For-profit institutions generally price their services on a per-credit basis, which provides the ability to calculate the cost of a semester or degree provided – sometimes.  Credits, or credit-hours, usually cost more at the graduate level than the undergraduate level.  At DeVry University, one of the major online schools, the cost for an undergraduate credit for virtually all of their undergraduate options is $580 for credits 1-11.  There’s a discount on the last three or four credits, which are billed $350 per.  According to DeVry’s own calculations, that makes the tuition and fees for a full semester in 2010 add up to $8,100.  Four full years or eight semesters will take you past the $64,000 mark for a Bachelor Degree.

Using those figures as a benchmark, here is a brief survey of the per-credit costs with some other reputable for-profit online schools.  Ashford University has a baseline fee of $372 per credit hour for an undergraduate degree.  However they do post a series of additional fees associated with transcript evaluation if you’re transferring credits, a fee ($140) when you apply for a field of concentration within a major, fees for graduation, etc.  None of them are big, but they will add to the cost of your degree.    With Capella University, the calculations are more complicated because they apply charges between $800 and $2,000 per class depending upon the number of credits assigned to the course.  Capella uses the quarter format rather than semesters and students take a maximum of three courses per quarter. The US News and World Report annual ratings of US Colleges reports their annual tuition cost at about $10,600.

For traditional universities, costs can come down substantially if you are paying the tuition to a public university and you are a resident of the state.  Public schools usually maintain the split tuition structure for online students as well as for campus attendees.  The annual undergraduate tuition at the University of Maryland University College which has an extensive online program is $5,520 for Maryland residents and about twice that for out of state students.  That’s a $24,000 undergraduate degree.  At the State University of New York (SUNY) online credits average $207 apiece for a New York resident.  That includes an online surcharge, as the campus cost per credit for in-state residents is $181.  This fee structure will put the annual tuition for an online degree through the SUNY Learning Network at about $5,500, similar to the University of Maryland.

The Penn State World Campus has an online tuition structure that is much higher, topping out at $5,700 per semester.  That rate goes up substantially in the second two years of your undergraduate program, so this particular public institution has a fairly pricey online program compared to other state schools.  Private universities like Northeastern will sometimes try to price competitively; this tuition comparison chart from Northeastern puts their undergraduate online tuition at $49,000 compared to Capella at $53,000 and Penn State at over $58,000.

This is a sampler for undergraduate degree costs but it represents some of the quality for-profit schools, public universities, and one of the competitive private universities that has moved into online instruction.  It’s a good representation of the range for undergraduate tuition online; graduate school is another matter.  Per-credit and per-year costs are higher; however depending on the school a Master’s Degree takes two years and often less to complete while an MBA program can be completed in eighteen months to three years.  Calculations for graduate work become more of a challenge because the allocation of credits and the number of credits required for completion of a program vary greatly from school to school.