A college or university’s reputation at high-brow dinner parties appears to be a defining quality. Name drop that you spent your formative years at Yale or Cornell, Princeton or Stanford, and legions of ahs and oohs will issue from the mouths of the impressed. Inform those same conversational juggernauts that you attended, say, Arizona State and giggles and persnickers become the order of the day. Collegiate reputation, to wit, gives credence to not only one’s education, but to one’s intelligence as well — it’s not what you know, it’s where you learned it.
Enter the oft-misunderstood realm of online college education facilities. The questions perennially surrounding online college options are: Can you receive a high quality education from an online university; and secondly, will employers believe the answer to the first question is yes?
First things first: Of course students can receive a top-notch education from online universities — the faculty of an online college can be as commensurately competent as those at brick and mortar universities; and the curriculum can be just as, if not more, challenging, up to date, and retainable. There are, in fact, numerous benefits enjoyed by studying via the Internet. One of the wonderful facets of online college education is the self-discipline inspired by the program, not to mention the convenience of setting your own hours. The flexibility of schedule proves an attractive feature to adults seeking higher education compatible with the pace and timing of a strenuous workweek. Still, despite these advantages, online colleges suffers from problems.
Online colleges are plagued by regional accreditation. Accreditation comes in a variety of forms and organizations, voluntary organizations like Central States Consortium of Colleges and Schools (the U.S. Department of Education defines all accreditation as a voluntary procedure). Online college education providers routinely finagle some sort of state-wide or international accreditation, not necessarily from dubious sources or anything, but not from the correct governmental agencies (those employed by the U.S. Department of Education). The problem is that without official regional accreditation, online education participants cannot apply governmental loans to tuition costs, making attending an online university a go-it-alone, more expensive experience.
However, a large number of established universities are following the lead of online education programs and turning to the Internet to engage older or more time-restrained students. Lectures, reading materials, study guides, and even tests are meeting, head-on, the wave of the future and being set into HTML format, to the exuberance of some and the head-wagging of others. Still, the easily answerable question remains: Does the quality of education invariably falter when coded for consumption over the Internet? Answer: Of course not. In essence, with regards to online education, students are receiving the selfsame information as before, just in a different form.
Online college education still suffers detractions (most notably the absence of late night bacchanalias) in the form of governmental funding and accreditation, but for those without the resources or time to engage in a brick and mortar university’s four–year, on-location curriculum, online education remains an excellent tool for learning. Just avoid name dropping it at dinner parties.
By Jean-Pierre Lacrampe