Grad School Options

[bjcheung77]

Sometimes it's a good idea to apply to local schools, for the recognition and state pricing for tuition, etc...

There are options as well if you want to do the MOOC from Coursera and Edx, like the ones mentioned by Hotdogman1, those are all very good name brand and all of them have degrees from partnerships with Coursera and Edx, plus you get the discounts for tuition, some are less than $25K...

It really depends on what the original poster is looking for, I would investigate the local institutions first and also the ones in Coursera and Edx depending on the degrees offered. OP didn't indicate the Masters they're looking for... In short, find your degree, then search for your school of choice...

[aslhou]

I graduated with a UMPI BABA (3.9 GPA) with around 50 Sophia credits and a bunch of other alternative credits.

Some of the “top” Universities I’ve been accepted at are:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: (Online) MSM
Boston University: (Online) MBA
Purdue University: (Online) MS in Aviation and Aerospace Management
Georgia Institute of Technology: (Online) MS in Analytics

While these are very good schools, the programs themselves aren’t tough to get into as long as you meet all the requirements and doesn’t require GRE/GMAT. I decided to go to a local state university instead.

These are great programs, in fact I just recommended them to someone yesterday.  Major congrats on the acceptances!  Btw, did you choose the local university because it has a good reputation in your city?  Usually that’s more important if you don’t plan on moving out of state.

[Hotdogman1]

I graduated with a UMPI BABA (3.9 GPA) with around 50 Sophia credits and a bunch of other alternative credits.

Some of the “top” Universities I’ve been accepted at are:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: (Online) MSM
Boston University: (Online) MBA
Purdue University: (Online) MS in Aviation and Aerospace Management
Georgia Institute of Technology: (Online) MS in Analytics

While these are very good schools, the programs themselves aren’t tough to get into as long as you meet all the requirements and doesn’t require GRE/GMAT. I decided to go to a local state university instead.

These are great programs, in fact I just recommended them to someone yesterday.  Major congrats on the acceptances!  Btw, did you choose the local university because it has a good reputation in your city?  Usually that’s more important if you don’t plan on moving out of state.

Reputation was something I considered, but was not a big factor in my decision-making at the time. I was looking for a program I could do while working full time, was non-CBE, and was cheap enough for my company’s tuition reimbursement benefit to fully cover over a 2-3 year period. The local state university I go to is in a similar ranking tier to the previously mentioned schools, in-person, and a 15-minute drive from my house. The standard graduate tuition is higher than my requirement, but I luckily did get a partial scholarship that would just barely cover the entire degree when including the tuition reimbursement.

However, I do think I should have considered reputation and alumni network more seriously. A family member just graduated from the same school with a 4.0 GPA. He went to 4 school job fairs, got 4 job offers/ 8 interviews / 21 phone interviews / 72 applications. He also has an English professor going over his cover letter and a VP of a medium sized company going over his resume. Obviously, I don't consider him to be the norm as he was very active in utilizing all available career resources, but I am very impressed with the amount of support the school provided and look forward to taking advantage of that support in the future.