Online higher education may be where credit is due

"There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit." While the original author of this quote isn't known, it has been attributed to all sorts of prominent people: a 19th century Jesuit priest, a longtime CEO of Coca Cola, U.S. Presidents Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and many others. They all liked it and used it, and it is worth remembering. Despite the quote, though, getting credit has been the economic fulcrum of modern higher education. The cost of education is measured in credit hours as are graduation and degree requirements. And for both the academic supply side and the demand side -- employers and society in general -- it appears that what a student actually learns matters less than the credit, in the form of a diploma or degree, that they obtained.