Gibson Regester via Compfight

By Suzanne Kaplan, Guest Columnist

If you’ve ever tried to google the phrases “online degrees” or “online certificates” you have most likely encountered a degree aggregator such as OnlineClasses.net, eLearners.com,Online Certificate Programs, or DegreeSearch.org. They’re all the same, really. They present as if they are going to search the Net for all possibilities, but that’s not the case at all; they search their own databases that are filled with information from their partnership schools.Take DegreeSearch.org. They have a tab on their homepage that allows users to search for online degrees. The catch is that you, the user, will only find information about online degrees from the schools they work with, which not surprisingly are almost all for-profit colleges, with the exception of USC’s School of Education and School of Social Work and Georgetown’s School of Nursing and Health Studies.

What’s worse, these aggregators want your email and phone number. And once they get it, they’ll keep emailing and calling you. After testing an online aggregator and sharing my email and phone number, I was bombarded with emails and calls from Walden University.

While you might not rule out going to a for-profit college, surely you want to see all your options, not just those from places like University of Phoenix and Walden University. (If you’re wondering which colleges are for profit, here’s a list.)

Of course, you may be one of those people who completely rules out going to for-profit colleges because you don’t trust their academic rigor or you’re just not okay with their ridiculously high tuition and questionable recruiting practices. And if you have no idea what some of the problems are with for-profit colleges, you should refer to Senator Tom Harkin’s two-year investigation on the for-profit education industry that he disclosed this past July.

Your feelings about for-profit colleges aside, if you want to find high-quality online-degree or certificate programs, you’re better off googling specific areas of study rather than using an aggregator. For example, if you’re looking to do an MBA online, google “MBA online” or “online MBA degrees.” Even then, your search will include aggregators; eLearners.com shows up sixth if you google “online MBA degrees.” But, you’ll also see that Penn State, Drexel, and Northeastern show up in the results, which are all reputable universities.