Is there still a stigma against online degrees? According to a new poll by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the answer is, well, corporate human resource managers can’t seem to make up their minds.

49% of HR managers interviewed by SHRM said they look less favorably on online degrees than traditional degrees. But the answers they gave to follow-up questions didn’t seem to back up that viewpoint. 79% said their companies had hired job applicants with an online degree in the past year, and a majority said they see individual online courses as being just as good as classroom courses. They also generally agreed that their view of online schools is better than it was five years ago.

The one solid fact to emerge from the survey seems to be that companies look very closely at whether or not a job applicant’s degree comes from an accredited school or not. That holds true regardless of whether the applicant went to a distance learning or a brick and mortar school.

Of course, it’s not clear whether any of this really impacts job seekers who got their degrees online. While human resource surveys are often cited as proving the value (or lack of value) of online degrees, the fact is that HR managers are not terribly important in the hiring process. What they often do is simply go through responses to a job ad and pass on resumes to department managers who have the real power to hire or not hire. Given that most HR folks admit – in this recent survey and others – that they find it very hard to tell from looking at resumes which degrees were earned online and which were not, it’s not clear how any reservations they might have about the distance learning would actually impact the real-world hiring process.

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/10/26/2356614/stigma-against-online-degrees.html