Ask YC: CS/Programming Online

Here's my criteria: I needed a Bachelor's degree program. I wanted an actual brick and mortar school that offered it's courses online. And, I wanted it to be as geeky/CS heavy as possible. UMUC fit all of those.

While they don't offer a full CS degree, their full online degree is Computer and Information Science. That's more of their Software Engineering major as opposed to their Computer Science major. It's a "Java school." So, take that for what it's worth. I wish I had more algorithms/compiler type classes. But, I knew that I wanted to do web apps when I was done, so that's what I focused my schooling on.

I'm sure that you might be able to skate through your degree, but it's far from a diploma mill. I've worked full time the whole way through, and have only been able to carry 9 credits at the maximum. Generally I've only been able to carry 6 credits. The University of Maryland has a decent reputation. For what it's worth, after my first year, I got an email from the National Security Agency inviting me to apply for a full ride scholarship. I doubt that you'll get that at Kaplan, Capella or at U of Phoenix.

UMUC has a big contract with the military, so you're doing a lot of your distance education with people in the military or work for companies that do military contracting. I took classes with other students who were working in the Intelligence community, who were in combat zones, and one guy was doing penetration testing for the State Department. I'm careful with what I post online, and we don't chat about our jobs much. :)

All in all, it's been worth it, and I'd recommend it as long as you use Ratemyprofessor.com. Like any University, some teachers are tools, some are phenomenal. Like any degree, you get out of it what you put into it.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a great school for CS with an impressive history of startup founders (Netscape, YouTube, Firefox, Oracle, Siebel, AMD, Lotus, etc.) The Urbana-Champaign CS program is usually ranked third in the country, after Stanford and MIT. If you did very well in your online classes with Springfield, you could probably continue on with the MS program in CS at Urbana-Champaign if you wanted to do so.

[Don't get me wrong, Springfield's CS program is the ugly third cousin of UIUC, but it is still much better than Kaplan and UPhoenix and the rest of those online busywork diploma mills. No offense to any Kaplan/UPhoenix alumni ;-) ]