Employers today are seeing more and more applicants with online schooling from accredited colleges. About 7 per cent of graduate students, or 1.2 million, have conducted their course of study completely over the Internet, according to Eduventures, an education market research company. The numbers are bound to grow, with new legislation eliminating limits on federal aid for online students.

Online graduates can land in any of 100 occupations, from librarian to auditor to counterintelligence threat analyst. Betsy Davis, deputy chief of the CIA recruitment centre, estimates that 5-10 per cent of new employees completed some or all of their course work online. Many had been in the military, or had resumed their education after a break.

While online programmes have been common for advancement within the workplace, almost 40 per cent of those getting their degrees solely online are adults who want to take their credentials into the marketplace, for a new career or better job, Eduventures says.

What happens when these virtual graduates go knocking on the doors of potential employers?

In one recent survey, employers overwhelmingly preferred traditional bachelors degrees when hiring over credentials even partially completed online. In the study, published in the January issue of the quarterly Communication Education, two professors asked some 270 small and medium-size companies in eight cities about their attitudes toward online credentials.

Ninety-six per cent said they would choose traditional candidates over those with virtual degrees. Graduates of hybrid programmes (online and in classrooms) didn’t fare much better, with 75 per cent choosing candidates with traditional degrees.

“Recent graduates, who apply for jobs without much work experience, may find that having an online degree on their résumé translates into having little chance of being hired,” concludes the study, by Margaret H. DeFleur, associate dean of graduate studies and research at Louisiana State University, and Jonathan Adams, director of interactive and new communication technologies at Florida State University.

Online advocates take issue with the study’s methodology, because it forced employers to choose between traditional and virtual degrees.

“There is no ‘no difference’ response allowed,” says Jeffrey Seaman, survey director at the Sloan Consortium, a non-profit organisation that promotes online education. “Where one of the options is familiar and the other is both unrealistic and new to the respondent, respondents will overwhelmingly select the first option.”

Seaman prefers a 2005 report by Eduventures that invited employers to rate the “value” of online education. Of the 500 or so participants, including Bank of America, DaimlerChrysler and the United States Air Force, half regarded online and face-to-face instruction as “equally valuable,” 10 per cent regarded online education as “more valuable” and 38 per cent as less valuable.

Richard Garret, a senior research analyst with Eduventures, doesn’t doubt that stigmas exist. “The key takeaway from the DeFleur article is that providers of online education still have work to do to convince employers about quality,” he says.

All online degrees are not treated equally in the job market. Employers have more readily embraced business, information technology and some areas of health care, Garret says. Fields needing physical resources, like hard sciences, engineering and performing arts, are considered less suited for online course work.

Terry Smithson, education strategist for the computer-chip maker Intel, is on the lookout for top talent in engineering, math and science. “So long as the degree is from an accredited university, it shouldn’t make a difference if it’s a traditional or online degree,” he says, “but in reality it does make a difference because there are no real online engineering courses that can simulate the hands-on courses you need.”

Kim Quirk, a Texas Instruments spokeswoman, says flatly: “We don’t hire people with online degrees. ”

Among the companies that say an online degree does not limit options for any position, as long as the college is accredited, are Northrop Grumman, United Parcel Service, Boeing and Discovery Communications, the media and entertainment company.

“We would not dismiss a résumé that cited a degree received online,” says Michelle Russo, a spokeswoman for Discovery. But, she continues, the company “would take into consideration the reputation and status of the granting college regardless of whether it was an online or a regular bricks-and-mortar college.”

And therein lies the biggest disadvantage. Employers don’t have much to go on to judge reputation. Classic factors like institutional prestige, faculty publishing, alumni donations and magazine rankings don’t apply. Graduation rates are unavailable. How can employers assess credentials delivered by an institution with a short-term track record, or one with no apparent distinguishing characteristics?

“The methods of delivering distance learning and the expansion of the market have grown too quickly for anyone to adequately measure the quality of education,” says Susan Patrick, president of the North American council for online learning. Beyond word-of-mouth, Patrick says, the most reliable way for employers to judge an online institution is accreditation. “If we can find better ways to measure education in terms of lifelong learning or for employment purposes then we can stop discriminating against online versus face-to-face degrees,” she says.

All this may be an argument for online programmes within traditional colleges, which have established reputations and whose virtual formats are not obvious. At the University of Maryland University College, the public institution with the largest online enrollment, most of the 88,499 adult learners move back and forth between classroom and online courses.

Heather Robinson, a spokeswoman for UPS, acknowledges that hiring managers can’t tell the difference. “It is almost impossible to differentiate fully online degrees from partial online degrees from traditional degrees,” she says.

More than 281,000 students are enrolled at the University of Phoenix, about half working toward their degree entirely online.Terri Bishop, a founding director of University of Phoenix Online and now senior vice president for public affairs, says it is possible to gauge the success of Phoenix graduates in the job market “apples to apples” because the same curriculum is used online as at its centres.

Across factors like salaries, promotions and types of positions, we know that University of Phoenix Online students have performed as well and in some areas better” than those who attend classes at University of Phoenix centres, she says. Bishop also sees a sign of acceptance of online degrees in the fact that some companies pay their employees’ tuition. She says 50 per cent to 60 per cent of Phoenix’s students receive some reimbursement.

Johnson & Johnson is among the companies that pay for employees to obtain a degree online. The company won’t discuss its outside hiring, but Kee Men Yeo, director of eUniversity (an in-house hub for online training), says that in promotions, “there is more emphasis on your skill set and performance as opposed to whether you attended Harvard or Capella.”

Boeing estimates that of its 2,293 employees who earned a degree in 2005 while on the job, 40 per cent completed their course work online. The fact that online degrees are highly acceptable for advancing within the company suggests a job-friendly attitude toward prospective employees with similar credentials, says Richard Hartnett, director of global staffing for Boeing.