Online Engineering Bachelor's Degree

The University of North Dakota offers online bachelor’s degrees in civil, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering… The school is ABET accredited in these majors. Would an employer avoid someone with an online degree. The transcript and diploma would look the same as doing the degree on campus.

Anything new and different will be questioned. Getting a BS online is certainly new and different. How much it is questioned is certainly different for different employers.

Engineering is certainly a team effort and knowing that someone will function well in a team is VERY important to me. Working together with your classmates helps develop that skill. That can still be done in an online course but you’d have to convince me that you did so. I’d also question why you didn’t go the traditional route for your degree?

If online is your best option, go for it. Just be prepared to address those concerns.

The UND engineering degrees have ABET accreditation, so they should be completely acceptable to employers, grad schools, state licensing boards, etc.

However, note that UND charges high out-of-state tuition for the program, unless you are a resident of ND or a neighboring state/province. Furthermore, ABET requires engineering degrees to include labs, which are hard to provide through distance education. So the online students are required to travel to North Dakota during the summer to do lab work, and this obviously represents additional expense. My understanding is that few people outside of the ND area complete the UND engineering programs, because of the high cost and summer residency requirement.