Will Rogers once said that a difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries. And with the disparities in rankings among those who rate online MBA programs, it’s obvious that Rogers never read what online education evaluators thought either. Indeed, only a few years ago most people would tell you that the idea of spending time and money on an online MBA program was a waste, akin only to earning your degree from a program on the back of a matchbook. The opinion went further when you consider the abundance of excellent MBA programs, why invest in an online education? And what’s with the huge differences in rankings among online MBA programs?
Online MBAs: Coming of Age
Despite the results of several national studies that compare the results obtained from an online education versus one from a traditional classroom setting, there are still a number of experts who consider online educations a waste of time. In most cases this presents a dilemma: If students, whether online or in a classroom are fed the same information, just one receiving it over a wire, what could be different–and therefor inferior–from an online method?
Over the past few years, several organizations, including one of the most reputable, US News and World Reports, have attempted to systematically rank online degree programs, MBAs among them, to determine a ranking score. Although the publication was able to determine rankings, many critics pointed to serious flaws in the criterion for judgment saying that the results created more questions that it presented answers. One such glaring flaw is how one online MBA program can score higher than its unranked on-campus counterpart.
Good, Better, and Best
Some organizations have attempted to evade the controversies entirely by changing their rating systems entirely, such as the staff of The Economist, which decided to change its usual rating system to individual scores of excellent, good, average or poor. The publication already has a reputation for downplaying the quality of distance learning programs, however they are delivered.
Anyone who attempts to use these rankings when selecting an online program would do well to make sure of the criterion for these programs, as well as their sources, since some groups that purport to give rankings for online degree programs are nothing more than “link farms,” which instead of giving you objective information, instead direct queries to school subscriber websites.
At the Top
In the past few years it has fallen to institutions such as University of Phoenix, Capella, Kaplan, and others to offer online as well as classroom programs for those who for whatever reason are unable to get into more reputable programs. This is a questionable course of action since even the most reputable colleges and universities in the country are also offering these online MBA programs. Why, they reason, settle for less than the best when the best are so easy to access?
The truth is, the higher you go among rankings for business schools, the better the chances are that that institution offers an online option to their programs. Some of these are a blend of online and residential programs, but whatever a student desires, chances are good that there is a program to fit their needs.