The Four Most Common Questions of Applicants

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Som Seng

As the Marketing and Customer Service Manager here at UMassOnline, I’m usually the one who fields most of the initial inquiries from prospective students seeking to know more about our offerings and admissions requirements. I’ve found that four questions are asked most often when students are investigating whether or not we represent the best fit. In summary, students want to know more about our tuition and fees structure as well as financial aid possibilities, accreditation, admissions requirements, and lastly whether or not previous college level credits earned will be accepted at UMass. All good/important questions by the way.

The point of this overview is not to discourage your calls. Your specific questions in most cases can only be answered via a conversation. Plus, I like to hear from you. But this brief overview of the four most common questions may be helpful in giving you a better sense of how we operate and how straight forward the process can be.

1. Tuition, Fees and Financial Aid

Contrary to a popular misconception, online education is not necessarily less expensive than traditional classroom-based course work. It’s comparable, but it may not seem that way at first when you compare the two. That’s because most course/program fees are already built into our cost. Tuition rates quoted for traditional classes often do not include fees and these you would want to include in your calculations in order to make an apples to apples comparison.

Financial aid is available. We recommend that your first step in seeking financial aid begin with this FAFSA form. It’s the free application for Federal student aid.

2. Accreditation

All UMass courses, online and traditional, are accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. This link takes you to their site so you can learn much more about this important status and its critical relevance to you when it comes to the value you and others put on your academic achievement. In addition to this, many of each campus’ schools and colleges are also accredited by discipline-specific agencies with national reputations for assessing academic quality. In short, UMassOnline courses are accredited on par with all of the nation’s leading colleges.

3. Admission Requirements

Admissions requirements for UMassOnline programs are the same as face-to-face programs. Admissions requirements do vary from program to program and from campus to campus. For details on Admissions requirements for a particular program, find the program on our Degrees and Certificates pages, click on the program and then click on the admissions tab.

4. Transfer Credits

UMassOnline does accept transfer credits. For all applicants who have taken courses similar in content to ours at an accredited institution and received a grade of C- or above, credits will be accepted. I encourage you, however to contact me to discuss this concern in more specific detail so that you know your status as far as transfer credits when starting your UMassOnline coursework.

More Questions…

I invite you to call or email me directly with additional questions or, of course, to leave a comment here. Chances are any question you have is also of interest to others like you currently evaluating UMassOnline. Therefore, by leaving a question here in the comment section, you’ll be helping others understand the process better, too.