Is it possible to 'hide' a degree?

[bellbaby]

I''m 46 too Jennifer! In 1988 when I registered for classes at my college, we actually went into a large room and all of the teachers stood in front of tables, and you walked around and signed up for classes. It was so intimidating, and so chaotic, and the Seniors, Juniors and Sophomores had gone in already, so we got the leftovers! Fun times.

I'm another "class of '88."

Also, what I was told is you have to reveal all college coursework if you want financial aide.

[Life Long Learning]

99% of the time agree with you, but I disagree! I am older than you!

Progress does reverse!:ack:

The Big 3 and are all doing away with 100% testing out and or being able to transfer 100% of the credits.:puke: They are being progressively regressive!:mad:

Since I'm 46, I'm old enough to tell you that technology doesn't stop- and progress doesn't reverse. .

[jwatson1]

There is no stigma with online degrees. I don't know where you got that silly idea. That is, if your "online" degree is from a legitimate, fully regionally accredited university. Maybe you're thinking of "degree mills" which are non-accredited fake universities basically charging for an unofficial graduation diploma.

Make sure your online university is Regionally Accredited. It MUST be accredited from one of the following (the official list):
https://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/agencies.aspx

If your online degree is not regionally accredited, it won't do much for you. But if it is regionally accredited, it makes no difference whether it was online or in person. The world is changing. Millions of people now get their degrees online, and even Ivy League colleges have online programs, including Columbia and Harvard.

Nowadays, online degrees allow people to take degrees at large, respected universities without having to worry about quitting their job or relocating to another state. Online degrees are 100% as respectable as physical, in-person degrees.

Not only that, but if your university has a physical campus, there will be no way for anyone to know whether you took the classes online or traditionally. It makes no difference. You can use the online degree that is regionally accredited for any grad program, job, or whatever you could use a college degree for.

[dfrecore]

99% of the time agree with you, but I disagree! I am older than you!

Progress does reverse!:ack:

The Big 3 and are all doing away with 100% testing out and or being able to transfer 100% of the credits.:puke: They are being progressively regressive!:mad:

Yes, you can't transfer in 100% of the credits, but you can still test out of 114/117 credits. Requiring a single course taken there is not insane. I think that they did this because at other schools (most of our UC and CSU system schools here in CA are this way), you now have to take a capstone course. ALL schools are starting to do this. The Big 3 cannot go completely against the tidal wave of there other 9 million college in the US, or else it would be obvious that their degrees weren't up to snuff. So, they've decided, one by one, to go the way of the crowd. It is STILL cheaper and faster than any other college except the competency-based models. They still accept 97.5% of a degree being transferred in - look for another school that will do that. You can still get a bachelor's degree for less than $7500 starting from scratch (and even less if you can utilize Study.com scholarships, affiliate memberships, SL coupons, and take multiple courses from Study.com and SL in a month). This is just crazy cheap! It's almost the same price as our CSU-system schools here in CA were 29 years ago (I paid about $1500/yr at SJSU). It's roughly the cost of a single year there now.

I'm certainly not complaining, even if it's not perfect.

[sanantone]

There is no stigma with online degrees. I don't know where you got that silly idea. That is, if your "online" degree is from a legitimate, fully regionally accredited university. Maybe you're thinking of "degree mills" which are non-accredited fake universities basically charging for an unofficial graduation diploma.

Make sure your online university is Regionally Accredited. It MUST be accredited from one of the following (the official list):
https://ope.ed.gov/accreditation/agencies.aspx

If your online degree is not regionally accredited, it won't do much for you. But if it is regionally accredited, it makes no difference whether it was online or in person. The world is changing. Millions of people now get their degrees online, and even Ivy League colleges have online programs, including Columbia and Harvard.

Nowadays, online degrees allow people to take degrees at large, respected universities without having to worry about quitting their job or relocating to another state. Online degrees are 100% as respectable as physical, in-person degrees.

Not only that, but if your university has a physical campus, there will be no way for anyone to know whether you took the classes online or traditionally. It makes no difference. You can use the online degree that is regionally accredited for any grad program, job, or whatever you could use a college degree for.

