Wednesday 11 April 2012

Cost effectiveness of an online degree

There are millions of people around the globe who look forward to develop their careers as professionals through advanced education in the field of management. Most people who are looking for online colleges are doing so for time constraints and flexibility of schedule. For example, the business class studying at a "brick and mortar" university is only offered courses at 2pm on Monday-Wednesday-Friday. How can you participate in this course if you are working full time? Compare this to a OLWA University course, where a professor gives you an assignment to complete via email and the class is held as a 24/7 discussion board. With online universities, you are offered much more flexibility with your time which may help you to save money, especially if you are working while attending school.

In the current economy, cost is often a big factor. You don't want to spend a lot of money on your education if you don't have to. Fortunately, there are inexpensive accredited online colleges and universities. Indeed, as a student, you want the most cost-effective degree programs which strike a balance between low-cost tuition and high quality education with accreditation. For this purpose, you might have to spend several hours in order to evaluate the prospects of the online degrees. You would have to gauge the best match against your interest against the university's offerings. Ultimately, what you can get is a degree that helps you to stand out from the crowd as you aspire to go further ahead than your counterparts.

The traditional universities are bound by a lot of factors that makes their costs relatively higher than the online counterparts. They have to fulfill the costs of the building, maintenance, staff, and many other miscellaneous costs. Moreover, the students have to travel to their campuses, incurring an extra bunch of fuel expenses. Online students are devoid of such costs most of the times and hence find it feasible to afford their education on the go.

In my case, I wanted to pursue an MBA degree with majors in Marketing. As a marketing graduate, I understood that marketing has become an important and integral part of any business, and more and more companies are aligning their business processes to become more customer friendly, in order to succeed in this highly competitive marketplace. Though there are many professionals who have good experience in the marketing field, but may lack a professional qualification on their resume. I was amongst those, and an online MBA in marketing was the best education that could help me boost my career by getting qualified for higher positions within the organization or elsewhere. Thus, I enrolled at an online university where I completed my entire master's program in as low as $9000- less than half of the cost that I could have paid at any brick and mortar school! This made the entire process feasible for me as a masters student and helped me progress quickly on the career ladder at the same time.
Today, I am the president of the company with over three hundred brands running successfully under my domain. I have found my decision extremely rewarding, and would recommend all my fellows to do the same.

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