Grad School Options

[defmo]

Hello everyone,

I am pursuing a Business Administration degree w/ conc. International Business at SNHU. I have 50 Sophia credits. GPA should be 3.6+ by the time i graduate. I have a native level proficiency in both French and Arabic. I need to know what my options are for Grad School? little bit worried about the Sophia credits on my transcript. Anybody gotten into a top 100 grad school with a similar profile? If so, which school was it? what was the program? Any input would be greatly appreciated. 
Many Thanks to Everyone here, you have all been very helpful to me throughout this journey.

[freeloader]

Without knowing what degree you want to pursue next, it really is impossible to say.  There is a huge difference in difficulty and admissions requirements in gaining admissions to the 100th ranked medical school vs the 100th ranked law school vs the 100th ranked MBA program vs the 100th ranked graduate program in education, to name just four areas of study.

Your GPA is fine to good and your school is fine for admissions to a higher ranked program; they aren’t exceptional, but certainly not bad enough to disqualify you automatically.  Depending on your field of study and the schools to which you are applying, they may or may not be sufficient, but that’s impossible to say without knowing more about you and your ambitions. Depending on the degree you want to earn, your standardized test scores (GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc), letters of recommendation, certifications/licensure, research experience/shadowing, work experience, and/or writing samples may all figure into admissions decisions.  Different degrees prioritize those things differently. Different universities may also prioritize those differently. 

There also are differences in admissions to programs (like law, business, medicine) where students typically pay for their degrees and admissions to PhD programs where students typically have their degrees funded by the university and typically receive a living stipend. PhD admissions decisions often feel like whether or not you are in the right place at the right time. I will assume for a moment that you (or your parents) are North African. If you want to pursue a PhD in Arabic, French, anthropology/history/politics, and study North Africa, you typically want an advisor who studies something close to what you want to study. If that person is overrun with applicants and current grad students, you probably don’t stand much of a chance at being admitted. If that person wants to supervise grad students but never gets any applicants, you might be admitted despite having credentials that are well below the average stats for the program or university as a whole.  That can be true for any field of study, just picked areas that seemed potentially relevant to you. 

Finally, there are often different admissions standards for online versus in-person degrees, even for the same degree at the same university.  Some online degrees are much more selective than their on-campus equivalents, some are about the same, and some have easier admissions standards. 

TLDR; maybe(?), it depends.

[ashkir]

Graduate school is more about specializing into a career or academic choice. What would you like to specialize in? Do you want to specialize in science, math, business, education, healthcare, computer science? Now, what branch of that specialization do you want to specialize in? Education for example you can do leadership, teaching, STEM teaching, disability services, and more.

Top 100 is very subjective. There are over 4,000 universities in the United States, and over 1,000 offer grad studies. There's over 25,000 in the world. For example there's less than 40 DHA programs in the world, so they're all top 100.

Like people think Harvard is top 10, but in engineering it's only 23! But, Purdue is #3!

I'd recommend sitting down and carefully reviewing what you liked a lot in your undergraduate degree. Think about your career, and what would make you happy. Graduate school is an expensive, and a dedicated step. Graduate school will make your undergraduate feel like primary school again.

[bjcheung77]

@defmo, keep working towards finishing the SNHU degree first. You'll get an idea of what you want to do when you're done, but it's good you're looking at grad school already... You just need to decide if you want to go with Public/State institutions, Private Non-Profit and decide the degree major at the Masters level. It's relatively easy looking for schools, it's getting in that is a bit harder... When you know your next major, you can break it down to a short list of institutions, I usually recommend the ones that are on MOOC providers such as Cousera/Edx because these are higher ranked partners that provide a discounted degree than the butt-in-seat offerings.

[Vle045]

Top 100 according to whom? According to Poets & Quants, I’m in a top 10 online MBA program. There’s also lists where they aren’t ranked at all. Another group might consider the same program to be garbage. It’s all so subjective.

[ss20ts]

Top 100 according to whom? According to Poets & Quants, I’m in a top 10 online MBA program.  There’s also lists where they aren’t ranked at all.  Another group might consider the same program to be garbage. It’s all so subjective.

Seems like every college would at some point rank in some top 100 list. There's a list for everything these days and they constantly are publishing new lists. I wouldn't be surprised to find a list of top 100 colleges for wearing blue underwear.

[sanantone]

I'm not going to be obtuse. We know which rankings are taken seriously and which aren't. However, I will note that there are rankings within a country, global rankings, and rankings for each field. For most people, the ranking within a particular field would be most relevant.

[ss20ts]

I'm not going to be obtuse. We know which rankings are taken seriously and which aren't. However, I will note that there are rankings within a country, global rankings, and rankings for each field. For most people, the ranking within a particular field would be most relevant.

There are so many different rankings from various sources for even degrees as basic as a straight MBA without any concentrations or specializations. Rankings according to who is important because everyone and their grandma writes these lists nonstop today.

[sanantone]

I'm not going to be obtuse. We know which rankings are taken seriously and which aren't. However, I will note that there are rankings within a country, global rankings, and rankings for each field. For most people, the ranking within a particular field would be most relevant.

There are so many different rankings from various sources for even degrees as basic as a straight MBA without any concentrations or specializations. Rankings according to who is important because everyone and their grandma writes these lists nonstop today.

Most fields don't have multiple rankings. Some of them have no rankings. Business is the one field where you'll see multiple well-known, credible rankings. Even among them, the top 50 or top 100 aren't that different. They might be shuffled around, but they're still generally considered top programs.

[Hotdogman1]

I graduated with a UMPI BABA (3.9 GPA) with around 50 Sophia credits and a bunch of other alternative credits.

Some of the “top” Universities I’ve been accepted at are:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: (Online) MSM
Boston University: (Online) MBA
Purdue University: (Online) MS in Aviation and Aerospace Management
Georgia Institute of Technology: (Online) MS in Analytics

While these are very good schools, the programs themselves aren’t tough to get into as long as you meet all the requirements and doesn’t require GRE/GMAT. I decided to go to a local state university instead.