Launching a new online degree program is a major undertaking for a university. Gaining the necessary approvals, developing the curriculum, hiring the faculty, marketing the program…preparation takes time, energy and involvement from many people. You want to make certain you have thoroughly researched the market of the potential program to help ensure that when the program hits the market, it does so with success. There are three critical factors you should be sure to include in any new online program market research endeavor: market saturation, regional/online markets, and labor demand.
There are three critical factors you should be sure to include in any new online program market research endeavor: market saturation, regional/online markets, and labor demand.
Market Saturation
One critical factor to take into consideration when analyzing the feasibility of an online program is saturation. Simply put, saturation is a ratio calculated by dividing the number of graduates by the number of competitors. Data on the number or graduates and number of competitors is available within the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). This saturation ratio will provide you with critical insights into the health of the market. It is also important to determine if there is a competitor dominating the market that may be causing your saturation to be inflated. After you have calculated the saturation of the market, you will need to determine the minimum feasible saturation that your institution is willing to accept. Is the saturation ratio at a level where the proposed program would be viable for your institution?
Regional and Online Market Segments
It is also worth looking at how the program is performing at regional and online levels. You may find that a program has a much stronger demand and a healthier saturation in your region than it does nationally. A number of factors can contribute to this difference but one of the most important drivers is industry/labor demand. Also, if you are researching the viability of an online program, you may also want to calculate the saturation of institutions with an online program as you may find that the online market is more favorable than the overall market. These are two additional critical factors that can provide you with a nuanced understanding of the feasibility of the program.
Labor Demand
The final critical factor is labor demand. There are two key metrics to labor demand assessment: historical trends and future projections. For future projections, the most commonly used source of information is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS provides 10-year job growth projections by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC) codes. To determine SOC codes appropriate for your program, consult the CIP to SOC crosswalk that can be downloaded from NCES. (CIP stands for Classification of Institution Program and is the taxonomy used to classify IPEDS information.) Once you have determined which CIP codes are most relevant, gather the employment projections from BLS at state and national levels. For historical labor projections, there are a number of providers who scrape job posting boards and corporate websites across the internet and aggregate the data to provide detailed historical trending job posting data.