Online Bachelor Degree Programs

A bachelor's degree usually takes about four years to finish. You'll often see it written as a B.A. (bachelor of arts) or a B.S. (bachelor of science). The distinction between the two sounds clean on paper, but in practice it blurs. Plenty of colleges hand out the B.A. for nearly all of their academic tracks, humanities and sciences alike. Schools that run applied, career-focused training in areas such as criminal justice, finance, or nursing tend to award the B.S., even in cases where hard science isn't really at the center of what students study.

For anyone planning to go further and chase a master's or a doctorate down the line, the bachelor's comes first. These degrees span a wide range of subjects: computer science, marine biology, English, film studies, and plenty more.

The money gap is real. People holding a bachelor's typically bring in more than $25,000 a year beyond what someone with a GED or a high school diploma earns. A bachelor's is an undergraduate degree from a college or university, and reaching it generally means four years of full-time work and 120 to 128 credits, with a set portion of those credits concentrated in the student's chosen major.

Earning power is the part that tends to get people's attention. Over a lifetime, bachelor's holders often make roughly twice what high school graduates make. Stack them against workers who did some schooling past high school but never finished a degree, and the graduates still come out about a third ahead. Put simply, it's an advantage that's hard to pass up.

Online programs have carved out their own place here, offering a combination of variety, flexible scheduling, and cost that works for full-time students and busy professionals both. Most fields are covered, and graduate-level coursework shows up too.

Finishing a bachelor's online can lead to career openings you didn't have before, and it also leaves the path clear to go after a master's, an MBA, or a doctorate later, with all the convenience that distance learning tends to bring. Browse the options to see which bachelor's programs are available and to ask for more details.

The university or college itself can help you confirm that a given program actually fits your academic plans and where you want your career to go. Drexel University, which has shown up on lists of the country's top schools, offers degrees online.

Drexel's accredited online programs are built for working professionals who want to finish a degree or keep going without giving up quality. The online master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, and certificate programs follow the same accredited curricula as the on-campus versions, and they hold up against what other universities offer, online or traditional. Drexel got into this early, launching online degrees back in 1996. With its roots in technology and research, Drexel Online carries more than a century of teaching experience into its programs, more than 115 years of it.