[snowwrestler]

This might be heresy here on HN, but I think that there is more than accreditation paperwork at play here. I think it remains to be proven whether a MOOC actually does deliver an education that is on par with what you would get from attending a 4-year CS degree program at a college or university.

MOOCs are new and exciting, but they're also new and unproven. Accredited bachelor degrees are valued because they have a long history of delivering value. MOOCs do not.

[araftery]

I think you're spot on. The challenge is to find away to evaluate both on a level playing field. A CS grad from different caliber universities probably (on average) have different levels of competency. Even graduates from the same university won't have the same level of skill. For traditional colleges, employers can cut through these asymmetries by using heuristics like institutional prestige and metrics like GPA.

The key is to find a method of credentialing general enough that it can apply to both traditional, college-educated job applicants and non-traditional ones alike.

Whether MOOCs will be enough for those non-traditional applicants to be successful in this modern credential system is a separate issue, and, as you point out, far from certain.