favorites: on-line degrees | Higher Ed Professional

On-Line Colleges: How to Choose Wisely

September 6, 2009

As someone who works in education, I know not only about how to earn degrees, but also how valuable those degrees become once you earn them. The value of a degree can depend on many things — the rigor of your coursework, the demand for new workers in your industry, and your industry’s requirements regarding future education chief amongst them — but for most students, the “name” of the degree is the one they while question the most. Perhaps no other degrees have their names — and value — questioned as much as those from on-line or distance colleges.

First, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between on-line courses and on-line colleges. Concerns of quality aside, the reality is that, at most public institutions and at many private ones, it’s now almost the norm for students to take at least one course on-line while in college. At many community colleges in particular, where faculty specialize in delivering education to students with tougher schedules and there less time to spend on campus, students are able to complete up to half of their Associate’s work on-line even though they are not technically enrolled in on-line degree programs. This means that any stigma against on-line education needs to be clearly separated along the lines of courses versus colleges. Likewise, there’s a huge, huge difference between an on-line course offered by a well-known, campus-based college (like your state university) and one offered by a for-profit, distance-only college (like University of Phoenix). This is because on-line courses offered by “regular” colleges, called “brick-and-mortar” colleges by many on-line college students, are usually taught by full-time faculty members and are required to meet the same standards as in-person, on-campus courses. This is why on-line credits from traditional colleges are much more likely to transfer than those from exclusively on-line colleges. Traditional colleges simply have superior resources, superior faculty, and superior coursework.

And then you have the many for-profit colleges and universities that offer fully on-line degrees. The most commonly known of these is, of course, the University of Phoenix, which is business venture of the Apollo Group. As the largest North American university, with almost 500,000 students enrolled at any given time, the University of Phoenix has become the national image of on-line education, not to mention a running punchline for most jokes about on-line degrees. The criticisms of UoP are so well known now, but perhaps the best website to ever condense these criticisms was the now-defunct (and blisteringly named) UoPSucks.com, which can still be seen in archived form. As someone working in a field where your own education means everything when it comes to how far you’ll advance, I can tell you that my opinion of UoP is not very favorable.

Instead, I strongly encourage students interested in on-line or distance degrees to look at more established, reputable options. The most highly-regarded, inexpensive, accredited on-line colleges are those that are public colleges run by states. Since they don’t charge the same tuition as private, for-profit colleges and also get additional state funding (including for financial aid), the costs are much lower, even for out-of-state students. It simply doesn’t make any sense to pay so much more for a private degree with a questionable reputation. Finally, since they are run by the states and are typically affiliated with the major public universities in those states, they are more accountable and accessible.

Some examples include Charter Oak State College (based in Connecticut), Thomas Edison State College (New Jersey), Empire State College (New York), Granite State College (New Hampshire), the University of Maryland – University College, the University of North Carolina, Penn State – World Campus, the University of Texas TeleCampus, Fort Hays State University, and the State University of New York. Many of these institutions also offer scholarships, in addition to regular financial aid, and give you the flexibility to attend some courses in-person if you’d prefer. There is also Western Governors University, which is not technically public but has public backing, so it operates in a similar way.

Among these, my personal favorites are Charter Oak State College and Thomas Edison State College. I really love how extensive TESC’s liberal arts offerings are — most on-line colleges focus more on career programs and leave the humanities majors of the world behind — and how wonderfully academic their approach is, even with its emphasis on other methods of earning credit. With Charter Oak State, I love the flexibility they give you to create your own program, the very individual focus and small feel (less than 2,000 students each year), their remarkably low tuition (even for out-of-state students), their generous transfer credit policy, and the real sense of community that the college and its students have.

Of course, there are also many established universities with on-line degree programs, including Boston University, Fairfield University, Midway College, Drexel University, Notre Dame College (no, not the football one!), Franklin University, George Washington University, and Northeastern University. The Distance Learning Alliance provides an outstanding, albeit incomplete, list of such institutions.

A recent development has me quite hopeful. A consortium of some of the most well-regarded on-line colleges have come together to create the College Choices for Adults website, which aims to provide more transparency and help students looking for on-line and degree completion programs with more accurate, detailed information before they make decisions. In addition to the info they give you on each listed college and program, they also provide a great list of questions to ask about any college before enrolling. I hope that they will not affiliate with some of the more questionable for-profit outfits, but even if they do, the information they provide should be helpful to many. As former Capella University president Michael Offerman has said, the website should “enable adults to make informed choices about higher education options by providing them with program-level learning outcomes, measurements and results that are difficult to find elsewhere.” That’s an improvement students can certainly to look forward to.