The $6,600 Master's Degree

The $6,600 Master's Degree
There comes a time in every concept's life when the thing...actually...happens.

If you're reading this post, you probably already have some familiarity with all the jostling going on in the education business. You know, for instance, that a number of companies are experimenting with MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), tablet-based learning, and all kinds of in-school networking and Big Data analytics.

And then came last week's announcement.

Georgia Tech, one of the nation's best engineering schools, said it would begin offering fully-accredited, real-world master's degrees in computer science via the Internet. The cost: About $6,600. Or roughly the cost of a few years of interest that many graduate students pay on a big loan to fund their education.

Here is the key line from the The Wall Street Journal's take on the program:

The upfront costs to create the online lectures run between $200,000 and $300,000, but once those hard outlays have been made the cost per each additional student is minimal, said Mr. Isbell. He estimated the school would have to hire one full-time teacher for every 100 online students as opposed to one full-time teacher for every 10 or 20 students who study on campus.

The description made me recall my freshman political science class in the mid-1990s, held in a dusty auditorium in West Philadelphia, a bow-tied professor reading his erudite, but canned, lecture to a few hundred freshmen.

Looking back on it now, this experience had far more in common with the Middle Ages than the world of 2013. What's the difference between watching a lecture in an auditorium and watching HD-quality video in one's living room or beach cabana?

From there it's not that hard to question the cost of a standard master's degree, which all-in can cost $50,000 to $60,000 per year. Even if the experience is not the same, the value for money from the $6,600 degree appears at first blush, superior.

For people in business, there's plenty to take away here. It's easy to use the old trope - disruption - but put that aside for a moment.

The thought exercise I've been going through is this: What's the proverbial $6,600 Master's Degree in your industry? And what would happen to your industry if it happened now rather than in the murky future? It's a fun and sometimes harrowing game to play.

Let's try:

For doctors, it's nearly-thinking systems that can diagnose, prescribe, and treat most common illnesses, absent human intervention.

For journalists like me, it's already arrived. It's called the free Internet.

For taxi drivers, it's driverless cars.

For hotels, it's Airbnb.

If you haven't devised the answer for what it is you do, you have three choices: Prepare for it, build it, or ignore it. What's your path?