Do Employers Know if you Got your Degree Online?

The number of people getting online degrees has increased dramatically over the last few years. Despite this there are still quite a few people who take a negative view of online learning. The result is that a lot of people who got their degrees online would like to keep this fact secret. This is particularly true when they are looking for a job, so will potential employers know if you got your degree online?

Basically this question comes down to the question of does an online degree actually say on it that it is an online degree? The answer of course is that this is going to depend on where you got your degree. Some schools that offer both traditional and online degrees will put a note on the online degree and on your transcripts saying that it was earned in this manner others won't. There are some schools that will make a note of it and also point out that the online degree is of the same standard as a traditional degree, the University of London External Program are well known for this.

Other schools will use a more subtle approach to differentiate their online degrees from their regular ones. Usually they give the online degree a different title, HarvardExtension School is a good example of this, rather than the Bachelor of Arts that regular students get extension school students get a Bachelor of Liberal Arts. The difference is subtle and many people won't realize that it is not a regular Harvard degree but most people in academia will.

Of course there are the schools that offer only online degrees, in these cases they rarely mention that the degree was earned online. How likely it is that potential employers will know is going to depend on how well known the school is. There are some online schools that advertise a great deal and are very widely known, in few cases do they have a good reputation, you can be sure that potential employers will know that a degree from one of these schools was earned online. There are however other online schools that few people have heard of, employers likely won't know how these degrees were earned.

If making sure that a potential employer does not know that you got an online degree is important to you it is probably best to not get one. In most cases they won't care and they won't ask anyway, in fact rarely are you even required to provide a copy of your degree or your transcripts when looking for a job. That being said if they do ask you about it don't lie, this will just lead to trouble down the road.