I don’t totally know if this is where this goes but this is my question.
I graduated from college last year and I am getting nowhere fast when it comes to my “real” job. I am getting no offers, no interviews, absolutly nothing. So part of me has thought about adding a masters to my resume, because I am sure that that will help a lot. Whilst looking into schools I am getting a lot of the schools that are primarily online. U of Pheonix being the most popular, but there are others as well.
My question is…Do company’s look favoribly upon these online colleges and count them as “real” programs? Or do they tend to pass on them in favor of campus based colleges?
Degrees from the University of Phoenix are generally regarded as not worth the paper they’re printed on, so stay away from them. Other online programs can viewed well, if they come from more well-known institutions. But some people will always be suspicious of anything new, so the online degree doesn’t carry quite as much weight as a classroom-based degree.
It’s also worth mentioning that, while the master’s may help you find a job, but it may not, and it’s an expensive proposition. You need to have specific reasons to believe that it’ll help you find a job, and evidence that those reasons are good reasons, in order to really justify going for it.
I agree a lot of schools you can take almost your whole course load via the web. Others you can do this but they may call on you to come in only once or twice a semester, usually to take the mid-term and final in person.
I would check those first.
The thing is depending on your industry a degree may or may not mean much. After your first job it is mostly worthless, 'cause employers no longer care what you learned but what you do on your last job.
On the flip side, I have been unable to find a job for a long time now, and I got a degree from the U of Chicago and that HURTS me. 'Cause the jobs I applied for like at Target or Starbucks, they see me as too advanced, even though I graduated in 1984. So I leave it off now.
MBAs are a dime a dozen now a days. I worked for a hotel awhile back and we had FIVE MBAs and one of them was a reservation supervisor and the other four were salespeople.
MBAs have become the degree to get when you can’t figure out what to do with your life and have to do something other than sit at home or for people with too much time on their hands.
I’m not saying that is true, but that is how I’ve viewed them as the people that I’ve know that have them, have gotten their MBAs because of that.
Online degrees, especially from for-profit schools, are viewed with skepticism. If they have any value, it’s for someone who is already working at a full-time job and genuinely needs the flexibility of the online program.
You’d be better off with an on-campus program and getting involved in as many activities as possible that would help you network into a job.
It depends very much on the degree you already have, and the degree you’re looking to get, and where you are going to get it from, frankly.
It’s my WAG that a degree from an actual University gotten online would trump one from a virtual unversity such as Phoenix.
I’m considering getting a Masters of Medical Management. It’s offered by only 4 schools (Carnegie Mellon, Tulane, USC, and UMass. It’s mostly online work, but the associated Universities have actual campuses, and decent reputations.
As everyone has said, the important thing isn’t online vs. traditional, it’s the school granting the degree. Phoenix, DeVry, etc. – not good. Traditional school that also offers online programs – good.
This is about half the reason I want another degree, but this post doesn’t encourage me. I am basically doing nothing right now and chalk it up to the fact that I only have a B.A. I guess my understanding is if I can grab something advanced in a marketing (or advertising if anyone has it) then I could actually GET somewhere.
An MBA is a valuable degree to get if you are interested in pursuing a career in finance, consulting or management. And even then, it only really matters if you go to the top 30 or so school, preferably the top 10 or so like HBS or Wharton.
Personally, I would view an online degree, especially an online MBA as a joke. IMHO, the most valuable education you get as an MBA is working in teams and presenting in front of a group of people. Nearly every class I had required multiple group projects with class presentations.
There is also the invaluable experience you get from interacting with other highly motivated professional people. Most people don’t know what they don’t know. There’s a big difference between learning with a bunch of people looking to get a rubber stamp to qualify for some generic corporate job and learning with a bunch of people who are getting a degree to learn to be entrepreneurs, investment bankers, hedge fund managers, brand managers and management consultants.
Phoenix or DeVry is fine if you want an entry level job in accounting, computer programming or HVAC repair.
Also, no degree is a magic golden ticket. You are going to start at entry level, not CEO when you come out.
I have to disagree with that. UP is fully accredited; a degree from them is quite valid. I’ve worked with a bunch of folks that had UP degrees, not a dumbass in the lot.
I think you’d get a lot more value by looking at the state schools where you would have in-state tuition and seeing which ones have opportunities for you to get involved with advertising/ marketing through student media (newspaper, radio, TV stations, websites) or business incubators (helping students and faculty who are developing business plans with their marketing and advertising). Also, go to their career services the first week and start figuring out how to get internships and how to prepare for campus recruiting.
