Degree and Certification Trends
Change in higher education is occurring at a faster pace than it has in decades. One of the driving forces for change is that the U.S. needs to graduate more students from college, in order to keep pace with the global economy. Other drivers include increasingly unaffordable college tuition, technological advances and changes in health care. The resulting trends in higher education are discussed below.
Accelerated Bachelor's Degrees
A relatively new idea to help decrease the cost of a college education is to compress the typical four-year degree into three years. Some schools are experimenting with various ways to do this including having students attend summer school, more emphasis on Advanced Placement exams and increasing the course-load during the regular school year. The benefits are numerous including better utilization of school facilities, lower overall costs, shortening the time before students start working or start an advanced education program and more focused, motivated students.
Traditions and accepted practices that have been in place for many decades are often hard to break so it is likely this trend will be slow to expand and may be limited to a small number of schools for a while. It also takes a certain type of student to pursue this route; students who are motivated, academically talented, mature and committed to their choice of major will be those most likely to choose and succeed in an accelerated program.
Respect for Online Education
Society has been rapidly incorporating remote interactions into many aspects of their daily lives in ways that include working from home, socializing online and performing consumer transactions remotely. The concept of obtaining a high-quality college education remotely has also become more acceptable and is resulting in many more people attending college that would not otherwise have been able to do so.
While there are a number of low-quality online schools as well as diploma mills hoping to reel in unsuspecting students, there are also a multitude of high-quality schools that offer programs as robust as their physical counterparts. In addition, many highly-respected brick-and-mortar schools offer online courses and, sometimes, entire programs via the internet, thus helping the format gain further respect. Over time, the online schools that provide the highest quality of education will continue to gain a wide-spread reputation for graduating well-qualified students.
Higher Level Degrees in Healthcare and Education
Nursing and K-12 education are two fields where there has been momentum towards requiring professionals to earn higher level degrees. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing has recommended that all advanced practice nurses, who currently must earn a master's degree, should be required to earn a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) doctoral level degree by 2015. Already there has been a very large increase in the number of DNP programs available and the number of students enrolled in them.
In the field of education, master's degrees are becoming a more common requirement for K-12 teachers. For some specialties in some states, a master's degree is required before starting to teach and in many states, all teachers must earn a master's degree within a certain amount of time after they start teaching.
Certification Trends
Certain specialty areas in technology such as wireless networking, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Linux and information systems security are experiencing high-growth. Companies are spending a lot of money to take advantage of these state-of-the-art technologies and need highly qualified staff that can configure, deploy and maintain them. Hiring companies, more than ever before, are requiring that job candidates have the appropriate certification which validates their qualifications.
Business certifications are becoming more important to hiring companies as the complexity of working in the global marketplace is requiring a higher level of professional skills. Project management, contract management and risk management are some of the areas where certifications are helping companies be sure they are hiring the best-qualified talent available.
Quick Facts
- About half of college students entering a four-year school graduate with a bachelor's degree from that school within six years.
- Of 4,200 schools surveyed, 65 percent offered online college courses in 2006-2007.
- The number of Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students doubled from 2007 to 2008.
- About 47 percent of public school teachers in 2004 held a master's degree or higher.
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