Best Online Business Administration Degree

Ranking Methodology

Our goal in this ranking is to objectively look at how many online university programs compare to one another. This is why we have used third-party data to help us reach our conclusions about programs we rank. 

Data sources:

• ROI Calculation: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ 
• Student counts, tuition: https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data

Explanation and requirements for ranking:

• Universities were ranked on their ROI ratio. The ROI ratio is a comparison of two-year post-graduation earnings and student debt at graduation. High ROI is better.
• Universities must offer four-year degree programs to be considered
• Universities had to have non-zero debt and earnings numbers.
• We chose to include only online universities by only including schools that have at least 90% of their total student population be exclusively online. This eliminates brick and mortar institutions with online programs from our ranking.
• We chose to include only institutions that are doing online education at scale because we believe this is a better experience for students pursuing an online degree. We chose to only include institutions that had at least 15,000 total online-only students for this reason.
• The use of the word "best" is subjective, but we are using the term based on the ranking methodology explained above, and in a way that reflects WGU's values.