by Jayden Harlow

Created on: April 24, 2008

While online college degree programs have certainly taken some knocks in the court of public opinion over the past few years, I believe that a college degree obtained online can be helpful to a career if approached strategically. Such a degree is most beneficial to a student already working in his or her chosen field, who needs an associate's or bachelor's degree in order to advance. Although it is possible to obtain a master's degree online, doing so is of questionable value at the present time.

To understand how an online degree can and can't help you, it's important to understand how degrees in general are valued in the business world. I think we can all appreciate that a Harvard business degree is held in higher esteem than one from UCLA, and the UCLA degree in turn would be more well regarded than one obtained at a lesser known school, and so on down the line. But why is this? Essentially, it is because over time businesses have come to see that the Harvard graduates they hired generally did work of a higher quality than a UCLA graduate, who generally did better work than a graduate from another school, and so on. This is partly due to the quality of the students the school admits and partly due to the education provided and the graduation standards that are set. A good school is one that consistently turns out valuable employees, and the university's reputation builds with each successful hire.

Unfortunately, the opposite can also be true, and this is the snare online programs have fallen into. If a company hires a candidate with an online degree and that candidate does not do well, the company will be hesitant to hire another graduate from the same school again. If the company hires a number of candidates with online degrees and none of the hires are particularly successful, the company is unlikely to want to hire anyone with that type of degree. While it may seem at first glance that the negative reputation online programs currently have in the business world must be purely a result of poor quality teaching in these programs, the reality is not quite so simple. Just as Harvard has developed its reputation in part on the quality of student it accepts, online programs have grown their reputations on a similar foundation. Many online programs will enroll any student with a high school diploma or GED, and therein lies part of the problem. An open door policy may seem attractive when you are first choosing a program, but it can harm you once you've graduated.

While

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