Question for Excelsior graduates

Hi, I plan on graduating from Excelsior with a bachelors degree in business finance. I've already started thinking about finding a job after I graduate. I was wondering if people with Excelsior college degrees have had trouble when applying for jobs. Is the job market open to people with online degrees?

 

I don't think you will find any problems with future employers "accepting" your Excelsior degree. The utility of an Excelsior degree should be similar to what someone would get from any other 4th tier school.

I suspect many people that have gone the big 3 route (myself included) are mid-career adults. As such, an undergraduate degree is probably more useful in meeting minimum job requirements than anything else. If you are qualified for a job but need a degree (any degree) you should be good to go. If you are not qualified for a job and hope to rest on the big 3 degree, you may be disappointed.

The job market is very open to online degrees. Not as open as it would be with a "traditional" degree but your mileage will vary. Some people on this board will tell you there is no discrimination against online degrees. There have been a number of discussions about discrimination and acceptability of DL degrees. This alone should tell you it can be hit or miss. After all, if all degrees had the same utility, there would be nothing to discuss

 

russinator3, here is just a thought:
Excelsior doesn't quite fit into the common definition of "online school". The concept on the basis of which Excelsior(and TESC and COSC) operates, to the large extent, remained the same as it was at the beginning in the 1970s. Back then, the term "online degree" was used only in science fiction.

I've personally a degree from Excelsior and it served me well for the purpose of applying to graduate school. Many others told the same on this board. I don't have experience, however, how this degree would be perceived for the purpose of employment. I would tend to agree with the previous poster, who mentioned that the acceptance of the Excelsior degree is compable to that of the most 4th tier universities.

Dennis

 

I think it would be perceived as a degree from an unknown college, which are majority from most employers who only know the "big names" and the local ones. Excelsior is an accredited school, and you should be able to continue on with your education anywhere you want to. If you feel a degree from Excelsior alone may not help you meet your goals, consider then postgraduate degree from a local, better known university. Excelsior will open that door for you as Dennis said.

 

The original poster referred to Excelsior as on "online" school. While Excelsior is not such a school, it is about as "non-tradional" as it gets. In fact, for some students, Excelsior is not about education at all.

I have an undergraduate degree from COSC. That degree allowed me to get into a great MBA program. I can't say enough good things about the benefits of a big 3 degree. With that said, I would never classify my COSC experience as "education". In my case, I tested out of almost every course. While COSC helped me reach graduate school admission requirements, I didn't learn anything new from the school itself. They simply allowed me an opportunity to prove my knowledge through CLEP, Dantes, etc...

My situation is unique and others may have different experiences.

-Travis

 

My Excelsior degree was not on-line; I had obtained credits from several RA schools including University of California, Cal state California, U of Lowell, Redlands, Several CA CCs, and a couple of UK schools. After adding a CLEP exam (for English) I had enough to qualify for an Excelsior degree (when I received my degree Excelsior was the USNY). No one has ever questioned my Excelsior degree or discuss how I earned it.
It was accepted as entry for my two graduate degrees.

In reference to previous comments what or who decides that an Excelsior degree is 4th tier?

 

Schools are ranked by U.S. News and World Report annual college guide. Excelsior is actually not ranked as 4th tier. They are "unranked" along with TESC and COSC. Does that make them 5th tier?

-Travis

 

I agree with that. If you took courses from Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Oxford and, however unlikely, you use them for a degree at Excelsior..... There is no way to check that since Excelsior doesn´t provide tuition.

 

Excelsior does offer classes (WebCT) and charges tuition.

 

I am a graduate of Excelsior from 2004...got a teaching job, and was accepted into Montana State University-Bozeman's Master Sciecnce in Science Education.

No problems or questions about it!

 

Excelsior does offer classes (WebCT) and charges tuition.

Yes, Excelsior does offer online classes now. But it has started only recently doing so. In fact you can still earn your degree by examinations or by combination of traditional classes and exam credit.

As to the rankings, I think Excelsior is a not comparable to Harvard or Yale; it is a decent school like hundreds of other private and state colleges and universities that do not appear in any rankings
This fact is supported by dozens of accounts by members of this forum who reported that an Excelsior degree helped them to get into good to prestigious graduate programs.

Dennis

 

One would argue that before Excelsior started offering classes, it was not a "school" at all (no ranking would apply). Since the school did not educate anyone, calling it a school would be a stretch. Of course, that has changed now.

I don't think anyone was trying to compare Excelsior (or TESC or COSC) to Harvard or Yale. In fact, it would not be fair or valid to compare Excelsior to most schools. My COSC degree allowed me to get into a great MBA program. It also validated my pre-existing knowledge. COSC did many things but did not educate me (although they do offer a limited number of classes). Since many people do not receive any education at Excelsior, it would not be fair to compare the "school" to a ranked college or university.

I'm not knocking the big 3. Just explaining why I said the utility of an Excelsior degree would be "similar to what someone would get from any other 4th tier school."

Just like a ranked 4th tier school, the degree will help with grad school admissions, promotions, new careers, and/or a great diploma to hang on the wall

 

Look all I was saying is that for a university that merely asseses your university work, it is highly unlikely that it will ever be ranked since it doesn´t provide tuition. Now it seems that it does. But still, if the courses you bring to be evaluated at Excelsior come from first tier universities so will be the quality of your degree. In different words, quality at Excelsior is not homogeneous, it depends on what your bring.

 

I think this can be said of any school that accepts transfer credits.

 

Not really, since one has to complete at leat one year in residence, and most universities require students to take a good number of credits of the major in residence (usually half). This is the case for engineering majors at least. But even then, those schools can be evaluated in terms of quality since they offer enough courses to obtain full degrees in multiple disciplines. Offficials are those schools assume that their residence requirement serves the purpose of normalizing quality of graduating students. That´s clearly not the case of Excelsior, and it is the reason why it is unranked (especially when one analyzes the methodology used to assess schools. It would be basically a chimera to conduct a similar study for any of the Big 3). Regards.

 

On the other hand...; maybe Excelsior hasn't so much control over the content of particular courses, though they certainly stick to RA standards and ACE recommendations when evaluating them. However, they have much more control over the cirrucular degree requirements and they seem to emulate the better schools and stay up to date here.
For example, they recently added an Information Literacy requirement for all new students; with this new requirement they are ahead of many brick and mortar colleges.

Dennis

 

Please, Dennis,don´t take my comments about Excelsior as a critic. I am merely trying to explain why it appears to be unranked by those magazines. I am sure Excelsior College graduates comply with RA university standards.