FWIW, my Master’s degree is from National University, and I did all my work online. I haven’t had trouble finding work (though, to be fair, my goal was to teach at a junior college) but that might have something to do with my BA being from a local brick-and-mortar school. National is accredited, though, and my degree was fairly rigorous–moreso than my BA, anyway.
At the end of the day, I think it depends on whether or not the applicant displays understanding and competence; the degree, in my case, was just a hurdle I had to jump so I could teach college. For anything else, I’m not sure what the value would be.
A problem I have right now is I can’t even get a damned interview for something I want, even if it’s crappy entry level jobs. If I could get that I am pretty confident that I can impress you face to face. If I can add some more letters to my B.A. then I am hoping that it will at least let me a damn interview.
UP is building mini-campuses all over, so I guess they do actually offer classroom degrees too. They put a 5-10 classroom building more or less across the street from UCF a few years ago. I have no idea why.
I second ultrafilter for the most part. The view towards Univ. of Phoenix type places is so bad you are better off not including it on your resume. You don’t want to be thought of as “They thought that having a degree from that place was a good idea?” kind of person.
One very important thing to keep in mind is that many for-profit places (online or not) go thru a life cycle: Rapid growth funded by student loans. Bad reputation sets in: the government is unhappy about students not paying back loans, students don’t get jobs that make it pay off, etc. School goes belly up or bought out by another company that repeats the cycle.
You don’t want a degree from a place that could easily be bankrupt in 10 years. (Especially since a lot of people then fake having a degree from such places since it’s so hard to check on them.)
And yes, having an online degree from a traditional school is much, much better but not quite as good as an in residence degree.
As far as anecdotes go, the few people I’ve met that took some computer tech courses from Devry were okay, but they only took enough to learn the basics to get started. No way would a 4 year or grad degree be worth the money.
Having accreditation doesn’t add a positive in this context. Not having it is the bad thing.
I work for a traditional, very old university that offers some online graduate degrees, and has for quite some time now (including an MBA). Group work is required for online degrees just as it is for the in-residence ones. The only difference is the means used to achieve the end - for example, web or teleconferencing would be used as opposed to meeting in a classroom. Just because most (or in some cases all) of the work is done long distance doesn’t mean it’s done in a vacuum.
Our online degrees tend to be geared toward working professionals who continue to work full-time while taking two classes per semester all year long. There is also a lot of emphasis placed on students like this learning from each other, as much as from the instructor (who has, as they say, more of a ‘guide on the side’ role as opposed to the ‘sage on the stage’). In-residence programs tend to be geared more toward students with less work experience, some of whom may be coming straight into graduate school from undergrad; some may also be more interested in getting into research/academics as opposed to industry.
Our graduates tend to be quite successful and the programs competitive, so from what I see here, as long as you can get into a school with a good reputation and you get a degree in a field where there’s some demand for your skills, whether you do the work long distance or locally in a classroom doesn’t matter that much.
I’ve been thinking about asking a similar question, so hopefully the OP will forgive me tacking it on here. If it’s too far afield I’ll try my own thread.
I have no interest in a degree per se (I have enough of them already), but do want to find a good online school to take a few computer courses. I’m self-taught in HTML, PHP, MySQL, and a bit of VBA, but it’s very shade tree-mechanic in nature. For each, I’ve read a couple good books (i.e., not at the Dummies or Idiots Guide level, but they do start from the beginning) and learned a lot through task-based problem solving.
I’m finding that learning Flash and Javascript (more than just basic snippets) will be very helpful. Web work is ancillary to our business, but clients are increasingly asking us for it — having the skills in-house will allow us to respond much quicker and manage projects better. But I don’t think I want to go through the whole this-is-easy-I-can-figure-it-out-on-my-own route again. I will if I have to, but I’d love to find a one or two semester course with structure and feedback to create a solid foundation.
There’s a bajillion tutorials and help out there (it’s how I got up to speed(ish) in PHP, etc.), and a lot of courses for sale. But if I’m going this route, I’d like to hit as “real” a school as possible, whether brick-n-mortar with an online component or online only. But, since we run our business out of our house, it has to be completely online.
The way I see it, I want to find a school that, once enrolled and paid up, will give me access to student software/hardware discounts. That is, if it’s good enough for Adobe or Microsoft to consider ‘real,’ then it’s been vetted (i.e., accreditation isn’t necessary, since it’ll never go on a resume). But that seems awfully silly — hence this post and quest for opinions.