With almost a year into the pandemic, COVID-19 has impacted many facets of our lives, whether it be social interactions to how we receive health care to how we learn. It has especially affected higher education and how students receive their education, with most campuses going remote during the fall semester. Although the transition to remote learning may have brought about challenges, SUNY schools quickly adapted to ensure their students continued to receive a high quality education online.
For many of our campuses, they already had the foundation to serve students remotely through pre-established online degree programs. And, a number of these offerings have received recognition from this year’s Best Online Colleges and Best Online Bachelor’s Programs list issued by U.S. News. This year’s list was comprised using methodology that took the following themes into consideration: engagement (35%), services and technologies (25%), faculty credentials and training (20%), and expert opinion (20%).
Additionally, U.S. News implemented some changes for this year’s edition: two new discipline-specific undergraduate rankings of online programs for business and psychology were added; the definition of an online program was adjusted to “the vast majority of required coursework for program completion is able to be completed by via distance education courses,” instead of all required coursework; to be considered in the rankings, the online program had to be founded before 2019-2020, whereas in prior lists, only programs coming into inception (which for this edition would have been the 2020-2021 academic year) were automatically ranked; and programs now receive maximum credit for requiring only two instead of three letters of recommendation from applicants.
To calculate a program’s overall scores, U.S. News compiles the raw category scores prior to them being rescaled and multiplies them by their category weights. Essentially, a program’s total score scaled from zero to 100 highlights its difference from the highest-scoring program.
Want to see how SUNY is represented in this year’s rankings? See below:
Best Online Bachelor’s Degree Programs
- University at Buffalo (#8)
- SUNY Canton
- SUNY Delhi
- SUNY Polytechnic
- Alfred State
- SUNY Oswego
Best Online Engineering Degree Programs
- Binghamton University
Best Online MBA Degree Programs
- SUNY Oswego
- SUNY Polytechnic
Best Online Master’s in Nursing Degree Programs
- Stony Brook University (#9)
- SUNY Polytechnic
- SUNY Delhi
Best Online Master’s in Education Programs
- University at Albany (#10)
- Stony Brook University
- SUNY Oswego
Best Online Master’s in Information Technology Programs
- SUNY Polytechnic
You can visit sunyonline.edu to learn more about SUNY’s newest online program offerings.
