More on Performance-Based Admissions: Who Benefits?

In our March 2024 feature article “Performance-Based Admissions: Online Ed’s Most Disruptive Trend in Decades,” we previewed the seismic shift on the way as this new paradigm starts tearing down traditional barriers to entry—making graduate education more accessible than ever.

In short, performance-based admissions (PBA) enables applicants to demonstrate their readiness for advanced study by completing a sample of a degree program’s actual coursework during one to three “gateway” or “pathway” courses. In exchange, those applicants need not file the extensive documentation that graduate admissions offices typically demand, including reference letters, scores on admissions tests like the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) or Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), college transcripts, application essays, and resumes.

This article takes a second look at performance admissions from perspectives different from those presented by our earlier article and primarily describes how the new paradigm works. Instead, here we explain which potential students are most likely to benefit from this approach, along with some of the ways that schools offering a PBA option will enable their prospective students to overcome obstacles posed by traditional admissions requirements.

From our first article, here is a typical list of the documentation elements required by a traditional application to a graduate degree program. Keep in mind that these are the elements that potential students applying to a performance admission program can skip:

• Completed application form
• Official transcripts from undergraduate and prior graduate work
• Admissions test scores from the GRE, GMAT, LSAT or MCAT
• Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) for international students
• Two recommendation letters
• Essay or statement of purpose
• Resume
• Admissions interview (some MBA programs)
• Application fee
• Application deadline

Graduate school applications with traditional documentation requirements like these discourage enrollments. For example, the results from a recent adult learner behavioral survey from the Washington, DC-based higher education consulting firm EAB are instructive.

EAB’s polling focused on adult students’ preferences while choosing a degree completion, online, graduate, or professional program. In that survey, 69 percent of graduate and adult learners told the pollsters that an admissions or application requirement—like those from the list above—deterred them from applying.

That statistic closely mirrors the recent polling by the Silicon Valley online course provider Coursera. The firm’s research shows that a whopping 59 million learners on their platform—or about 38 percent of their 2024 total of 155 million learners—plan to apply to a degree program. And there are only two main reasons why those learners won’t apply. The top reason is cost, and the second reason is the application.

Coursera’s 2022 polling focused on two performance admission programs at the University of Colorado that offer master’s degrees. In those programs, 73 percent of the students said that they would never have enrolled had their program required a traditional application process—only 4 percent more than in EAB’s study.

In other words, without performance admissions, about 628 of the 860 students in those programs would likely not have enrolled. Those 628 students benefited from performance admissions because the new paradigm enabled them to bypass admissions obstacles that would have blocked their enrollments at graduate schools with traditional applications.

Next, we examine three of the most frequent obstacles that performance admissions enables such applicants to overcome.

One might assume that a traditional (non-performance) application might have stopped most of the Colorado students from applying because their undergraduate grade point averages were too low. Surprisingly, Coursera’s research plus authoritative anecdotal evidence suggests that the main obstacle that blocks most potential working adults from applying to graduate programs is instead their difficulty with obtaining letters of recommendation.

This might be the applicant group that benefits most from performance admissions. Twenty-five percent of Coursera’s sample—the largest group in the survey—said that a recommendation letter requirement was the obstacle that stopped them from applying to graduate schools with traditional admissions.

Because the age of working adult applicants averages around 35 years, these applicants can face challenges in obtaining reference letters from some of their undergraduate professors who have already retired. Problems like those can prompt such candidates to seek reference letters from supervisors at their jobs. And before the advent of performance admissions, an employee’s anxiety that asking for such a letter could lead to thorny and potentially embarrassing workplace predicaments could have ultimately stopped them from applying to graduate school.

In May 2024, Northeastern University’s Assistant Vice President Robert Towner talked about reference letter concerns during an interview about the school’s performance admissions strategy. On the Office Hours with EAB podcast, Towner talked with EAB’s strategy expert Jennie Bailey about how performance admissions helps candidates overcome obstacles like these in their graduate school applications.

Towner says he’s heard about reference letter obstacles from graduate school applicants throughout his career. He started as the director of business development for online programs like the iMBA—now one of the most successful programs in graduate education—with the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then joined Coursera, where he managed the firm’s degrees marketing team for North America. Now leading experiential digital global education at Northeastern U. in Boston, he recently helped the D’Amore-McKim School of Business launch a pilot performance admissions online MBA option. Here’s what he told Bailey about reference letter issues:

Nobody wants to submit their letters of recommendation. . .I don’t want to go ask my boss to write me a letter of recommendation.

