碩士學位即將過時了嗎？

When George Washington University announced last week that it was laying off nearly 50 employees to reduce costs, the university’s president, Steven Knapp, blamed a decline in enrollment in graduate and professional programs.
上週，喬治華盛頓大學宣佈，將解僱近50名職工，以減少開支。校長史蒂文·納普稱，因碩士及職業教育學生人數下降，不得已做出此決策。

Graduate degrees and professional certificates have been the fastest-growing segment of higher education in recent years, and the thinking has always been that when the economy improves, fewer people go back to school for such credentials because they can More easily get jobs instead.
近幾年來，考取碩士學位及職業證書的人數持續上升。而公衆一直以來都認爲，經濟繁榮的時候找工作更容易，所以很少有人返校繼續求學。

But GW and thousands of other college and universities are mistaken if they think that any downward trend in graduate enrollment is a temporary blip caused by an improving economy. Rather, what is happening now is a permanent shift in how today’s working adults acquire education throughout their lifetimes.
但若喬治華盛頓大學和其他高校因此便以爲，研究生人數減少是經濟增長導致的暫時性現象，那就大錯特錯了。恰恰相反，目前的變化將成爲長期的發展形勢——今日的上班族終生都在追求教育。

Until now, if you needed additional training to get ahead in your job or switch careers, you had little choice but to enroll in a graduate or certificate program at a local college or online. These programs largely replicated undergraduate programs at colleges in that they required students to start at a specific time and dedicate months or even years to a series of courses. Most of all, the programs were expensive, and came with little, if any, financial aid from the colleges, which saw them as cash cows.
當下，如果你想在工作中更有成就或想要改變職業發展方向，只能考取當地大學或網校的研究生課程或證書課程，幾乎沒有其他選擇。這些課程與本科課程幾乎如出一轍，要求學生在特定時間開學，花上數月甚至數年學完一系列課程。最重要的是，此類課程收費昂貴，即使學校提供補貼，也是微乎其微。在這些學校看來，學生就是搖錢樹。

We hear a lot these days about the “student-debt crisis,” but some of the biggest increases in student debt have come at the graduate level, not among undergraduates. A Brookings Institution report released last June found that the average debt levels of borrowers with a graduate degree have more than quadrupled since 1999, from about $10,000 to more than $40,000 (by comparison, those with a bachelor’s degree increased from $6,000 to $16,000).
近來，媒體頻頻報道有關“學生負債危機”的消息，然而，負債人數上升最快的是研究生，而非本科生。布魯金斯學會去年6月發佈了一份報告，指出碩士貸款者平均負債額自1999年以來增長了三倍多，從約1萬美元上升到4萬多美元（相較之下，本科生從6000美元上升到1.6萬美元）。

The graduate and professional education market is ripe for disruption, yet much of the discussion on the changes coming to higher education have focused on undergraduate programs, like the kind Sweet Briar College operates. Persuading 18-year-olds and their parents to think of alternatives to a bachelor’s degree is a tough sell in a culture that celebrates the coming-of-age experience of going off to college. It’s much easier to offer a different pathway at the graduate level, when students already have a bachelor’s degree and they’re often paying the tuition bill themselves.
碩士及職業教育市場已臻成熟，不容易受外部影響。相反，在高等教育改革方面，討論最多的是關於本科生課程的改革，斯威特布萊爾學院便是如此。學生們都盼着長大成人、走入大學校園，在這樣的文化氛圍中，想要說服18歲孩子和他們的父母放棄本科學位、轉向其他選擇，實在太難了。而對於已經擁有學士學位、學費也可以自力更生的研究生來說，想要說服他們“選擇另一條路”就容易多了。

New players in the market that aren’t traditional colleges — the Khan Academy, General Assembly, Skillshare, , Coursera, and Dev Bootcamp — are starting to attract students who normally would have pursued a graduate degree or certificate. Sure, these so-called “boot camps” don’t have the household brand names of legacy players, but they are largely succeeding where traditional colleges haven’t even tried to compete: with “just-in-time education.”
教育市場出現了不同於傳統大學的新興角色——可汗學院、綜合學會、技能分享網、琳達在線教育、Coursera公開課和德夫訓練營——他們開始招攬原本想要考取碩士學位或證書的學生。當然，這些所謂的“訓練營”並非歷史悠久、家喻戶曉，但他們興旺的祕訣很大程度上在於，勇於探索傳統大學尚未嘗試與他們競爭的領域：“即時送教育”。

Think of just-in-time education as when you watch a video on YouTube to figure out how to change a flat tire or fix a broken appliance.
比如你從YouTube上搜索如何更換輪胎或如何修理損壞的電器，這就是“即時送教育”。

These emerging providers know that today’s economy demands education throughout our careers rather than just at the beginning, so they offer short spurts of content (from a few hours to a few weeks) when students need it instead of giving them a full helping of a degree.
這些新興學院很清楚，當前經濟發展要求我們在工作的同時要長期不斷學習，而不只是三分鐘熱度。因此，當學生有需要的時候，他們便提供短期衝刺班（幾個小時到幾周不等），而不是全日制學位教育。

So far, their model is proving popular. The Khan Academy serves 10 million people a month with 5,000 videos. General Assembly has nearly two dozen locations around the world and more than 12,000 alumni who have taken its full- and part-time courses, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s and already have a bachelor’s degree.
以目前趨勢看來，這種模式廣受歡迎。可汗學院每月提供5000個視頻，供1000萬人學習。綜合學會在全球擁有近20個分支，有超過1.2萬學員（其中多數在20-30歲之間）原本就擁有學士學位。

And then there is Lynda​, which reaches more than 4 million people a year with its how-to tutorials online in everything from management skills to programming. Last week, just as GW was announcing its cutbacks, LinkedIn announced that it was buying Lynda​.
琳達在線教育提供各領域的在線實操課程，從管理技能到編程等，每年學員高達400多萬。上週，就在喬治華盛頓大學宣佈裁員時，領英宣佈收購琳達。

The purchase price: $1.5 billion. That’s almost double George Washington University’s annual budget and perhaps the only sign you need to see the kinds of changes coming in graduate-level education.
收購價爲15億美元。這幾乎是喬治華盛頓大學年度預算的兩倍，或許也是你需要關注研究生教育變革的唯一跡象。

Vocabulary

blip：信號

cash cow：搖錢樹，財源

spurt：衝刺