Hi @Student86
First of all a big pat on the back for striding forward! You’ve done a lot of work already by finding these schools and a course of study that interests you.
Second, a well-intended, hopefully gentle heads up. The rates of finishing online degrees is teensie. The drop-out rate is high. I’m not saying: Don’t do it. I’m saying: Be sure that you can finish before you start. Do that research. Be sure also that you can get a job once you finish. Think hard about the potential pitfalls. The worst thing is to end up with more debt and no additional employment opportunities.
- Write or call each school and ask the rate of finishing the degree and the average time it takes to complete that degree.
- Find out where their graduates find work (they will tell you 1-5 of their best cases; weigh that information against the percentage of people who completed their degrees.)
- Run the numbers to figure out your personal debt load at the end.
- Find out the how employable people with MPH degrees actually are in your area.
Third, in terms of whether they will accept you, I’d bet that they will. First, your 3.5 average is on target for what they accept if you look at their site. Also, I strongly suspect that online programs 1) genuinely can educate but 2) are cheap to run for the school and therefore are seen primarily as a 3) money maker for the school, meaning that they will not worry so much about the previous qualifications of their students. Don’t take their acceptance as a message that you definitely are getting a degree or that you will complete the classes. Online programs offer less support than on-campus programs where you have genuine warm flesh-and-blood peers struggling through this together.
If you feel that you personally can do the work and not drop out of the course, and that the tuition charged will not press you into high debt, then it may be worth it to you, if your area has a demand for MPH holders.
The biggest “name” is Johns Hopkins and that may open more doors than New England. Regardless of how big a name, institutions of higher education are run, with rare exceptions, more and more as businesses now. They produce what I like to think of as education products. High-level administrators say in meetings, let’s create this certificate program and we should be able to charge $30K for each student and run this through the summer. There seems to be “demand” for such a product. The buildings would just stand empty otherwise during that time and we’re going to make some money instead. We figure that 100 students will take this course. Subtract the $5K per professor for each class, and we’ve got a nice profit.
I wish that I were making up this scenario, but I’m not. This is how higher education is working now. Administrators at high levels create products to make the institution money. They use the word “brand” to discuss their college or university, its logo, it’s “profile” and how best to monetize it more. The professors are not being paid all that well, the students are paying a lot of money for these products, and it’s up to the consumer (ahem, student) to decide whether this product is worth what it’s costing. Will that certificate pay them back in the job market?
Can you still get an education using an online course? Yes. But it’s buyer beware. Be sure that you know what you’re getting into.
Please don’t feel discouraged. I know that this may feel like a bucket of ice water on your dreams. Please try not to feel that way. Take a step back and think: What is it that I want to do really? Is it the MPH? Or something kind of like that?
From your original question it looks like you’re interested in health as a profession; you don’t have a lot of time to study because you work, because you have debt already. Looking at online programs is a perfectly reasonable way to solve these problems. However, it’s not the only one. And it may not be the best one.
My bet is that you want a good-paying job once you finish your degree, putting aside for now how you get that degree. My strong suggestion then is to expand your search and look at the several other jobs that are health related and see 1) how much they pay in your area; 2) the demand for those jobs in your area; and 3) what local institutions can provide that training; 4) cost of that training and can it be done at night?
Some tools you could use to do this is salary.com to find out the wages of a job in your area. The website salarybystate.org will tell you the demand and projected growth of several jobs. I also just discovered a fascinating page by the community college network for Indiana. Coincidentally! I have no idea how I stumbled on this, I don’t live near Indiana . . . but if you click on each of these job categories, it reveals how much that job pays per hour in Indiana and then the job prospects in Indiana for that job each year. I know, this is just Indiana and if you don’t live there, well that’s not exactly the same. Still I found it fascinating to see which job pays more than others, which has more demand. My thought was that this is somewhat informative in general. A computer science job will pay about the same amount more than a job in fine arts regardless of the state. This site helps put numbers on general rules. https://www.ivytech.edu/bloomington/11207.html
In Bloomington IN, Public Health administration salaries are about $35K per year. http://salarygenius.com/in/bloomington/salary/public-health-administration-salary
A radiation therapist in the same area makes $56K per year – http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Radiation-Therapist-l-Bloomington,-IN.html
Johns Hopkins online degree for public health is $63K per year. Are you willing to go $80K into debt?? (Johns Hopkins says that everyone gets $20K off). For what that position pays in your area, is this degree going to pay you well or is it going to put you deeper in debt?
Ivy Tech community college costs about (I think) $10K for 70 credit hours towards radiation therapy degree.