Originally Posted by Unregistered

I used to work in a ministry where my work was to evaluate people coming in with overseas/distance learning degrees.

There are three reasons why civil service and stat boards do not appreciate overseas/distance learning degrees:

1. Protectionism - local graduates must have jobs. The government cannot control who the private sector hire but they definitely can control who the civil service and stat boards hire.

2. Protectionism 2 - the civil service and stat boards are filled with local graduates, and when they are asked to hire someone, who do you think they will hire? Someone who graduated from a familiar local university or someone who graduated from an unfamiliar overseas university?

3. Lack of understanding of overseas education system - unlike Singapore which aims to have only 25% university graduates, and hence the small number of universities, first world countries' philosophy is educate their people to their fullest potential. Hence they have a lot of universities. Not every university can be Harvard or MIT. There are first tier, second tier universities and so on.

There is no department in the civil service to evaluate these overseas universities and tell the ministries and stat boards which are good and which are bad. The decisions are left to the HR department of each ministry and stat board. Some HR kiasi and thus reject all overseas/distance learning degrees to play safe. Moreover, their directive is to hire local graduates, so why waste time on researching overseas universities? Some HR is more open minded or had done their research on overseas universities. It is because of this that we always read about different experiences encountered by overseas / distance learning graduates at different government employers.

In the private sector, aka the real world, your performance is more important. If you can't perform during the probation period, you will asked to leave, local graduate or not.

So my advice to people who can't get into local universities is not to hear from the naysayers. If you can afford it, go overseas for your degree. If you can't, a distance learning degree is just as good. What's more important is the knowledge you learn from it and how to apply it in your career. If your aim is just to pass and get a paper certificate, then no university can help you. Lastly do your research on the foreign university, whether it is a first tier university in their home country.