The economic urgency around higher education is undeniable: the price of tuition has soared; student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion and is greater than credit card debt; the dollars available from government sources for colleges are expected to shrink in the years to come; and the costs for traditional institutions to stay competitive continue to rise. At the same time, more education does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Employers are demanding more academic credentials for every kind of job yet are at the same time increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with the variance in quality of degree holders. The signaling effect of a college degree appears to be an imprecise encapsulation of one's skills for the knowledge economy of the times. Students themselves are demanding more direct connections with employers: 87.9 percent of college freshmen cited getting a better job as a vital reason for pursuing a college degree. "Learning and work are becoming inseparable," argued the authors of a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, "indeed one could argue that this is precisely what it means to have a knowledge economy or a learning society. It follows that if work is becoming learning, then learning needs to become work--and universities need to become alive to the possibilities." Despite these trends, few universities or colleges see the need to adapt to the surge in demand of skill sets in the workforce. Distancing themselves from the notion of vocational training, institutions remain wary of aligning their programs and majors to the needs of today's rapidly evolving labor market. Who will attend to the skills gap and create stronger linkages to the workforce? This book illuminates the great disruptive potential of online competency-based education. An examination of online competency-based education unveils the tectonic shifts to come in higher education. The following chapters are contained: (1) Disruptive Innovation and Academic Inertia; (2) Jobs To Be Done: The Shifting Value Proposition of College; (3) The Core of Competency-Based Education; (4) Online Competency-Based Education: Mastery and Modularization; (5) A New Value Network: Industry-Validated Learning Experiences; and (6) College Disrupted. Appended are: (1) Shifts in Public Policy: Major Developments; and (2) Descriptions of Innovators.