Schools Ranked by Accreditation Years

For our rankings, we only included online colleges that are accredited by an agency officially recognized by the Office of Postsecondary Education. For each college, we looked at how long it had maintained its accreditation status, since a longer period of accreditation implies more name recognition and prestige, as well as the continual competence of the college’s administration.

Not every school had tuition data available on their websites. We did not, however, want to penalize those colleges without data. To that end, we simply excluded those schools from the rankings in this category.