There is a stigma with certain types of accredited schools i.e. ITT Tech, University of Phoenix, Everest, and Devry. ITT Tech shut down, but many people have the misfortune of having their degrees. We have a member here who will not interview anyone who attended an expensive for-profit. To him, overpaying for a degree at a low-quality school is a sign of the person's intelligence.

[KenJ]

Yes, correspondence schools have been around for at least 100 years. Penn Foster is one of the oldest ones. Distance learning includes courses by mail, email, satellite, television, video, online, and any other method that doesn't require you to be in the classroom.

The point is, I never took one course by correspondence, but the catch-all phrase for non-traditional learning was "correspondence degree." Also, even though my degree was good enough to get a commission in the Army, it was not looked highly upon in the civilian world. There was definitely a stigma attached to it back then. It was not a common thing to have a degree from a "non-traditional" source. There were no "how to do it" guides. There were no CLEP study guide books. You got your hands on a textbook, read it, did the twenty question sample test and hoped for the best on test day. I wish we had the resources that are available today and I'm glad that non-traditional education doesn't have the stigma that it had at one time. Basically, all we had were the two page "study guides" that CLEP and DANTES give out. People were really sh*tty about you having to be "in the seat" back then.

[cookderosa]

99% of the time agree with you, but I disagree! I am older than you!

Progress does reverse!:ack:

The Big 3 and are all doing away with 100% testing out and or being able to transfer 100% of the credits.:puke: They are being progressively regressive!:mad:

Not at all - just because they're changing their residency, that doesn't mean they're using less technology. They just want more cash LOL

[SolarKat]

There is a stigma with certain types of accredited schools i.e. ITT Tech, University of Phoenix, Everest, and Devry. ITT Tech shut down, but many people have the misfortune of having their degrees. We have a member here who will not interview anyone who attended an expensive for-profit. To him, overpaying for a degree at a low-quality school is a sign of the person's intelligence.

Piggy-backing off this, I think you need to know *your* market. In the Boston area, there are loads of brick & mortar universities packed in & around the city. I don't think I'd encourage a young person in this area to do an online degree in STEM (the market that I'm most familiar with)...and I'd be cautious about any field. The local students spend time building projects/portfolios, doing local internships/co-ops/industry events, and get connected by their schools' career services departments. These interactions with industry are really important to career development for a new grad around here. And even then, it's super competitive. I've heard flat-out from managers at Amazon Robotics, BAE, Raytheon, and others that they would be very skeptical of anyone coming in with "just a piece of paper" and nothing substantive behind it. There's a sort of "snob" factor around here from the ground up, based upon where you've graduated, as well as industry pressure for kids to come in with job skills, like knowing bench equipment, that often is overlooked by online STEM degree programs. The student has to make a determined, independent effort to build those skills outside of (and in addition to) the online course requirements. (And the student must realize that they *need* those skills...which is tough if they have no exposure beyond a text and an online classroom.)

I think the bigger hurdle to overcome is not the "online degree" part, it's that these skills on-the-ground get overlooked in an alternative-learning format. For example, testing out of a tech writing class will give quick credits, but it doesn't develop the tech writing *skill*. (I took "Advanced Technical Writing" at Study.com. I wrote a total of 800 words. I passed with flying colors, but my experience with the various tech docs was unchanged.) This is the underlying problem of distance/test-out ed, I think. The student has to know...well...what it is they don't know, and then go get the knowledge/skill some other way.

So yes, I think in *certain* markets and certain geographic areas, distance ed has disadvantages, sometimes severe disadvantages, in the job market, particularly for young people just starting a career, and possibly for older workers making a major career change. It's something to be examined carefully prior to sinking a load of cash into a program.

[sarg123]

I agree with SolarKat. There are so many variables to this that it is impossible to make a blanket statement of any sort about any degrees.

