Yale University’s School of Medicine is deciding whether to create an online version of its physician assistant master’s program. Its first attempt failed because it couldn’t get accreditation. Yale says it’s “reviewing the matter” and may try again.
Yale’s partner in all this is the education technology company 2U, which has plenty of other customers, many of them Ivy League schools.
“There’s a lot of demand for us right now,” says Chip Paucek, CEO of 2U. He says universities want to enroll students online to address shortages of workers in some fields. But online degrees also bring in more tuition dollars.
“A university needs to figure out how to pay its bills and be sustainable,” he says. “Just like any enterprise.”
But some degrees lend themselves more to online learning than others.
“So learning statistics or data science online, certainly learning some of the computer sense, skills and knowledge,” says Andrew Kelly, education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Kelly says degrees that require hands-on training, like physician’s assistant’s programs, are more difficult, because universities have to find hospitals where online students can train.
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