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Deciding on the best school to attend is a decision that requires more than just knowing what you can afford financially. You need to know if the school or degree program you choose can actually get you the job you want in your chosen career field. This means you have to find out, for instance, if employers look only at candidates who have graduated from the top schools, if there is a specific accreditation body that recognizes the school or program, if the schools program provides everything that is needed to satisfy any licensing or certification requirements to work in your state, or if employers in the field will hire graduates who hold online degrees.
You should also know if you are a good candidate for online courses. In a nutshell, online courses include a lot of reading you read many assigned readings (books, articles, lectures), you answer quiz and test questions (often timed), and you write responses to the material or to other classmates responses. If you are disciplined and can organize and motivate yourself to get it all done by the deadlines, then online programs have advantages you should look into.
A bachelors degree is a post-secondary (after high school) undergraduate academic degree. The bachelors is often referred to as a four-year degree because most programs require completion of roughly 120 coursework credit hours which takes about four years for persons who are in school full-time. However, in a changing economic environment many employers wont hire job candidates who have no experience and as a result, students are forced to work while they go to college (possibly through an internship), turning what was a four-year degree into five or six years of part-time study.
When it comes to a master's degree is a graduate level academic degree that consists of approximately 30 credit hours beyond the undergraduate bachelor's degree. Masters programs focus study on a specialized area of a discipline, delving into intense examination of theory and applied knowledge. Masters students gain skills in research, analysis, writing, and critical and independent thinking in order to solve complex problems, discover new knowledge, and provide written or verbal communication of these problems and solutions. The most common master's degrees are the Master of Arts (M.A.) and the Master of Science (M.S.).