Generally speaking, the more prestigious the university, the better your degree. Obviously a degree from an Ivy League is worth a lot more than a degree from a "regular" college. I think the assumption on this forum, however, is that the Ivy League colleges are not on the table, so we'll take them out of the equation for now. A lot depends on your major, so that's part of the equation as well. There are so many degrees from B&M universities that are pretty much useless for finding a job - psychology, sociology, and history are three concentrations that come off the top of my head. So, in those fields, it really doesn't matter where you got your bachelor's. In general, if you're planning on continuing to graduate school, it doesn't either matter too much where your bachelor's is from - so that's another plus for the big three.

It's really best to do your research before you make a decision about this - as sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn't.

Personally, I'm hoping that in my case it won't matter too much. I'm hoping to get my degree in Business/Accounting through TESU - I am doing this because, at my age, and with kids/job and other responsibilities, this is the only option that is really available for me. Also, since I am not looking for the traditional anyway, (I'm planning to start working only part-time) it may not matter too much where I got my degree. But I think that there is definitely a bias against online degrees in general, and in my area in particular, so it may work against me once I start looking for a job. A lot will depend on the attitude of the person doing the hiring, I guess.

As for cost... yes, a degree from the big three is really inexpensive, but depending on many factors, a degree through a regular college does not necessarily cost that much either. There are many low cost options such as community colleges, there is FAFSA, and in my state there is TAG, in NY I think it's called TAP, in NJ they have the NJ Stars program, and many colleges give generous scholarships.

Someone mentioned this earlier, but it's worth repeating - if you get into Phi Theta Kappa from community college, you can get very generous transfer scholarships. You don't have to be a genius to get this - community colleges are generally geared toward the average person, so if you are reasonably intelligent, take school seriously and do homework, and study for tests, I think it's not that hard to get. I just applied to an online four year college - I found that I would be able to get a bachelor's degree practically for free! It was really tempting, but I decided I'd rather finish faster and pay a bit more money. I think it will end up costing me about $3500 to finish up with TESU - I'm trying to tell myself that that's really not so much for a degree, but it's $3500 more than I would have to pay if I went to the online college!

Also, as SolarKat mentioned, you are just not going to get the same skill set from the "testing out" method. In the "relatively easy" community college that I just went to, a paper was required for EVERY class, including chemistry. You also had to take some kind of math - and my classes were much harder than ALEKS (you were also actually graded, as opposed to just needing a 70%). It seems like it is possible to graduate from any of the "big three" without EVER having to write a paper. Look, I know that you really don't need that skill for real life (for most people), but if someone like that goes to a regular graduate school, they will be in over their head.

There are SO many scenarios where a big three college degree is a great option - but to say that it's exactly the same as a B&M degree... I would say that really, really depends on what you need the degree for.

[dfrecore]

I agree with SolarKat. There are so many variables to this that it is impossible to make a blanket statement of any sort about any degrees.

Generally speaking, the more prestigious the university, the better your degree. Obviously a degree from an Ivy League is worth a lot more than a degree from a "regular" college.

There are SO many scenarios where a big three college degree is a great option - but to say that it's exactly the same as a B&M degree... I would say that really, really depends on what you need the degree for.

To your first point, I'd like to give you this statistic: only 30% of American-born CEO's of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 attended an elite college. Which means that the other 70% did NOT get an ivy league degree, and still managed to make something of themselves. Wait, what? That can't be possible! Of course it can. There are only a few ivy league schools, and obviously everyone who becomes successful in this country couldn't possibly go there. There would not be very many successful businesses in this country if we had to count on Ivy Leaguers to get us there. And if you'd like to know who some famous successful people are who do not even have a college degree, you can find plenty of those, including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Dave Thomas (Wendy's), David Green (Hobby Lobby), Larry Ellison (Oracle), Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, Wolfgang Puck, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, 10 other presidents...the list goes on.

To your second point (actually the last point in your full post): I don't think anyone here said they the degrees were "exactly the same." Many times on this forum, we like to point out that a degree from one of the Big 3 is not always the answer to a problem. Many of us discourage younger kids from going here straight out of high school. Many of us recommend other options, and mention internships and contacts that you just can't get through the Big 3.