Ask HN: Anyone else feel that online bachelor degrees area scam?

Just to get things out of the way. I’m not talking about your unaccredited or barely accredited for-profits. Most people here are probably familiar with those.

But I’ve been looking at getting my bachelors who’s working and almost anything I can find targeted to working professionals feels off. I’m talking about offerings from what are generally considered respectable, good state schools.

I’ve noticed in my state particularly that many of the schools offering these sort of programs don’t really offer many “useful” degrees. On occasion I’ll see a decent CS program, so let me be clear. I know there are some good asynchronous, online programs, but they seem to be the minority.

For example I looked at one school I know is pretty good, particularly for a few subjects. But what online offerings do they have? Well, on one hand, the humanities and social science degrees that HN decries. While these aren’t particularly useful, they’re at least “real” subjects.

But these otherwise legitimate schools seem to be trying to sell even worse degrees. Do you really need to pay out 10s of thousands of dollars for an “IT” degree, where you can get a job much cheaper. Or restaurant management, golf management, various “business” degrees, “industry education” degrees. A lot of these seem like careers you could bootstrap without the extreme costs of college, yet they seem to be the majority of options from these schools.