Semi-relates: Why don't universities offer online undergraduate programs? It's frustrating. I enrolled myself back to finish my bachelor's degree and my school offers very few or no online options for the classes I need.
There's a normative and substantial laboratory aspect to ABET-accredited[1] undergraduate engineering programs.
From Criterion 7:
>> Modern tools, equipment, computing resources, and laboratories appropriate to the program must be available, accessible, and systematically maintained and upgraded to enable students to attain the student outcomes and to support program needs.
[1] https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/cr...
Most of the decent ones are expensive, and many still consider in/out of state tuition. There are a few good deals I've seen, highly dependent on being in-state.
The only "useful" ones you'll find tend to be CS, a handful of EE degrees exist online (no clue how that works) along with some other fields. Occasionally you'll find some in the natural sciences, but they tend to be BA's and explicitly for pre-law, pre-med, etc. I've seen maybe one online math degree and tons of social science ones, as well as "we made this major up to target to poor working people who will give us money".
At the end of the day, they exist, but are uncommon and probably not worth the price.
I researched going back to school online for years, but if I do it, I will probably do it in person (at least for the important years).
Forcing students to live on-premises also makes universities money through student housing and amenities. Universities have concerns that opening their programs to online instruction would lead to an exodus from the campus. You could have 70% of a 20,000 strong student body attend online, and all the expensive real estate of the campus would mostly be a waste of money.
- Even in my first attempt at college, I was never too concerned with the name/reputation of the school. My first go around I picked a state school that gave me a full ride, rather than going for the more prestigious options. So once I checked that the accreditation of WGU was indeed legit, that was good enough for me.
- Their admissions are based on your professional history, since they're set up to cater to working professionals, not high school graduates. (Heck, their mascot is the "night owl.") That means it didn't matter to them that my first attempt at college left me with a... bit of a "stained" transcript. That stopped me from getting into other online options, but my professional history spoke for me at WGU.
- I'm a huge fan of their competency-based education model. It isn't for everyone since the classes are self-paced and asynchronous, but it matches my personal abilities to self teach and to "binge" content. Plus, as soon as you enroll in a course you can take a pre-assessment that will unlock the final if you do well. For some of the courses I've spent over a decade in the workforce learning the content, so I was able to do the pre-assessment and then the final in a single day.
My current experience at WGU is short, but good. My term started June 1. I rocketed through a few of the classes that had test-based and code-based finals in the first week. Now I'm realizing just how out of practice I am with writing, because I'm in a pair of classes that have writing-based finals and I'm struggling more.
I don't personally know people that took their degree from WGU to another university for a Masters, but WGU maintains a list [0] of universities which have accepted WGU undergraduates into their graduate and/or doctoral programs.
[0] https://www.wgu.edu/alumni/career-support/education-and-prof...
The academia is a community and a lifestyle. The people who choose that lifestyle generally don't want to spend too much time teaching outside the community. Teaching is a lot of work, a lot of bureaucracy, and a lot of hard deadlines, and it's not particularly rewarding if the students are just names on screen. Maybe if people paid higher taxes and higher tuition fees, universities could hire teachers to "just work here" and pay them competitive salaries.