The landscape of postbaccalaureate learning has never looked more complex. On one hand, demand for the master's degree has never been higher -- the share of the U.S. population with an advanced degree has increased from 5 percent in 1980 to 13 percent today, leading the most competitive sectors of the workforce to refer to the master's as “the new bachelor's.”To get more news about Master's degress program, you can visit acem.sjtu.edu.cn official website.
But while employers continue to demand master's-level credentials and the skills they endow, societal concerns surrounding debt and the value of degrees have led others to assert that the master's degree is no longer “worth it,” the return on investment too shaky to bet on. Throw in competition from less expensive and shorter-term alternative credentials, such as coding boot camps and microcredentials from for-profit companies such as Google and IBM, and where once there were only master's degrees, and at a tight range of prices, now a worker hoping to reskill has more choices in regard to price, admissions standards and instructional model.
The landscape for graduate degrees is moving quickly, and graduate school officials, many worried about maintaining their institutions’ financial viability and relevance in a new economy, are struggling to keep up. Thursday, about 200 graduate school administrators, faculty members and other interested parties gathered at Inside Higher Ed’s New Models of the Master's Degree event to try make sense of the complexity and decide their next move.
Sean Gallagher, executive director of the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy at Northeastern University, who studies these trends, predicted that the future of how the master's degree is sold and consumed might mirror the how the recorded music industry moved through the first two decades of the 21st century.
Consumption of recorded music has only increased since 2001, as more and more people now have access to music at almost every moment. But with the decline in the sales of physical CDs and records, and the growth of streaming, where profit takes a different route, revenue for the entire industry decreased until slowly rising again in the last few years. But where revenue once went almost solely to labels and artists, now intermediaries, such as Apple and Spotify, have taken a greater portion.