My daughter will be seeking an online masters degree in finance. Advice please.

[panader0]

It has to be online because she travels for her job with the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond, Va.
She mentioned Penn State and Ohio University. I would like to ask for advice from the folks
here at DU.
The Fed will pay &15,000 grand a year.

[exboyfil]

1. Make sure she realizes there will be tax implications

at that level of reimbursement. I wish her the best. My finance courses were my favorites when I got my MBA. I might have majored in finance and mathematical modeling instead of engineering if I had known more about it at the time.

[still_one]

2. Congratulations!!!

[HopeAgain]

3. I teach in unrelated masters programs

online. I can tell you that because there are no classes, there is usually a lot of weekly assignments to keep up with. Might even be more work than an in person course.

As for the school, most accredited state programs will give a person the education they need in a given field if shes not focused on prestige, but rather on just learning the subject.

[tonyt53]

4. A son of a friend of mine got his this way. His son said this same thing about the class time.

[geardaddy]

10. I second this opinion.

I took some online classes for my M.Ed. and the workload seemed a lot more than my in-person classes.

[TheDebbieDee]

5. The wages for a financial analyst with a Masters degree and with median career experience

is expected to earn an average of $39/hour or $81k/year but this career has a bright future... Onetonline.org is a Bureau of Labor & Statistics site with information on salary and skills resulting from survey responses from those people who work in these fields.

https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/13-2051.00

Your daughter might want to research this site to find out what career forecast and prevailing wages are for her expected skill set and the region of the country she plans to live in... (I didn't find out about this site until my senior year when I took a Human Resources course...)

[Gidney N Cloyd]

6. Online masters programs often mean joining a student cohort and progressing as a group.

I have a long background in online course design and support and as someone else said, don't expect online courses to be easier than traditional classroom courses. Many students find them harder.
There are so many really cool tools available these days for virtual class meetings that it's getting more common to have synchronous online class meetings. Depending on the class and program there may even be a few in-person meetings.

[HipChick]

7. I detest Groups for online programs...you always get that one lazy person in your group

that does not want to do shit, but wants the credit when you turn in assignments...

[Gidney N Cloyd]

8. I know what you mean but in an ongoing cohort situation those parasites often get weeded out.

They may get away with it for a couple courses but eventually the other students get their number or they hit a class where there's less group work and they flounder on their own.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

9. That person is known as "Mr President". nt

[hunter]

11. Just like employment...

... but much worse when that lazy person is your boss.

I've heard this practice defended as preparation for life beyond school.

[RobinA]

12. I Heard That Too

And my response to that nonsense is that only a person who never worked a real job could believe that. I’ve worked in all kinds of organizations for 38 years and I have NEVER encountered the hell that is a grad school group project in the real world. Other kinds of hell, yes. Group project hell? Never.