"Accelerated" college for adults?

[Bob from down south]

Originally Posted by haselton

So how would you as an HR professional know if a prospective got their degree through a traditional or online program at Colorado tech for example? Most if not all colleges offer at least some of their degrees online.

Many of the online programs award their degrees through a separate college, i.e. "Metropolitan College," "Extension Campus," etc. which is apparent on a transcript. Even they don't want to dilute the value of their own traditional resident degree programs.

We pulled credit histories as part of our employment screening, and if the address history was not consistent with education/employment history it generated questions about the academic work.

Length of time in a degree program and number of courses taken per semester also is an indicator. Also, coursework with odd start/stop dates not aligned with semester schedules is a giveaway.

For local schools, like CTU Colorado Springs, we knew that anyone with a local employment history and coming in with, for example, an MBA from CTU, most probably got that degree online, since CTU only offers comp sci and engineering courses at the local campus.

And sometimes, we'd ask about academic work in the first interview, especially for tech jobs that don't have their own licensing/accreditation process.

[haselton]

Fair enough, thanks for the advice. I appreciate it.