If I get an online degree from Penn State and another applicant for a job physically attended Penn State for the same diploma, will the employer treat them as being the same? I wasn’t sure if this could be a Factual Question or not, so here goes…
I did move this from FQ to IMHO. Seems much more opinion than fact.
Online vs. in person from the same University would pretty much be treated the same. Plus I’m not sure why a resume or CV would mention the online part.
But for many if not most employers, a degree from Penn State is going to be valued more than from a strictly or mostly online college.
FTR: I was only involved in filling 2 fulltime positions, though many consultants/temps. So take what I posted with a grain of salt.
How is the potential employer going to know you earned your degree online unless you tell them? According to this source, diplomas don’t specify in person or remote learning.
A degree from an institution known to have a sole online presence probably won’t have quite the same cachet as a corresponding degree from Yale.
So they’re for all intents and purposes (even legally) the same? And people don’t mention whether their degree was online or not on resumes? And thanks for answering my second question (as to whether this is a FQ) so quickly. 
EDIT: Please ignore the legal question, since it seems like a pointless digression-I suppose it doesn’t really fit with the original thought.
IANAL but a degree from Penn State is a degree from Penn State AFAIK.
But a Degree from an institution like University of Phoenix or Edison College were not regarded as being equal to a College like Penn State or Rutgers.
I’m retired (effectively with the advent of COVID), and so a little out of it. But no resumes I looked at mentioned online vs. in-person.
Hell, I was IT, Programmer/Analyst type. Successfully completing a degree online from a Penn State, NJIT, Rutgers, etc. would if anything impress me a little and make me think you would do fine in a Work from Home situation.
But I can see this varying a lot by field and by person reviewing the resume/CV and I wouldn’t mention it.
Thanks for mentioning them. Penn State is the closest Big Name school I could think of when writing the OP, but the others might be closer to what I want if they’re cheaper and more flexible, and were the spark for that post.
I’m think a degree from Edison is worth more than no degree. They always specialized in life experience also which is often overlooked or hard to qualify on a resume, but if I’m looking at two equal resumes and one is a “real” college and the other is a for profit online college. The “real” college absolutely has an edge.
A degree from an online only school will be treated with less respect vs. an online degree from a brick-and-mortar school. So you should be fine.
They often can figure out if your degree is online from your work experience. If you get a degree from Penn State while working in Detroit, people will figure it out and may ask a gotcha type question to see if you would lie about it being online.
Still, it’s not uncommon for people with traditional degrees to get an advanced degree online these days while working full-time. Times are a changing.
There’s not a strict dichotomy between online and in-person degrees. Especially since Covid, it’s possible in many cases for some of one’s classes to meet in person and others to be online or ina hybrid format.
Even back in 2003, my colleges both had classes that were in -person as well as online-only. And sometimes the only difference was that you could optionally come to class—the actual work was still always done and submitted online. (This was common in computer classes.)
Pretty much. If a particular university is regionally accredited then an online degree conferred by that university will carry the same weight as one earned by someone who attended the same university in person.
I took my MA from Indiana State University and neither my diploma nor my transcripts mention that it was entirely online. Unless I tell someone there’s no way for someone else to know.
Additionally, many classes and programs that prior to 2020 were offered in-person have now migrated to a hybrid or entirely online delivery. One perhaps positive effect the pandemic had was demonstrating that many classes could be delivered remotely without a significant detrimental effect to student learning (this obviously does not apply to K-12 education). As a result many traditionally in-person programs are now, a year and a half after most universities returned from distance-only learning delivery, either online or hybrid. Thus a significant percentage of college grads will have completed their degrees either partially or entirely online.
Generally speaking, nobody would know that your Penn State degree was online rather than in-person, unless you told them or gave some sort of indication that it was online (i.e., letting them know you lived in Kansas during all 4 years of college and/or rarely actually set foot on PSU campus itself.)
I think nowadays the school name still holds clout, the fact that it was online may diminish the respect a bit, but if you have an online degree from Harvard, it’s still Harvard.
Now, online for-profit schools like UAGC, University of Phoenix, Strayer or DeVry may not be well respected, but it’s more because of the for-profit angle than it is about the online aspect.
I have colleagues who got their LL.M. degrees online from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, pre-Covid, while working full-time. Osgoode is a leading law school in Canada and was one of the first into online courses.
I’ve never heard any suggestion that their degrees aren’t the same as in-person LL.M.degrees from Osgoode.
Honestly, I don’t think Penn State applicants are as respected if they went to one of the many satellite campuses instead of the main one at University Park.
I think if you have to ask, the answer is probably “no”. University Park is more selective than Altoona which is presumably more selective than online. And given that most applications ask you what city your school was in, they will figure it out pretty quickly. Maybe on paper it looks like the same degree, but in practice, people do create mental hierarchies, particularly if they have to weight one candidate vs another. And that selectiveness will come out it different subtle ways.
Many universities, especially state universities, have multiple branches. And a degree would be awarded from a particular branch. But “online” doesn’t count as a separate branch of the university; rather, any online coursework you take would be offered by one of the specific branches.
At least, that’s how I think it works. I haven’t researched how all the various universities do things.
Yep. My daughter is currently working on her MPH from a well-known university in DC while working full-time and living in Chicago (she got her undergraduate degreee at a fairly prestigious Midwestern residential university). Pretty much everyone in the program is working, so all the classes are held remotely in the evening, seminar-style. As far as I can tell from her descriptions of the coursework (and occasional math questions), it seems the same as an in-person program.
One should perhaps distinguish between programs with online classes and correspondence courses, which have a reputation for being somewhat less rigorous.
I understood the OP question, and nobody else needed it explained, so I’m going to conclude that people generally conceive of some distinction between online degrees and “real” ones. Of course, to make the distinction they have to realize an online degree is that.
I earned two degrees from one of my state’s universities. I started at one of its satellites and completed them online due to COVID. There isn’t a single thing on my diplomas indicating they’re some sort of lesser degree or where I studied. They’re identical to other degrees awarded by those departments.
This has long been my take on it, too. It’s now not uncommon for established, respected, brick-and-mortar colleges to offer online options for degrees, and I’ve not heard much, if anything, bad about those programs.
But, the for-profit schools, like U of Phoenix, DeVry, the late ITT Tech, etc. have generally had a poor reputation, and if online degrees have a bad reputation, it’s likely because of that sort of school.