Schools are now offering completion degrees to business students in a very wide variety of areas, from marketing to finance, and in targeted business categories like heath care. Before you are ready to move on to an MBA, here’s a list of some of the top schools offering bachelor’s business completion degrees that can give you real business expertise.
Degree Completion Blog
Drexel’s New Online Program Allows Bachelor Degree Students To Complete A Master’s Degree in IT
Philadelphia-based Drexel University has announced a cool-sounding new degree completion program for students who want an MS in Information Technology online. The program, designed for adult learners who cannot get to a campus for traditional classes, is being offered 100% online. It is a “bachelor’s to master’s” completion program, designed so students can complete a masters in Information Systems, Library and Information Science or Software Engineering. The student can actually begin working on a masters degree while still taking classes toward his or her bachelor’s degree.
Southern Regional Board To Make A Push On Degree Completion Programs
The latest group to make a move on delivering completion degrees to adults who have taken some college classes but never obtained a degree is the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), according to the Tennessee state higher education commission’s website. While the program is not yet ready for launch, a portal called “theadultlearner.org” is being built, which offers students the ability to compare course options across many schools. The portal will not actually deliver online classes, but is intented to serve as a “clearinghouse” that provides adult learners with a large volume of dependable information on how they can complete bachelor’s and associate’s degrees, as well as certificate programs. More on the program here.
Don’t Expect State Universities To Solve America’s Degree Completion Problems
Suddenly, it seems, governors and state university presidents are all talking about American adults who’ve taken some college courses but never finished a degree. Even legislators in Washington are buzzing about a huge need for “completion programs” to help such incomplete learners get the degrees they need. All parties seem to point instinctively to public universities as the best solution to the problem. But history doesn’t indicate that state schools will succeed.
The numbers certainly look compelling. According to the Lumina Foundation, a private philanthropy, there are 37 million adults between the age of 25 and 65 in the U.S. who have gone to college but never earned any kind of degree. Colorado governor Bill Ritter recently said his state has 600,000 such people, while the Arizona Board of Regents has announced that four out of five high school graduates in the state do not have a college degree six years after finishing high school. A common theme being sounded is that workers without degrees cause a big hit to American job productivity.
Many Investments
A broad mix of grants, new completion degree programs and credit transfer options (to give students who’ve taken some classes a way to apply those credits toward a full degree) are being proposed – mostly with the idea of bringing state university systems to the rescue. But while legislators and educators argue, accurately, that this is where students can get the most education at the lowest price, there’s an essential problem with the type of student who needs the help.
A back story here involves some past failures and, not surprisingly, money. For begin with, the large number of adults with unfinished degrees offers, perhaps, a subtle indictment of state colleges and universities. If they match the broader demographics in American higher education (see a very complete picture of the type of schools attended by U.S. undergrads here), the vast majority of them once took courses at a state university or public community college, but failed to complete a degree there. That irony that seems lost on those now posing state schools as a cure-all.
Hitting The For-Profits
The money part has much to do with a debate about for-profit colleges currently raging in Washington, DC. It started in early 2010, when Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chairman Tom Harkin (Dem, IA) began releasing all sorts of damning statistics about for-profit schools, and it has set the University of Phoenix and others scrambling to burnish their reputations and fight off potential new regulation. Accusations of high dropout rates, over-aggressive recruitment policies and waste of government educational aid have many in Congress saying that government education money would be better spent in state schools. And the presidents of public universities agree. That would be the expedient thing to do in an environment where most education subsidies are being slashed due to massive state budget deficits.
The problem is that the for-profits’ loss (University of Phoenix announced that enrollment would be down 40% this year) may not be the state schools’ gain. It seems likely that for-profit schools will spend the next few years in a state of transition or perhaps retreat. But it’s also true that kind of services adult learners want – online degree programs with flexible schedules, top-end websites and tech-savvy teachers – are an area where they have far surpassed the average public university.
Global Crack Up
School politics are also a key issue. The glaring example of this is the effort launched in 2008 by the University of Illinois to join the online education fray with a “global campus.” The idea was to extend the school’s quality education and well-known brand name to a vast number of “non-traditional and placebound” students, each of whom would actually get a free computer with their reasonably-priced tuition. School officials cheerfully predicted the school would be serving 70,000 plus students online through the program by 2018.
Then a firestorm of controversy erupted inside the university. Administrators found themselves in a nasty struggle with faculty members who did not necessarily believe in online education, and who saw it – and the tech-savvy (read: younger) professors it requires – as a major threat to their system of tenure. Less than three years later, the program is dead, with the University of Illinois having lost $7 million on it. In an article on insidehighered.com, the former CEO of the Illinois Global Campus, Chester Gardner, said recently “It’s over…I wish people would just leave it alone.”
