Here’s an intersting study by PayScale, a career website. It compares the earnings right after graduation and mid-career earnings of graduates from various state universities.

Methodology Annual pay for Bachelors graduates without higher degrees. Typical starting graduates have 3 years of experience; mid-career have 15.5 years. See full methodology for more.

My one question about the validity of this is: did the California schools do so well because they’re in a state with lots of high-paying jobs, and their grads tend to stay there after finishing school? The next tier of schools on the list are almost all in affluent northeastern states. Anyway, it’s a good tool for comparison, as it compares specific branches of state schools against each other. To see the complete list a visit PayScale

We came across this list from a little earlier this year of one Economist writer’s view of the ten best distance learning MBA’s. Given that The Economist is a European publication, it should come as little surprise that several of the schools listed here are European institutions you may never have heard of. The only two American schools to make the list are the Thunderbird School of Global Management and the Warrington College of Business of the University of Florida, neither of which are exactly household names here in the U.S. There are several pages linked to this article explaining the method of this survey, though I’m afraid I was left a bit confused by them. Nonetheless, it’s an unusual list worth checking out for any prospective online MBA student. See the list here

The Sloan Consortium is probably the most respected academic group in the online education field. They just released the list of top online learning award winners for this year, and it’s interesting that very few of them are among the schools that spend a ton of money in marketing to attract students. As there’s little explanation on Sloan’s website of exactly why each of these people were chosen, I hope to find out more and fill you in on another blog post soon.  For the moment, though, the list of winners includes Michelle Pacansky-Brock of Sierra College, for “Excellence in Online Teaching,” Maryland Online, for “Excellence in Faculty Development for Online Teaching” and both St. Petersburg College and Stevens Institute of Technology for the “Most Outstanding Online Teaching and Learning Program.”

Alot of parents hope and pray each year that their kids graduating from high school will take a shine to one of America’s state universities. Who can blame them? Four years of study at a gold-plated private school like Boston University can cost almost $200,000. Imagine what it’s like to have three kids heading in that direction!

State universities, in contrast, can cost under $13,000 per year, at least for in-state students. But it’s not easy to know how good the school system is in your state. Government funding goes up and down over time, and some schools that aren’t well-known make big improvements in certain academic departments. Also, some state schools that are famous for having great basketball teams don’t necessarily score when it comes to producing a quality education.

Here’s an interesting article on MSN, covering Kiplinger’s list of the best public colleges and universities in the U.S. It’s little surprise that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is #1, but there are other schools near the top of the list that are a bit more unexpected.
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state universities

We just love the unending broo-ha-ha. About U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of schools of higher education. The big secret is that every school likes to complain about them, but nobody wants to mess with them because foreign students coming to school in the U.S. are a hugely important market, and they live and die my the magazine’s rankings.
Read more about the tepid protests of rankings by American college administrators

The truth is that many of the best known colleges and universities have been a little slower to embrace online learning than their smaller counterparts. Faculty resistance to anything that threatens the traditional classroom environment has been one blockade (even though many top professors actually have adjuncts or grad students teaching their classes for them). The fear of damaging a school’s name with an online failure - like the one Columbia University had - has also held back some of the bigger name schools. But now, Harvard, Duke, MIT, Johns Hopkins and other gold-plated names are slowly moving into the distance learning fray.
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Online education is a blessing to many students who can’t take a degree program at a traditional college. But it’s also a huge business that’s attracted lots of scam artists on the internet. When you’re looking for an online degree you want to make sure the school you go to is accredited (read our article on accreditation at http://www.successdegrees.com/online-accredited-courses.html ) and that the program is run by people with experience in e-learning. A new online guide called directoryofschools.com has just come out to help you weed out the fake degree program when you’re searching for a school online.
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Parents put a tremendous focus on college rankings in U.S. News & World Report and other publications when selecting a school for their kid, or just trying to figure out where their kid can get accepted. But colleges and universities have been grumbling for a long time that U.S. News’ rankings aren’t very trustworthy. The latest salvo in this battle is an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by the president of Sarah Lawrence College, who says that, because her school no longer looks at SAT scores in considering admissions (a growing trend, particularly at the higher-quality private schools), U.S. News has simply made up fake numbers about the quality of Sarah Lawrence’s student body. This fight is likely to intensify.
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