The Open University - Liberal Arts degree (only £6,192 GBP! fully online)

[dfrecore]

I also suspect many American employers might look down on an applicant with a foreign, online degree from something called “the Open University”, never mind the quality of instruction.

Open University has been around forever, is highly respected, and is the largest university in the UK. It's also regionally accredited in the US. 

And not for nothing, but it sounds a whole lot better than "University of the People" on one's résumé. Might as well just say you graduated from The School of Hard Knocks.

4. My post was about perception.  A quick web search will reveal hundreds of articles about the perceptions and biases of hiring managers. Most are familiar elite universities and a surprisingly small number of universities in their geographical area. It is probably safe to assume that most hiring managers in the United States will have heard of Oxford and Cambridge, perhaps universities like St Andrews and some of the more prominent institutions in (or formerly in) the University of London, like Imperial, LSE, or UCL.  Realistically, they will not know the difference between Manchester and Westminster.  “Open” education in the United States basically means community college. I would not want to have that perception associated with my degree. And I didn’t say that you should go to the University of the People rather than Open. Again, please don’t put words into people’s mouths.  Which will play better with a hiring manager, assuming they know nothing about the schools (and don’t have the time or interest to educate themselves), a degree from a branch campus of a state’s flagship university (like UMPI), a regional state university/public college (like TESU or COSC), or a foreign university that the hiring manager will likely think is a glorified community college?

I think 50 years is a fair amount of time to exist. And just because you assume hiring managers only know elite institutions doesn't mean it's true. In my personal opinion, hiring managers would think Charter Oak State College is a glorified community college and Thomas Edison State University is on par with University of Phoenix. I'd also think no one who doesn't read this board has even heard of TESU or COSC. I could be wrong. Which is why I don't present my opinion as fact, or say it's "safe to assume" everyone shares my perception. It's just that... my perception.

Anyway, I've spent enough time defending a long-respected university against baseless assumptions. There are more and better higher education institutions in the world than those popular on this board. And I don't mean the ones that give out Groupons.

So, hiring managers, like everyone else, will never have heard of most colleges in the US.  They will go to the website to see if it's accredited, MAYBE check to see if it's RA (some don't even know the difference between NA and RA), and that will be it.  There will be no judgement in most cases, because they either don't know, don't care, or both.  Companies in general just don't care where you went to school - and many don't even care what your degree is in.

Most people just don't know many schools.  There are 4,000+ in the US, and so there's no way to know most.  People know a few local schools, some big name schools, and that's about it.  When I lived in CA, there were 23 CSU schools and 9 UC schools.  Nobody could actually name them all.  I didn't even know one existed until a friend asked me about it (well there's a CSU Channel Islands! Who knew?!?). I'll bet a hiring manager in San Diego could probably list 5 public universities in CA.  San Diego State, CSU San Marcos, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Berkeley...and then maybe a few privates like Point Loma, Univ of San Diego, and USC.  Stanford.  If you asked them to name the state/university schools in nearby states, you'd get some blank stares (MAYBE UNLV if they are basketball fans - maybe.  Probably Arizona State.).  The point is, you'll know some, but not many, and even then it's a crapshoot ("oh, you went to Sac State - my best friend went there!" - things like that).

In general you should go to a local school if possible (although once you move, it's game over), a big-name school, or a no-name school, because you either want them to know the school, or you don't - either is fine.  What you don't want is a school with a bad rep.  But other than that, in most industries, it just does not matter.

I graduated from TESU.  I've applied for jobs, gone on interviews, and exactly nobody has asked me about the school. Zero.