Outside the for-profit world, relatively few schools have shown an appetite for jumping into adult education online. A handful of private schools, Wharton and Cornell particularly, have created state of the art online programs. But they are certificate and not full degree-granting programs.
Tough Realities
Two major charges leveled by Senator Harkin are that for-profit schools get a disproportionately large chunk of federal grant money, and that they have low completion rates (with perhaps under 50% of students who start actually getting through their degree programs). The debate about whether or not the for-profit schools deliver quality schooling seems likely to go on for some time. But however distasteful educators, legislators and perhaps even students may find the idea of making money on education, it’s possible that state schools may soon discover something the for-profit schools already know: that attracting adult learners and getting them to complete their degree programs takes a lot of work, requires some marketing expertise and costs a good deal of money.
Which Online Courses Work For Transfer Credit?
Click here for a list of Online colleges & universities that accept lots of transfer credits
Many online and offline schools say they’ll help you complete a degree by giving you transfer credits. But exactly which courses from your past they will accept transfer credits from and how many credits you’ll get for old classes at another school is a pretty murky area. You need to do some homework, in many cases, in order to get the best possible deal. Learning the details can be well worth the effort, since transferring credits from an old school can not only save you money and time, it also save you the aggravation of having to re-take a class you’ve already done.
What Credits Transfer From One College To Another?
In the words of a professor quoted on one blog, “Some schools have limits while others will shower you with transferred credit after transferred credit.” It’s common for schools that officially offer “completion degrees” to accept 60 credits (the equivalent of an average associate’s degree) from previous study toward a 120 credit bachelor degree. But some schools will take up to 90 credits in transfer and some may take even more. Here are some basics about how the process works:
Transferring General Course Credits
Bachelor degrees are designed to create a well-rounded student, and require you to take basic courses in both science and humanities, regardless whether your major is in a science or a humanities specialty – in most cases you’ll need them no matter what kind of bachelor degree you are getting from your school. These “general education” classes are usually among the first subjects you take while pursuing a bachelor degree. Standard courses you will be very likely to transfer credit for (and which you’ll probably need to have for your completion degree) include titles like these:
- English – Composition 1 or 2
- Arts & Humanities: A wide range including Music, Art History, Theater, Ethics, Literature or even Philosophy.
- Math – College Algebra or Calculus, at a 1 or 2 level.
- Social Science – Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology or an Economics course like Micro or Macroeconomics.
Keep in mind that your credit transfer will be limited by the course requirements in your new major. In other words, if your nursing or criminal justice bachelor degree requires two English courses, you won’t be able to transfer credits in from 10 writing or other English courses you took at another school. Your best shot at getting the largest number of transfer credits is to have taken a mix of courses in all these specialties.
Transferring Your Old Core Course Credits
Core courses that are specific to your major can be more difficult to transfer, but it’s definitely possible. The key is being able to match the course you took at another school exactly to a course at your new school. If you’re taking a criminal justice bachelor degree, for example, your new school may directly apply credits for an introduction to criminal justice course you took elsewhere to eliminate their own course of the same name from your curriculum.
A course on “criminology,” for example, may earn you credits toward a class that has a slightly different title like “criminal psychology.” This is generally referred to as an “equivalent transfer.” For a business major, you may be able to transfer credits for an “accounting” class to cover a requirement for an “accounting principles” or “bookkeeping” class. But that will only happen if you are able to demonstrate that the course at your old school covered essentially the same subject matter as the class you want to skip at your new school. It’s good to have a copy of the curriculum for your old course in hand when you talk to your advisor or admission counselor about the potential credit transfer.
Elective courses, which are usually the most advanced classes and may be special projects or research papers rather than classes, are the most difficult to transfer credits on.
How To Benefit From Articulation Agreements Between Schools
Your new school may have “articulation agreements” with other schools – sometimes quite a few other schools – that specify which credits can be transferred from one to another. Most of the schools that do this are state universities that have articulation agreements for students coming to them from community colleges. But there are definitely private schools that have arrangements of this type. If you happen to be coming into a completion program from a school that’s in one of these agreements, it can make it much easier to transfer a large block of credits to your new school. Quite often, articulation agreements will allow you to transfer an associate’s degree you have “lock stock and barrel” to cover half the credits for a bachelor degree program.
Minimum Grades For Transfer
Remember that most schools require a minimum grade on a class to allow you to transfer credits from it. But that minimum varies a lot from one school to another. It’s common for schools to insist that you got at least a “B” on an old course to use the credits from it, but read the small type closely in your new school’s catalogue. Some schools will accept credits for courses even if you got a “C minus” on them.
Speak Up For The Best College Transfer deal
Finally, don’t forget that the number of credits you can transfer is very much affected by how strongly you state your case with your new school. More here on how to transfer credits successfully from one school to another.