Featured Articles on OnlineEducation.com

A robust federal privacy legislation should be a floor, not a ceiling. The U.S. is one of the only democracies—and the only member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)—without a federal data protection agency.

The American public now expresses substantially more confidence in online college degrees than in 2017, according to a new poll released in November 2023. More than four in five adults—84 percent—reported they now believe employers are more accepting of online degrees than during the pre-2020 era. Compared with six years ago, almost three-quarters of the sample said online education provides a “more reputable” means of obtaining a degree.

In August 2021, the Taliban took the capital of Afghanistan, and with it many opportunities for girls’ and women’s education. Over three months later, Afghan girls are still stuck at home, waiting for the Taliban plan to re-enter schools, while boys have since been allowed to return to their classes.

Companies are rethinking their approaches to apprenticeships for tech fields. Find out how some of these innovative educational models are being built.

Learn about how coding boot camps operate, what they teach, and why the demand for software developers will continue to grow.

The rapid evolution of work due to technology, innovation, and globalization has had profound effects on the labor market, but educational systems have not been able to keep up. As a result, many young professionals feel ill-equipped to enter the workforce.

By 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be two million vacant American tech positions. Given the rapid advancement of technology in the workplace, jobs will require an even more diverse mix of traditional skills and computer proficiency.

The growing interest in public-private partnerships has been encouraged, in part, by governmental policies being put into effect. These are policies that propel reskilling and new collar job initiatives, and help prepare high school students for immersion in the new collar economy

Learn about the innovative training nonprofit Per Scholas and how they support reskilling efforts in the American tech industry.

Women make up only 13 percent of engineers in the U.S. One of the few areas in STEM that they do outnumber men is in mathematics. But the average total earning potential of a statistician, math teacher, or professor is closer to the starting salary of a civil or mechanical engineer. This pattern is not confined within healthcare and STEM. It’s also observable in professions like sales, real estate, administration, and management, among others.

Learn about trends in employer-led upskilling, reskilling, and how the face of the job market has changed with technology.

Social media activity can impact the lives of college students with short- and long-term effects; online personas affect not only a person’s immediate circumstances, but also one’s future ability to secure a mortgage or job.

Social workers are a vital part of our society, providing vital services to individuals, families, and communities. They support those facing poverty, homelessness, abuse, and neglect and assist people facing various other issues. Social workers also advocate for their client’s rights and interests in the political arena by working with local, state, and federal government bodies.

Platforms like Twitter allow users to communicate with others beyond their direct connections. This sort of access allows even the most underserved student to connect with professors from schools like MIT and Harvard. This article explores the top twenty-three socially connected professors on Twitter.

There are myriad professional training and certification courses available online, many for free. Professional certification can be one of the most effective ways to improve your employability and ensure career growth in the long-term.

As higher education costs continue to rise, scholarships are becoming increasingly important for many university students, especially those who want to minimize or avoid student loans. However, these days, winning scholarships can seem like a daunting challenge.

During the past two decades, online education has democratized access to learning, specifically with respect to geography and time. By illustration, a farmer in the American heartland may be hundreds of miles from the nearest university, but she can still enroll in an MBA program; or a nurse may have a demanding work schedule at a local clinic, but he can simultaneously pursue his graduate degree in nursing at an institution located six states away.

In late June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden Administration’s student debt relief plan, holding that the program lacked authorization under the 2003 HEROES Act. Biden’s program would have wiped out $430 billion of debt by canceling at least $10,000 of federal student loans for qualified borrowers with incomes under $125,000 per year. It didn’t take long for the President to unveil a new strategy at a White House press conference only hours after the ruling.

Hackers and scammers use a continually evolving set of tools to break through computer security. One of the primary modes to get access is phishing, or sending fake emails from speciously reputable companies in hopes of gaining access to credit card numbers, bank accounts, or other sensitive information. This guide helps students identify and respond to phishing attacks.

According to government data, PLSF enrolled more than two million borrowers through certified employers in December 2024. They include public school teachers; doctors, nurses and other clinicians who work for nonprofit hospitals; firefighters and police officers; public interest lawyers; and military employees of the Department of Defense. The program incentivizes people to choose lower-paying jobs and careers crucial to society’s functioning by offsetting some of their financial sacrifices through student loan forgiveness.

The U.S. Department of Education’s launch followed decades of expanded federal education funding. Those efforts started with Sputnik-era and Cold War math and science initiatives, followed by President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Higher Education Act of 1965, which attempted to open college access irrespective of any student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic background.

Alarming reports that employees from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency Service (DOGE) gained access to computer systems inside the U.S. Department of Education containing student loan records. Millions of borrowers who’ve benefited from student loan forgiveness programs worry that the new administration could suspend or reverse their discharges.

The Clinton Administration’s introduction of the first income-driven repayment (IDR) plan for student loan borrowers in the early 1990s was a milestone in the history of higher education finance in the United States. For the first time, borrowers struggling with high loan balances and limited earnings could elect a payment option that provided relief from the burden of what were, in many cases, unaffordable monthly payments required by the standard plan at that time.

The bipartisan Affordable Loans for Students Act (ALSA) from Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) would cut interest rates on existing and new Direct Loans to only 2 percent from the 6.5 to 9 percent range most borrowers currently pay at the time of this writing in April 2025. That works out to a 69 percent decrease from the rate undergraduates pay, along with a 78 percent decrease from the premium PLUS loan rate paid by graduate students and parents.

Educause’s October 2022 survey of 820 university undergraduates across America found that student preferences for online learning had soared by a sensational 222 percent since before the pandemic. But oddly enough, that newsworthy figure appears nowhere within the language of the report.