LUO marches to top of survey

Liberty University Online was recognized as one of the top military-friendly colleges in the 2017 Top Yellow Ribbon Online Schools survey

HONOR — Liberty University has a military-friendly program that helps support those pursuing a career in the army. Photo Credit: Kaitlyn Becker

HONOR — Liberty University has a military-friendly program that helps support those pursuing a career in the army.
Photo Credit: Kaitlyn Becker

Liberty University Online was ranked 9th in the 2017 Top Military-Friendly Colleges and also ranked in the 2017 Top Yellow Ribbon Online Schools.

The rankings were determined by the education researcher publisher SR Education Group.

The SR Education Group found 68 online colleges that met the 2017 requirements for online schools that are military-friendly.

The SR Education Group looks for signs of stable support networks and tight military communities along with better-than-average financial aid accommodations in the accredited colleges they choose from, according to the guide to online schools website.

Any school that makes it into the 2017 Top Military-Friendly Online Colleges list has to offer at least 10 degree program options stretching from bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree level, and Liberty University fulfills those requirements.

“In order to develop a list of the Top military-friendly Online Colleges, we researched accredited colleges offering online degrees and evaluated them in four areas: military culture, online support, financial aid, and flexibility,” SR Education Group representative Taitum Ridgway said via email.

The information used to decipher the military-friendly score is from a publication of KMI Media Group called Military Advanced Education & Transition.

KMI Media Group’s goal is to grant veterans and other service members the resources they might need to make wise and informed decisions about what type of education they get, according to a SR Education Group press release.

Additional data from the 2016-2017 school year such as tuition rates and available degree opportunities were gathered from the college’s and university’s official school websites.

Other information was found from the National Center for Education Statistics on programmatic accreditation and whether or not the school was for profit or non-profit.

The SR Education Group has a separate process for how they determine an online school to be considered a Yellow Ribbon school.

“Our Top Yellow Ribbon Schools ranking only considers schools that offer uncapped financial contributions to an unlimited number of students through the Yellow Ribbon Program,” Ridgway said.

“After meeting the requirements for inclusion, colleges were ranked according to the military-friendly factors.”

Annual tuition rates for the online school also must be under $12,000 to meet the requirement.

Every school was scored on an accumulation of the services and accommodations they provided in all the different requirement categories.

The total score assigned to each college/university is the reflection of each individual category added together and rated out of 100 points.

The two most heavily weighted sections are online support and the military culture because that is what the SR Education Group felt like was most important for military students to look for when deciding who to get their education from.

Liberty was one of the few universities out of all the colleges and universities that created the 68 listed that claimed to be a Christian University.

The data concluded that Liberty met all of the SR Education Group’s requirements with a high score of 88.7 in military-friendliness.

LAUGHLIn is a news reporter.

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