A new NBER study offers a telling data point about the value of institutional brands to potential employers. In this study, which considered a specific career field, employers didn't care where an applicants degree came from. The institutional brand of the job applicants degree just didn't matter. Imagine that.
A version of this disinterest in a universities 100+ year legacy of excellence has been bubbling up for some time. There are hundreds of mid-tier privates who've built an entire "we're different" narratives around the idea that their diploma is better than the public university across town. The NBER study is the first real evidence I've seen that the market is simply uninterested in where a degree is completed or how much it cost. This really isn't a surprise to those of us in professional and continuing education. We've been making versions of this claim anecdotally for years, because we work with the adult learners who TELL US they just need a credential that works in the real world. If they can quickly and cost-effectively get the credential a prospective or currently employer requires, they don't care where it comes from.
My concern now is that universities will respond to this shift like we're their responses to the demographic cliff, alternative credentials, and the adult learner market. Those disastrous responses are simply bolting a "workforce pathway" onto existing undergraduate programs, staffed by faculty who've spent their careers teaching eighteen-year-olds living in dorms. To say it again (and again and again), you can't retrofit a residential university culture into serving adult, part-time, career-driven learners by adding a few online programs and calling it innovation. The incentives are wrong. The faculty criteria are wrong. The advising model is dangerously wrong. The academic calendar is wrong. What you get is an administrative hack leading a new "initiative" with glossy PowerPoints and unqualified projections, but no change, growth or movement to evolve the institution.
The findings of the NBER study should remind us why schools and colleges of professional studies exist, and why their mission isn't some side hustle for the university. Our units already understand competency, pace, and relevance because they're the reasons our students show up. If a mid-tier private university is serious about responding to what this data and other workforce data are telling us, the fix isn't hiring a consultant or atomizing existing specialized services and programs for non-traditional learners. It's giving PCE/O units the authority and budget to rapidly expand what they are already doing.
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