No. It’s a for-profit school with a poor reputation. Employers have been known to toss any job application listing a Capella degree directly into the trash.

70% of Capella students are female, and 45% are minorities. Most of these students would not be accepted in schools of higher reputation. Most Capella degree programs do not have programmatic accreditation. Graduates of Capella degrees must endure the barely suppressed snickers of friends and colleagues their entire careers.

Try Athabasca University.

ADDED
It’s interesting that all the positive Answers to this question came within a one hour period, three days after the Question was posted, mostly by Responders who joined Q!A just today June 1/10… The Question is being spammed by Capella “ambassadors”…

I think so and it is accredited . There are others but at Capella you are responsible for your own success or failure.

Yes, Capella University is wonderful. The support staff and teachers are very knowledgeable. The schools accreditation’s are on point. For example I am enrolled in the Masters program in mental health counseling. For me to even take the license exam in my state I would need 48 hours of class time, a certain amount of residences and so on and Capella offers all of that plus more. The school would need to be CACREP accredited and they are. So, in all the school offers everything that i need and the classroom is set up in such a way that it allows me to discuss topics with fellow learners and also the teachers. I have called in numerous of times to talk to counselors to make sure that I will be happy with this degree and they always listen and point me in the right direction. They also help you research your degree so that you can see the types of jobs you can apply for after graduating. Well I hope this helps.

I’ll start with a disclaimer–I did get my PhD degree from Capella. There is always the perception that an online degree is not as good as a degree from a “real” university. Well, e-mail was not considered “real” compared with fax and there would not have been Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, and others if it wasn’t for the Internet revolution. My “day job” is as a Vice President of Corporate Strategy for a public corporation, and my “night job” is as an adjunct professor for technology forecasting in the graduate school of management in UT Dallas. I don’t seem to have a problem with my “online” degree. In fact–UTD is now responding to student requests to move more and more classes online, and is struggling to catch up, where Capella (and a few other universities) have already established themselves.

Let me assure you–the study at Capella was as real as it gets. I worked hard for 3 years until I heard the words “congratulations, Dr. Solomon” at the end of my dissertation defense conference call.

When I initially did my research on which university to take, I first checked for accreditation. Capella is accredited like any other university in the area, and it is proactive on keeping its accreditation status. I liked their program, which has put me in charge of my progress, like another person on this thread commented.

Finally–would I preffer a Ph.D from Harvard over Capella? You bet! But would I be able to work full time, support a family at a good lifestyle while paying tuition to Harvard? Not so sure… If I could take myself 4 years back to the decision to enroll in Capella–I would do it all over again.

By the way–just like some employers (in the education sector, mainly) might criticize you or discount a degree from Capella, they might do the same if you went to the University of North Texas, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Colorado at Boulder, or any other university that it not on their favorite list… Watch out for those biases…

My two cents…

I have cited my doctorate from Capella in applying for adjunct positions on faculty at various universities. Those who interviewed me indicated no bias against Capella and were impressed that I’d finished. I believe I got a good education there, challenging, with academic rigor; and I learned a lot. I also built a network of colleagues who continue to be a source of support. There are always some who will question a degree earned from a non-traditional university. Online and non-traditional learning, however, is where higher education is headed; and much of the resistance comes from those who’ve only learned in brick and mortar schools and do not understand distance learning.

By the way, I have seen people earn advanced degrees from Capella, Walden, U of Phoenix, and other schools advance very nicely in their own organizations, receiving full respect for their degrees. I wish you the best!