Nova Southeastern U Tops Online College Rankings

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 01/08/09

Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, FL took the top spot in a ranking of online colleges and degree programs by the Online Education Database. The OEDb Online College Rankings 2009 evaluates and ranks 44 undergraduate colleges and universities that offer most or all of their degree programs online. Nova Southeastern has both traditional classrooms and a distance education degree program.

OEDb's rankings are based on data derived from eight different metrics: acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. The resulting list accumulates the average ranking in each metric for which data was available.

Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA; Champlain College in Burlington, VT; Upper Iowa University in Fayette; and LeTourneau University in Longview, TX were ranked second through fifth, respectively. All five institutions provide on-campus and online education programs.

"Regent University is thrilled to be recognized on a national level for our undergraduate online programs," said Tracy Stewart, VP of IT and executive director of the School of Undergraduate Studies. "We were able to build upon proven best practices and technology from our online graduate programs to launch our young undergraduate program on a solid foundation. And our faculty and students' commitment to the online programs is another indication of their quality."

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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