In Brief
This article provides a list of popular online academic institutions and discusses the correlation between quality and popularity.
Many individuals who are interested in an online degree program, start searching on the internet for the best online academic institution seeking to know more about their rankings and qualities. One may find some lists on the web.
Accreditation – Rule of Quality vs. Popularity
The first question that arises is whether or not the more popular college in terms of student enrollment and number of students interested in learning there, proves its quality.
The second question is what defines the quality of the online academic institution?
First and foremost, the quality of a college is mostly determined by its accreditation – the higher the accreditation the higher the quality. However, there could be other factors to consider.
Can High Quality Co-Exist with Popularity?
Are popular colleges the best available?
Not necessarily. As it is in almost every area, there are two sides to consider:
- A popular college has to provide a variety of degree programs and expand its facilities to accept as many students who want to learn there, which may or may not detract from its quality.
- On the other hand, a popular college must maintain its popularity among other institutions, and inevitably ends up being a stronger academic institution. This is because it has to hire better experienced online lecturers/teachers and offer better e-learning options, utilizing advanced technological capabilities.
- Another example is that an academic organization that wants to pursue the highest academic educational level may have to specialize in selective degree programs and turn away many potential students, enforcing tougher admission criteria. In order to maintain quality, such a college focuses on specific professional degree programs and top academic disciplines, whereby the niche becomes smaller. As a result, these colleges are less popular.
List of Popular online Universities/Colleges in the USA
The table below summarizes the monthly searches across search engines, and daily total visits for each college.
Notes:
* This site doesn’t promote any online school (at least not directly) and therefore the research is unbiased.
* The traffic statistics for both global monthly searches and total daily visits are estimated. The figures are roughly combined, sampling user data from various Google sources.
* Part of the traffic to the websites is paid traffic – i.e. advertisements/affiliate traffic. This type of traffic requires a large-scale budget.
Some other popular colleges may have been excluded from this list unintentionally.