I am a high school teacher in Illinois and I can tell you that the superintendent of my school district (and many other superintendents in Illinois) do not accept any degrees from online universities. I think in the educational field, they are greatly frowned upon, at least in my area of Illinois.

At the Masters, and even more so at the PhD level, the reputation of your program within your field is vitally important to your ability to get a job in that field. It pays to go to the best reputed program that you can. And most of those online programs are not at all respected. Worse, he’s considering Capella? Oy. Honestly, that’s not going to help his career – in fact, it may hurt, as many employers refuse to look at resumes from schools like U Phoenix, Capella, Devry, ITT, Strayer, AIU, etc.

At least, if he must go online, he should consider doing an online degree from a school with a good rep for it’s offline programs.

That said, the IT industry is one of the few that do have some respect, by some employers, for some of the high level online programs. But Capella isn’t one of those programs. Instead, if he can’t attend a good school in person, he should consider the following online programs, which are at well respected universities:

- Carnegie Mellon
- Rensselaer Polytechnic
- Penn State
- U Maryland
- U Mass Amherst
- U Illinois Champaign-Urbana
- U Idaho
- U Nebraska
- Northeastern University
- Boston University

And still, he’d do better going to a program in person. Even from the list I gave, if he must go online, I’d probably only seriously recommend that he look at Carnegie Mellon, which offers one of the top programs in his field in the US. Maybe BU.