Diploma Mills

One thing to worry about, at least in my eyes, is the legitimacy of the online masters degree program. I don't mean legitimacy as in Harvard Business vs. your local state college. That would pertain to reputation and quality and respectability in the educational world. What I mean by legitimacy is accreditation.

Recently, there was an issue of a superintendent at the Freehold school district in New Jersey in which the superintendent had paid a diploma mill for a doctorate degree. The way the NJ school system works is that teachers and administrators are given pay increases for the degrees they acquire. Although this incentive is in place for degrees only from accredited universities and colleges, this superintendent went to a non-accredited college where his only major requirement for obtaining a doctorate degree was writing a 12-page paper. He was then given a diploma. For us real students, we know a 12-page paper could be less than 25% of the course work from a real, accredited institution. These are called diploma mills, places that hand out degrees as fast as McDonald's hands out cheeseburgers, so long as you pay the school's fees.

What is important to note here is that the non-accredited school was an online school. While you can be assured that a school like Drexel, Harvard, or Rutgers are all accredited, you need to make sure to do research when deciding on the right online program for you. The last thing you want to do is spend a lot of money only to have your degree be seen as irrelevant because of the school's lack of accreditation.

Here is a link to legitimate, state-recognized accreditation agencies:
http://www.elearners.com/resources/agencies.asp

Here is a link to a news article with more information on the problem with NJ school superintendents using non-accredited degrees to get more money:
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/09/05/03diploma.h28.html

Drexel University

Combined with the online masters degrees are online bachelor's degrees. One such program is at Drexel University. I am a computing technology major, which is another term for network administration. Computer science is usually what people think when discussing computer degrees for undergraduate studies. Problem with that is that computer science degrees are very math oriented, including years of calculus and other high-level mathematics. For someone like me, who may do well at math but don't want to dive into so much high-level mathematics, this is not appealing. My career goal is network administration. That is my current position at my current employer, and I do not want to take years of mathematics for a computer science degree. Instead, Drexel University has created the computing technology degree, which covers aspects of network administration like operating system architecture, database administration, and IT security as well as non-technical courses like project management.

You get the respectability and credibility of Drexel University without the strict structure of a traditional brick and mortar school. Their URL is http://www.drexel.edu.