I find it hard to understand what their costs are. Doing a quick search for university of pheonix, their tuition is about 10k a year. That's about as much as my local state university and way more than my local state community college. With no campus, no labratories, no clubs what the hell is all that money going to?
But as for the question, I've always heard that you get out of them what you put into them. I had a friend do an online course in .net programming, got a job making 25 dollars an hour as soon as he graduated, and was fired six months later because he clearly had no idea what the hell he was doing. He passed the tests, got his diplomas but apparently when put into an actual working environment he didn't know anything about what it is he had actually just done in online tests. Being able to be on campus, make connections and there is the social pressure to actually succeed, and know what the hell you're doing. At least if you care about going to school and not just drinking and being stupid. I could picture taking a purely online course as essentially devolving into a game where all I have to do is complete the quiz, and as long as I test well it doesn't matter if I understand what the hell I'm doing or not. But I guess that can be true on a campus. Hmmm, I think it might just be too early to tell. Online universities are fairly new, ultimately the job market with dictate whether they are worth it. I still feel intuitively like it's better to actually be in a class interacting with students and proffessors though.
You can find me on facebook as Markus Van Rijn, if you friend me just mention you're from VGchartz and who you are here.
