perhaps support.

There is something moderately beautiful about a group of young elites who get to spend their time reading for four years before entering the world of power and money and Wall Street. However, the world is changing. What is needed is not only cultural elites who all know each other and have degrees that signal it, but also people who know information and have tangible skills.