Become a Teacher: Beware Online Bachelor Degrees
Online Bachelor degree programs, and their Bachelor degree holders, often suffer from a poor educational reputation. Is this bad reputation justified? Unfortunately we have concluded the answer is yes.
Online vs. Bricks-and-Mortar
These three benefits of a Bachelor degree (perseverance, an open mind, and people skills) are important reasons many employers require a Bachelor degree. While one might be able to receive the open-minded related benefits anywhere, the other two benefits-people skills and perseverance-are far better attained at a bricks-and-mortar college where you have to physically go to class and physically interact with people, than at an online college. For this reason, in our experience with hiring schools and also in talking to recruiters of other industries and careers besides education, we have found that all things being equal, employers will always favor a job candidate who has been to a physical standing college, rather than an online college.
Online Extensions of Physical Universities
Sometimes physical colleges or universities have distance learning extensions (like the University of Maryland). Attending a school like this and participating in the distance learning extension in addition to a physical, live class is acceptable, as long as your degree comes from the original university, and not a distance learning or online offshoot. Employers seem ok with such colleges as long as the physical college came before the online college.
Solutions for Working Adults
We have found that online colleges have recently tried to make online education extremely in vogue and make it sound like the perfect solution for the working adult. But unfortunately more and more online-only Bachelors students are finding there is not gold at the end of the online college rainbow. So what are the alternatives for a working adult? Fortunately there are many night classes and other types of arrangements possible for a Bachelor degree, without receiving the degree from an online college. For example, a student could attend a school which permits some classes to be done online, or stretch your degree out several years, or start at a more flexible community college and transfer to a University. Non-traditional students of all ages are now common at universities and we encourage all ages and levels of adults to return to college for their Bachelor degree, just not an online college, or a few years later you might find yourself long on student loan debt but short on job opportunities.
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