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Re:What a PhD Really Means in the US National Security Commu... by mcguire on Thursday January 28, 2016 @07:00PM (#10992531)
For undergraduate programs? Sure. For a Masters? I suppose. For both, what matters is the reputation of the school, really, not the online/physical dimension. For someone like Georgia Tech, they're the ones who are going to be badly hurt if they cheapen their online classes, so I'm reasonably sure that isn't going to happen.

Accreditation is an attempt to capture that reputation in a way that someone who has no idea about anything else can trust. Unfortunately, while you cannot game real reputation, gaming the accreditation is (almost intentionally) trivial.

A PhD, though, requires a lot of one-on-one time with a real faculty member. It's very much an apprenticeship sort of position. I've know people who did that remotely, and it's harder than doing it while being physically present. Getting a PhD while keeping a full time job is a very bad idea (I'm perfect evidence of this), and trying to do it 'online' is going to make that worse.

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