Online grads sue USC

[sanantone]

The lawsuit isn't about ROI by paying $100K for tuition, if it was, then every school would be sued for offering English and History majors. It's about USC in-person vs online experience for payment. The tuition amount isn't relevant for the argument. Were the plaintiff(s) promised the same USC education online as they would receive in-person at the campus. From the article it appears they didn't receive the same USC education.

Paying $60k to $100k for an online master's degree isn't the norm. Hardly any college or university falls into that range of tuition. The lawsuit isn't really about quality; it's about USC misreporting the acceptance rate for its online program to U.S. News. The ranking is based on flawed data. Many would argue that U.S. News rankings don't directly measure quality; they measure reputation.

$60K to $100K is the norm for “top tier” universities. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is a very small number when looking at how many universities are in the United States.

I’d agree with your US News rankings testament…almost. If it were based solely on reputation, Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business would always be ranked #1 and #2. However, I believe in the most recent, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business was #1 while HBS was somewhere around #5.

The methodology for the online rankings is quite different from the methodology from the campus rankings. For on-campus rankings, they survey recruiters and the deans and directors of AACSB-accredited business schools. They also look at placement rates, starting salary, acceptance rate, GPA, and GRE/GMAT scores. I think one could make the argument that this is not a direct measure of quality. The more selective business schools have weeded out weak performers. 

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-gr...ethodology

The online rankings do look at factors that one could tie to quality, such as engagement, technology used to deliver courses, faculty credentials, and faculty having training to teach online. The two factors I don't think are related to quality are the opinions of academic professionals at high-ranking MBA programs and attributes of selected students. 

However, when you look at the specifics for "engagement," they don't actually measure engagement. They look at class size, deadline to complete degree, retention rate, and graduation rate. They also give extra points in the engagement category for having AACSB or ACBSP accreditation. 

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-...ethodology

Looking at the methodology for online education programs, since that is one of the programs mentioned in the lawsuit, the methodology isn't that different. They don't really measure engagement. The plaintiffs could win based on USC misreporting data, but if the primary complaint is not enough interaction with instructors, that's not something that U.S. News measures. 

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-...ethodology

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In reference to being top tier, do you mean overall top tier or top tier within a particular category? U.S. shows the out-of-state tuition rate for online programs and in-state tuition for campus programs. A lot of the top-ranked education programs are relatively cheap.

https://www.usnews.com/education/online-...n/rankings

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-sch...u-rankings