IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qsh/wpaper/214521.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?

Author

Listed:
  • Joshua Goodman
  • Julia Melkers
  • Amanda Pallais

Abstract

Though online technology has generated excitement about its potential to increase access to education, most research has focused on comparing student performance across online and in-person formats. We provide the first evidence that online education affects the number of people pursuing formal education. We study Georgia Tech?s Online M.S. in Computer Science, the earliest model to combine the inexpensive nature of online education with a highly-ranked degree program. Regression discontinuity estimates exploiting an admissions threshold unknownto applicants show that access to this online option substantially increases overall enrollment in formal education, expanding the pool of students rather than substituting for existing educational options. Demand for the online option is driven by mid-career Americans. By satisfying large, previously unmet demand for mid-career training, this single program will boost annual production of American computer science master?s degrees by about seven percent. More generally, these results suggest that low-cost, high-quality online options may open opportunities for populations who would not otherwise pursue education.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua Goodman & Julia Melkers & Amanda Pallais, 2016. "Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?," Working Paper 214521, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    • Handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:214521
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://scholar.harvard.edu/joshuagoodman/node/214521
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lastra-Anadón, Carlos & Muñiz, Manuel Antonio, 2017. "Technological change, inequality and the collapse of the liberal order," Economics Discussion Papers 2017-43, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    2. George Agiomirgianakis & Theodore Lianos & Nicholas Tsounis, 2019. "Returns to Investment in Distance Learning: the Case of Greece," International Business Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 12(3), pages 94-100, March.
    3. David Carey, 2017. "Adapting to the changing labour market in New Zealand," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1420, OECD Publishing.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:214521. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Richard Brandon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbrssus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.