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Yale Medical School’s Request to Expand Campus Program Online Is Denied

The Yale University School of Medicine and 2U, an education technology company, have been denied accreditors’ permission to offer a physician assistant master’s degree online as an expansion of an existing campus degree program.

Yale’s announcement of the program in March was heralded as evidence that even the nation’s most prestigious universities were moving toward online degrees. It was to be the first to offer the same Ivy League degree from an online program as from the campus version.

But as the Yale experience shows, getting a campus degree program online and accredited is not simple.

The university was hoping to start the online program with 12 students in January, and to eventually enroll 350 students. The campus version enrolls about 40 students a year.

According to a statement from a university spokeswoman, Karen N. Peart, Yale applied for accreditation as an expansion “because the on-campus and online programs would be equivalent in admission criteria, student curriculum and assessment, clinical placements and summative student assessment.” Still, Ms. Peart said, the accreditors’ response, which came last month, was “reasonable.”

The timing for the new program to start now depends on full accreditation and state licensing, Ms. Peart said.

The Yale Daily News was the first to report that Yale’s application for the expansion had been rejected.

Over the last three years, elite universities have rushed to offer free online courses, known as MOOCs, that do not carry credit or lead to a degree.

“All academic environments are looking at online for new and better ways to teach,” John McGinnity, president of the American Academy of Physician Assistants, said. “There’s a huge demand for physician assistants that has to be met, but to take a P.A. program, which has over 2,000 hours of bedside clinical training, and put it online — a lot of us were curious to see how they would do that.”

Admission to the nation’s nearly 200 physician assistant programs has become highly competitive, with an average of eight to 10 applications for each seat. The Yale program receives more than 1,000 applications a year.

Yale and 2U, which would split the revenue from the program, expect to bring three groups a year to the 28-month program, which costs $83,000 on campus and would cost the same online.

The program would bring the online students to Yale at the beginning and end of the first year, and at the start of the second year. The clinical rotations that make up the second year of training, though, could be done at sites near the students’ homes.

According to The Yale Daily News, students and alumni had expressed concern that the online plan could undercut the quality of Yale’s program and dilute the value of the degree.

Even before it went public a year ago, 2U had been a leader in the push toward online professional degrees, forging partnerships with more than a dozen prominent universities. It is a partner in the University of Southern California’s teaching and social work degrees; Northwestern’s master’s in counseling; the online M.B.A. at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Georgetown’s nursing degree; and more.

Chip Paucek, the chief executive, said the company expected to introduce five new online programs a year, many of which, like its nursing, social work and teaching programs and the Yale physician assistant program, would include field placements.

Accreditation, he said, is a hurdle in each new field.

Mr. Paucek said his company had handled more than 20,000 site placements in its online degree programs, employing 100 people who handle nothing but those placements.

“One of our disciplines at Georgetown is midwifery, and no one would want to go to a midwife who delivered virtual babies,” he said. “The students in our Georgetown program have delivered 3,653 babies.”

Another point of pride, he said, is that the Georgetown nursing program had a 100 percent first-time board pass rate for its family nurse-practitioner graduates in 2012 and 2013, the latest years for which data are available.

Not all of the company’s online efforts have been so successful. In 2012, 2U created Semester Online, in which Duke, Northwestern and other universities would offer online courses to their own students and students elsewhere, who would have to pay more than $4,000 in tuition per course. Duke pulled out before the program ever got going, and it was disbanded last year.

A correction was made on 
April 16, 2015

An article on Wednesday about the denial of a request by Yale University School of Medicine, working with the education technology company 2U, to expand a medical program online, described incorrectly in some editions one of 2U’s other partnerships. It involves the University of Southern California’s teaching and social work degrees, not its teaching and nursing degrees.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Yale Medical School’s Request to Expand Campus Program Online Is Denied. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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