According to the Pew Research 2014 report, Millennials – born after 1980 – are the best educated generation in US history. Over one-third have a bachelor’s degree, compared with every fourth parent and grandparents. To stem the rising costs of higher education, universities, universities and profit-oriented institutions turned to technology. Are online colleges good?
Many now offer online, bachelor and even master classes in which some or all of the work is done online. According to a Pew Research report, 90% of public four-year colleges and universities and 60% of private universities offer online courses. In 2011, a third of all students enrolled in an online course.
Do employers respect online degrees?
Online education was once a peculiarity, and the value of an online degree was at most uncertain. In recent years, traditional full-time colleges and universities have begun to offer university courses through online learning. Over a third of ordinary colleges offer university colleges.
According to the latest research carried out by the Online Learning consortium
Over one in four students (28%) now takes at least one online course.
Public institutions have the largest proportion of online students, with 72.7% of all students and 38.7% of all distance students.
- A total of 5.8 million distance learning students in 2014. This fall consists of 2.85 million all distance courses and 2.97 million from some but not all distance courses
Unlike a decade ago, most employers now use online education. As more and more trusted schools offer online study programs, respect is growing. Online education is no longer a quirk, but the norm because signing up for an online course is growing for the tenth year in a row.
According to a survey by CareerBuilder.com, 83 percent of managers say that “an online degree is as reliable as the one earned by a traditional campus-based program.”
When asked by employers, they said that the school’s accreditation, the quality of its graduates and the reputation of the college or university, among other things, make an online diploma more reliable.
Dark website for diploma providers
The desire to earn degrees combined with the high cost of education led to the explosion of non-accredited ‘diploma mills’, where anyone who was ready to pay the fee received a diploma. Accreditation is a process in which an independent, publicly recognized external organization checks or verifies compliance with specific standards and adheres to them when granting a degree or certificate of competence. It is a quality assurance process aimed at maintaining the integrity of the institution’s instructions and mastering the material by the student.
However, non-profit, online or profit-based school accounts have become front page news, especially where schools have encouraged and assisted students in obtaining government loans to cover their education costs. Such institutions knowingly cheat students enrolled in educational and vocational courses solely for the purpose of charging fees and tuition, mainly using the following three tactics:
- Misleading or inflating the commercial value of training or education
- Failure to meet or take into account student skills
- Providing inappropriate, incomplete or incorrect training materials and instructions
