Accredited Degree Programs: Six of One/Half Dozen of the Other?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m mapping out a preliminary degree/career path in early education and am considering two options to get started:

A) Enroll in a 2-year transferable AA degree program at the local community college and then transfer to a 4-year university to complete BA.

B) Enroll in an accelerated BA degree through an online school like Western Governors University to complete the whole program.

I’m a working adult who does well with online learning and can get more done quicker if I am not tied to a physical campus and working around class schedules, among other reasons why option B is more desirable.

Since most institutions offer a significant number of their courses online these days, is doing an online degree program this way just another acceptable choice? Would both accredited BA degrees be viewed with the same weight by future employers?

Your experiences and insights are appreciated!

LH

2

Does Western Governors University publish data on how successful their graduates are at getting jobs?

While I have no knowledge about this I would guess Option A is much better.

3

WGU is better than a for profit degree mill like Phoenix University.

4

They have a peculiarly useless set of data available - Student and Graduate Success | WGU

Colleges certainly aren’t uniform in what/how they present their data, but you can usually see what portion of graduates are employed and what their salaries tend to be. All the information they actually present seems pretty useless.

98% of employers said they would hire another WGU graduate? I’ve hired some people who turned out to be pretty awful, and it still didn`t make me rule out ever hiring anyone from their alma mater.

I was intrigued to see it’s a not-for-profit institution. In my opinion, it’s the for-profits that are really valueless - being online only isn’t inherently bad.

5

I would say option 2. In the same time you can get a bachelor’s degree as an AA. I believe WGU is fine for a teaching degree.

6

This is where I always get hung up. I’m not sure that employers are the ones I want to trust with that decision. The answer is supposed to be “Accreditation” but there are so many different accrediting councils and associations etc. listed. How can I find out which ones are actually considered valid? Is there a list somewhere that, say, another school would check when deciding whether my degree met their entrance criteria for graduate school?

I generally let HR handle all that when I’m hiring, but it’s becoming so common to go to an on-line school, I’d like to have a better understanding of which ones are actually teaching people.

7

Yes. For academic (meaning non-vocational) degrees, the correct accrediting bodies are the six regional accreditation bodies recognized by the Department of Education. These bodies accredit all legitimate institutions of higher education in their areas.

Note that being a for-profit school is not a bar to accreditation; University of Phoenix is fully accredited, although they have been placed “on notice” for some problems which they claim to be correcting.

So accreditation itself doesn’t tell you much about quality.

Also, regional accreditation as an institute of higher learning is focused primarily on determining whether the institution is a genuine educational institution and has the financial stability and recordkeeping abilities to function as a college. When it comes to graduate and professional programs, as well as undergraduate professional programs like nursing, the school will need to be additionally accredited by the bodies that oversee those fields. I’m not sure if that applies to childhood education programs.

WGU is a regionally accredited, non-profit online school and has a pretty good reputation.

8

The National Council for Accreditation of Teaher Education has a list of accredited four-year programs for early childhood education, and the National Association for the Education of Young Children has a list of Associate’s degree programs.

I didn’t check to see if there are any online degree programs, but you can contact the associations directly.

9

I appreciate all the responses here, and for the links to more info. Thanks!

10

I guess it depends on what you ultimately want to do. I think you’re better off if you aspire to graduate study at some point to go the AA/BA route. You’ll get to know faculty and build networks. I can appreciate the concerns about work, and WGU is better regarded than most of the for profits out there.