I speculate this is because specialized higher education is less valuable, in all senses, than well-rounded general education at the bachelor’s level. A bachel

I speculate this is because specialized higher education is less valuable, in all senses, than well-rounded general education at the bachelor’s level. A bachelor’s degree is valuable to the student and to society as a transformative period of time when someone can study a wide range of topics, especially topics that focus on large-scale world ethics, and integrate the moral and social maturity imparted by it via social networking within and across universities. The particular domain knowledge or training in eg math or computer science, pre-med, sociology or psychology, music, education, etc., are not very valuable. Employers don’t really care about any of that, apart from virtue signaling to weed out mass candidate pipelines. The actual knowledge itself is just table stakes and pretty worthless; companies will have to train you to do jobs that have effectively zero to do with acquired skills like programming. But general well-rounded cultural appreciation of a base foundation puts everyone into a level playing field to be fit for plugging in as an employee: basic understanding of how to work in groups on projects, managing interpersonal relationships even when you don’t like them, having a common standard of collegiality and “how things are done,” common understanding of academic/liberal social norms. While possible, there has not been created an online bachelor’s program that successfully replicates anything like this yet. They all focus on skill building and curriculum, as if that was any part of the purpose of college. Master’s degrees are quite different. They are a pure credential kind of thing, a certificate of advanced training. It’s assumed you already have the social norm education and that’s not the goal. The hard skills of the training still don’t actually matter to anyone in master’s degrees (nor even PhDs), but they can be used for clout or authority or stack ranking in terms of how decision-making ranks are established. This is much more amenable to online courses because all that matters is the certificate at the end, nobody cares how you got it. With bachelor’s degrees they actually do care that you physically attended “intellectual workforce finishing school” at a physical campus, because the social norm / behavioral training is the only part anyone cares about.