Graduates of online colleges, such as ITT Tech, DeVry, and University of Phoenix, were you able to find a job or did employers mock your degree? Employers, would you hire someone with these degrees?

I work in education management. I'm going to address your question by saying accreditation is everything. I'm going to explain it a bit, and then I'm going to go way off the rails, and then I'm going to sew the whole thing up with a short paragraph of practical advice.

When an accreditation evaluation team visited the first school I worked at, which was for-profit, our staff came in at 6AM and left after midnight, completely at the beck and call of the evaluators. These people inspect everything, every office, every class, every file. The visit takes days. Eighteen hour days. They're flown in from all over the country; they work on contract for the accrediting organization, and are experts in their fields, often carrying PhDs, working as professors at other schools or as industry leaders. As much documentation as we could muster was collected and organized months in advance. Phone calls went out at any hour during the three-day visit if documentation for someone's faculty file was needed. If the evaluators came up with enough "findings," such as teachers lying about their work experience, shady enrollment practices, or faculty development activities going unfinished, the school's accreditation would have been in jeopardy. Do poorly on a follow-up review, and you could lose it. Lose it, and you lose the ability to offer Federal student aid. No Federal aid, and your potential student body shrinks, or maybe disappears.

There's national accreditation, and regional accreditation. Regional accreditation applies to what you would think of as a traditional college experience. National accreditation comes into play when a degree program is hard to traditionally quantify, such as accelerated learning, online courses, and trade schools. There's a stigma on national accreditation because it goes hand-in-hand with for-profit colleges, and a few for-profit colleges are diploma mills. I've seen regionally accredited schools which have been god-awful, with a revolving door on the president's office, accreditation constantly teetering on the brink. I've met and dealt with evaluators on both sides; same sort of people (sometimes literally the same people), same attitudes, same checklists. Everyone's just preening over the brown grass on their side of the fence. Past the threshold of being certified by a respectable accrediting body, it's all bureaucratic nonsense.

You know what else I've seen? College applicants with high school diplomas who can't read. Kids who can memorize answers, but not think critically. Socially inept thirty-year-olds who never outgrew anime but don't have any way to associate with other fans aside from being enrolled in college. Fully-grown adults who don't understand that deodorant is not a substitute for bathing. Fully-grown adults who bring their mommy to SAP hearings. And, most of all, students who only signed up because their parents told them to.

I've seen loans from the Department of Education at close to ten percent interest. Folks I graduated college with pay between seven and ten thousand dollars in interest per year on their student loans, but can only deduct $2500 come tax time.

And last year I saw a public school library which still has 486 computers in use.

The whole US education system is a horror show, but if you need to get a degree for some reason, go to community college first. Do well, acquire scholarships, and transfer up to a state school. Nationally accredited institutions, like online colleges, have a stigma that they just can't shake.

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