We all have only so much political capital to use at work. Do I really want to burn a favor by asking a boss or a colleague or an associate in a different division, “Hey, I really need you to write this letter for my program.”

Do I really want to do that?

And then there’s the anxiety and stress that comes along with that. Because now you have people at your workplace who know you’ve applied to a degree program. And they’re going to ask, you know. . .

“What’s going on? I wrote that letter of recommendation for you. Are you starting your MBA? Is this happening?”

And for whatever reason, maybe you weren’t admitted to that program. And now you have the embarrassment and anxiety behind having to say something like: “Thank you for writing that letter, but actually I wasn’t admitted, so I won’t be starting my MBA,” or “I won’t be doing these things.”

These are all things that I’ve heard from applicants for a long time that are barriers to their saying, “Hey, I’m ready to jump in and start school.”

Along with the potential applicants with reference letter challenges, the second largest applicant group that benefits most from performance admissions would probably be those stopped from applying to traditional programs by an admission test requirement. About 20 percent of Coursera’s sample—the second largest group—said this obstacle would have blocked their applications.

It’s not difficult to understand why. Even though both the GRE and the GMAT are today substantially shorter than their previous editions, a typical prep course for each of these admission tests can still require months for classes and study time—plus cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars.

Although most graduate programs waived their test requirements during the pandemic, and many of them no longer require such tests, some elite MBA and graduate STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) programs have reinstated their testing requirements. Some highly competitive applicants have been known to study for one or more tests like these for as long as a year—and it’s not unheard of for such candidates to hire private tutors as well.

Coursera’s percentage of students deterred by admissions test requirements also matched EAB’s survey results, which revealed that prospective graduate students continue to opt out of taking admissions tests wherever possible. EAB found that 22 percent of graduate applicants polled in 2023 had no plans to take an admissions test, double the pre-pandemic 2019 level of 11 percent. Most of these students are parents over age 35 with full-time jobs.

Also, about 61 percent knew the schools where they’d apply before taking an admission test—suggesting that they probably sat for a test only because a specific program they were interested in required its scores. EAB additionally found that about 47 percent of adult learners who plan to enroll or are currently enrolled reported that they had not taken any admissions tests.

About 13 percent of Coursera’s sample—and the survey’s third largest group—said that their inability to satisfy prerequisite requirements would have stopped them from applying to graduate programs that only offered traditional, non-performance admissions. This group probably includes applicants who in college majored in a discipline unrelated to the graduate degree they were seeking.

A likely scenario might involve an employee without a STEM undergraduate degree who today finds themselves in a technical job, and seeks to upgrade their skills by acquiring a technical master’s degree. However, master’s degree programs in fields like computer science, electrical engineering or data science may not consider such an applicant who doesn’t hold an undergraduate STEM degree, or who hasn’t at least completed a list of undergraduate STEM courses.

This seems to be the group most interested in the accessibility, equity and inclusion benefits of performance admissions. Coursera’s Dr. Quentin McAndrew, the firm’s global academic strategist whom we quoted at length in our previous article and who worked on the team that developed the first PBA degree program while a University of Colorado vice provost, recently commented on these aspects.

In a June 2024 interview, she told Dice.com that the Colorado faculty’s objective for developing performance admissions was originally to establish equity for the school’s applicants and remove bias from their applications. “They don’t have to rely on past performance that may not reflect who they are now,” she said.

About those seeking a technical master’s degree without prior undergraduate credits in a STEM field, she said that through performance admissions, “now they can come back and actually realize their ambitions and their full potential.” She continued:

It makes the application itself completely equitable because it is based on your experience, your ability and your willingness to work through the coursework. It takes that application decision out of the hands of the university and puts the learner in charge of their learning.

In the same article, Mallik Sundharam, a vice president at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, pointed out that busy managers and executives at technology firms may have little time available for the traditional application process that requires chasing recommendation letters or writing application essays.

He asked, “Do we want them to go do all of this if they are a manager or VP of a company? We want to make this as inclusive as we can and not to create hurdles for them to take their first step toward the graduate degree. That’s how performance-based admissions was born.”