Online Degrees and the Dilemma of Prestige Attainment

Full disclosure: I teach online and I believe that online education is effective when practiced according to standards, and provided to the appropriate audience/clients.

A professional friend that I respect and admire recently asked a question on his Facebook feed: “15-20 years from now, do you think online degrees will be more/less/same as today in terms of prestige and acceptance?”
I answered off the cuff in a negative way, and he asked for something more substantial. I promised him I’d formulate an answer. After reflection I knew that the only way to explain my rationale was to apply the framework of Randall Collins’ classic article, Functional and Conflict Theories of Educational Stratification. I read the article over 25 years ago in an advanced social theory course. Obviously it had a profound effect on my life.

To begin, here is requisite background on Collins’ theory. He derived his educational stratification ideas from Max Weber’s (1968) Economy and Society. There are three forces (or conditions) that serve as catalysts of change in educational requirements.
First, status groups. These may consist of cultures or subcultures with persons that share status equality. Individual identity is based on participation in (and being accepted by) such groups. Groups distinguish themselves from each other through various categorizations, and Collins names them “moral evaluation such as “honor,” “taste,” “breeding,” “respectability,” “propriety,” “cultivation,” “good fellows,” “plain folks,” etc.” The groups legitimize exclusion of persons that may be lacking in one or more of these categories (Collins, 1009).
Second, the struggle for advantage. Competition for prestige, wealth, or just power is continuous and fierce. Collins acknowledges that not every person possesses the requisite motivation to achieve or strive to attain top-level advantages (Collins, 1009). However, as a group, there are enough members that do commit to the struggle in ways that pit status groups against various other status groups. Interpersonal conflict within groups is dwarfed by the across-status-group conflict. In other words, I would, as a member of the group, support my group even though I may not be hungry for any one or all of the scarce resources on which the group is focused. Organizations are the vehicles of conflict across groups. Normally the elites of the organizations control the subordinates but there is variation in the success rates. If subordinates are able to form a status-group of their own then their power is strengthened. However, as Collins points out, “in general, the organization elite selects its new members and key assistants from its own status group and makes an effort to secure lower-level employees who are at least indoctrinated to respect the cultural superiority of their status culture” (Collins, 1010).
Third, Education as status culture. The presumed main action of schools is “to teach particular status cultures, both in and outside the classroom. In this light, any failure of schools to impart technical knowledge (also it may be successful in this) is not important; schools primarily teach vocabulary and inflection, styles of dress, aesthetic tastes, values and manners. The emphasis on sociability and athletics found in many schools is not extraneous but may be at the ore of the status culture propagated by the schools.” (Collins 1010). In essence, the technical knowledge isn’t what is critical here. Crucial to status group survival is the permeation, transference, and survival of a “respect for these elite values and styles” (Collins, 1011).

Collins outlines a prestige-structure among types of schools that had withstood time (and unsurprisingly is still in place today). He discusses secondary schools, but my focus is on post-secondary institutions, as was Mr. Sabado’s original question.

Elite colleges (the Ivy League) hold the top place among status groups, followed by major state universities. The third status group in higher education was the professional schools attached to the elites, and in some cases, professional schools attached to major state universities. Catholic-based schools, Black schools (we call them HBCUs today) followed in the hierarchy and the least elite form of higher education was the commercial training schools (today’s equivalents are the technical colleges).
Collins then ties these status groups’ standings to a “fit between education and employment” (Collins, 1013) which perhaps unsurprising, is still fiercely observed in today’s education and career-linked environment. Collins parses historical linkages between education and high economic status from the colonial period onward in the United States’ history. The need for mass literacy (as industrialization advanced), competition between and among religious denominations, and eventually the separation of church & state legitimized a growth-spurt in the founding of colleges and universities by many differing groups of substantially different statuses. As industrialization increased, so did the opportunity for elite jobs. Turner (1960, in Collins, p. 1015) termed the phenomenon the creation of a “contest mobility” school system. An increase in educational requirements may not have been necessary to perform the work, but that change brought more respectability and prestige to organizations that required higher educational levels for entrance into their own status group. As Collins predicted, the “mobilization of demands by minority groups for mobility opportunities through schooling can only contribute an extension of the prevailing pattern” (Collins, 1016).

Whew! There we go. Education transfers culture. Education cements an appreciation of and respect for status group culture. Other than literacy (which is learned at the secondary level–or it was at the time of Collins’ article) education is not as important as one generally might expect. Skills are learned on the job after the education-level allows one to pass the entrance examination of membership into the status group.

Online higher education has been shown to be ineffective across the board for all but a small subset of people. Just this month (good timing for this post!) a scathing report was released on the status of online higher education. Even when effective for that small sub-group of people (professionals, already working, already familiar with technology) any chance for prestige has taken an incredible hit due to the egregious abuse of Title IV Federal Funds by for-profit colleges and universities, who were the first to prioritize online learning in the guise of affordable access. I won’t summarize that report in any more detail, but again here is the link and it should be required reading for any educator!
Even before I read the report, I could have predicted what would have been written, based on my experience. I’ve taught online and hybrid coursework since 2007. The best and brightest, the highly motivated who are also technologically adept, benefit from online learning. This isn’t necessarily an indictment of the people, but of the system that expects students to come prepared for college. The recent focus on completion rates and course completion percentages verifies that colleges and universities are not structured for open-access. As Collins has shown, colleges and universities in the United States were never founded on the premise of reducing (much less eliminating!) stratification.

Online education does not impart values. Online education does not require respect for status group culture. It benefits only those that have already been screened and who stand ready to defend the prestige of the status group. It can and generally does greatly benefit those individuals, but online education will likely never have prestige in and of itself.