A blogazine for all things Internet, e-marketing, business, media & software

As I prepared to write this post,  I realized that I have been continuously enrolled in one school or another for 23 years.  I am 26 years old.  The first 21 years of my education followed a fairly typical path of Head Start beginning at 3 years old, a series of public schools for grades K-12, and an undergraduate education at a brick-and-mortar state school culminating in 2005.

By 2005, I was working as a tester in a software company and already had 3 solid years of professional experience earned over the course of 2 jobs.  I was so entrenched in my career that I couldn’t be bothered to attend my undergrad graduation and spent the day at work clearing client deliverables from my to-do list.  Perhaps, I disregarded the graduation ceremony because I knew this wasn’t truly the end of my formal education.  I wanted to earn an advanced degree.

I was in a place dissimilar to many recent graduates my age - I had a few years of full-time professional work experience, a blossoming career outlook, was out of my parent’s house, and was financially independent and stable.  The last two years of my undergrad tenure were as a commuter student and involved putting 100 miles a day on an unreliable 1993 Chevy Blazer.  I had no intentions of repeating these daily voyages on any scale.  These factors, combined with a job commitment of 40-50 hours a week and a part-time eBay sales consulting business, told me that my grad program would have to be extremely flexible.

I began my search by looking into MBA programs at nearby traditional colleges.  My undergraduate grades and GMAT scores were good enough to easily get me into just about all area grad school program, so I wasn’t too worried about meeting admission criteria.  I was more concerned with finding the program that was right for me.  I soon realized that none of the schools in my area adequately addressed my unique interest of online marketing and e-commerce.  And what’s more, only a few of the colleges I visited recognized the unique time constraints of working adults.

Different types of online education

It was about this time, that I began to explore continuing my education online.  To successfully pick the right school, I had to learn what online education really involves.  As it turns out, online education is really best viewed as a continuum that describes the degree to which institutions leverage the Internet as a learning platform.  On the minimalist side of the online education continuum, there is the single course taught at a physical college that deploys the occasional use of online resources.  In the middle of the scale are physical universities that offer degree programs that can be completed entirely online without having to set foot in a classroom.  And at the extreme of the spectrum, there are universities where all learning and coursework take place only over the web.

I also had to learn more about accreditation to be sure that I made the right decision.  Some degree mills attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate accredited universities, a practice which represents a severe threat to the credibility of degrees earned online.  The U.S. Department of Education has created a resource page that helps students spot degree mills and a database of all accredited schools in the United States.  As part of my search for the right distance degree program, I learned about for-profit degree granting institutions.  As nonprofit universities dominate offline education, for-profit universities, for better or worse, are becoming synonymous with online education.

Why I chose Ellis College

Eventually, I came across Ellis College of New York Institute of Technology.  Ellis College had everything I was looking for in an MBA program.  The university offers an extremely challenging core MBA program with an e-commerce specialization option.  E-commerce MBA tracks are something many physical colleges have overlooked, and with online sales booming year-over-year it’s one of the hottest topics in business.

Moreover, Ellis College’s distance learning program is part of the New York Institute of Technology, a brick-and-mortar university located in Old Westbury, New York.  The affiliation with a traditional school should appease most skeptics of online learning.  The graduate program is geared toward working adults and extends students a measure of flexibility without compromising high education standards.  Additionally, the school has an active community of students and faculty (check out the video below).  I found the professional credentials of the Ellis College faculty especially impressive.  Most professors have PhD’s and/or 20 plus years of business experience at major corporations.  The instructors are always available to answer questions about coursework or to give professional advice.