What Online Degrees Pay The Most?

Are you looking to earn an online degree but don’t know what programs pay the best? We’ve got you covered!

Online degrees are becoming increasingly popular for people who need to balance education with other responsibilities. While earning an online degree might seem expensive, there are many programs that offer scholarships and grants to offset costs.

Here’s our list of the top 4 online degrees by average salary.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS),  the median annual wage for those holding bachelor’s degrees was $51,000 in May 2017. This number has been steadily increasing since 2000, when the BLS reported that the median annual wage for college graduates was $36,000.

Computer Science – $65K+/year – $70K+

If you’re interested in computer science, you’ll need to consider how much money you’d make as a programmer.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average salary for programmers with less than five years’ experience is $64,000 per year. However, the average salary for experienced programmers is $85,000 per year.

Business Administration – $60K+

Accounting – $50K+

If you’re interested in earning an accounting degree online, then you’ll need to consider how much money you’d make after graduation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median annual salary for accountants was $53,000 as of May 2017. This number is expected to rise by 6% between 2016 and 2026.

Marketing – $40K+

On average, students who earned degrees in marketing made more than $40,000 per year. However, there were some differences among different majors.

Students who earned degrees in business administration, management, and finance made the highest salaries at $51,000 annually. Those with degrees in computer science, engineering, and mathematics made the lowest salaries at $36,000.

Online Degree and the Importance of Career Guidance

One of the best approaches to a career development is being proactive about what your life goals are, what your career interest and dreams are. Hat you should than do is to start researching on career options that suits your attributes, interests and skills set.

From an institutional point of view, solving career guidance for online degrees requires getting the stakeholders to converge on the problem and devise a way of integrating mainstream curriculum with career guidance. What this would achieve is empowering leaners with information on various career lines and domains they can pursue.

This enables students to align their selection of subjects according to the prerequisites of the degrees that the students would want to pursue after finishing their high school education.

For example, if a learner ultimately wants to carve a career in computer aircraft engineering, the learner will then focus on the subjects such as mathematics, physics and geography etc.

While the learner may also study other subjects like languages, biology and literature, aligning one’s education thrust with a particular career domain enables the student to have a laser focus on their education and this heightens their chances of success.

ELearning has created easy access to affordable education yet without proper career guidance learners will often find themselves hitting a cul-de-sac at one point or the other in as far as their goals are concerned.

Exposure Must Precede Education Thrust Streamlining

Researches have proved time and again that many students end up frustrated somewhere down their career paths because they made a career choices before they had enough exposure.

While it is important to consider what online degrees pay the most, students must make well informed career decision that are not solely based on the salary scale of a certain online degree.

The importance of the foregoing is that when students choose career lines before they are adequately informed about the implications, details as well as the meat and bones of certain career paths, they are highly likely to hit a stone wall sooner than later.

In many cases students have to shift career upon discovering that a certain career path is not exactly what they had in mind.

There are many young people that hop from career line to the next not necessarily as in the case of a job to a career scenario. Shifting from a job, viewed as something to get by, to a career (a long term work engagement) is normal as a job can be viewed as a stepping stone towards a career.

The Problems of Career Hopping

Shifting from one career domain to another usually culminates from a lack of decisiveness which can be a result of lack of adequate exposure early enough.

Many people keep stumbling upon various areas of interests in the latter stages of their lives and thus causing instability in their career endeavors. Studies have shown that if young people can be exposed to as many career spheres as possible, the young people will more decisive in choosing career paths.

Schools should therefore prioritize running career guidance workshops and as we have mentioned earlier, integrating career guidance and education in mainstream curriculum so that learners grow up with clear understanding of their interests, capabilities and the opportunities that await them as well the prerequisites for enrolling for certain courses.  

Career guidance has many benefits not only for leaners but for schools, parents and employers and all stakeholders.

Career guidance should include education and exposure on funding options so that no students should feel that there is no hope of pursuing tertiary education since their parents are barely affording the high school fees.

Career guidance helps to give students perspective on why they are at school and what they should do and where they should go after completing their high school education. This yields higher motivation levels on the part of leaners enabling them and all other stakeholder to achieve set goals. 

3 Things you Should Know About Online Degrees: Don’t Start Before you Read this

The idea of going through tertiary education from the comfort of your home, at you own pace and in an affordable way can be quite thrilling.

There are many joys that come with distance education and the fact that more companies and universities are getting to recognize online degrees, gives prospective graduands every reason to get started with pursuing an online degree to set their fond career dreams in motion.

Before you get started with your choice of an online degree that pays the most you need to understand that there is a world of differences between conventional brick and mortar learning and online education.

This model and form of online education requires certain traits and frameworks if the student and tertiary institution are to achieve set goals. In this post, we will zero in on 3 things you should know about online degrees, before you get started.

1. Online Degrees Require Students To Be Highly Motivated

The reasons this is so is that online education is student centered more than it is system and tutor centered. In conventional education paradigms, students are generally passive consumers of knowledge, whereas in online education are students are active participants in the process of generating and imparting knowledge.

Online education assumes you have enough maturity, motivation and discipline to handle your learning commitment with responsibility. Some distance learning models give ample room for anatomy on the part of the students. Students without maturity and discipline can easily flounder out of the rails of their course.

2. Online Degrees Require Good Time Management Skills

Without anyone keeping track of your daily and weekly school work, online education assumes that the student has good time management skills coupled with the traits we outlined earlier.

As an online student, you will not meet any tutor in person to remind you about your assignments and work. You need to have a well laid out schedule that clearly marks out tasks to be done and the dates when the works must be submitted. In other words, you need to have sound time management skills so that you do not miss any deadlines.

The other reason why time management skills are vitally important for everyone pursing online education is that many students who are enrolled in distance education course have other full time commitments such as 9 to 5 jobs.

It is not easy focusing on books and schoolwork after work and without high levels of motivation and sound time management skills, the dream of acquiring an online degree can dissipate bitterly.

3. You Need To Be Comfortable With Computer Technology

Distance education is facilitated by the advancements in technology. Communication from your university will come through email and various eLearning media such as Blackboard. In online education everything is done virtually.

The implications of online education are that the student must be comfortable with computer technology. You need to have more than just average computer skills as you must be able to upload and download learning materials and navigate through the set eLearning systems for file transmission and communication with your tutor.

There you have it. There are many other traits you need to possess if want to pursue distance education fruitfully. Do your due diligence and find out the best online degree for you. While the factor of which online degree pays the most is key, consider your interests and skills set as well so that you make a well informed decision. All the best!