| The_vagabond7 said: 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 their 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. |
Yes, it can become a "game" to just do as little as possible, but the exact same can be said about going to school on campus. As accountants, my parents have seen 100's of applicants for accounting jobs where the people have 4 year (on campus) degrees. They don't have the faintest clue what the hell they are doing in regards to accounting. Simply being at a school shouldn't mean anything more in regards to whether or not somebody can apply it. Having a good teacher and applying yourself during school is what teaches you these things. And as I mentioned in my post, I had an online teacher in Econ 206 that did an extremely good job, and I learned a TON in the class because of the way he taught.
Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.
