We collected tuition figures for 740 online degree programs — MBA, DBA, business bachelor's, BSCS and MCS — at 537 US institutions, verifying each against the university's official website. For 587 of the 740 (79%), no total program price was published. We had to compute it: per-credit price times required credits, per-term price times expected terms, each estimate flagged and explained per row.
What the medians actually are
| Program | Listings | Median total tuition | Share estimated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online MBA | 223 | $27,000 | 61% |
| Online MSCS | 103 | $26,250 | 84% |
| Online DBA | 35 | $48,024 | 57% |
Source: Online Degree Tuition 2026 (740 listings, 537 institutions). “Share estimated” = rows where no total price was published and tuition was computed.
How universities hide the number
The techniques are consistent across institutions. Per-credit pricing without a credit total on the same page. Per-term pricing without a stated number of terms. "Estimated cost of attendance" tables that blend tuition with living expenses until the tuition line disappears. Fees listed on a separate bursar page, never linked from the program page.
None of this is fraud. Much of it is legacy web architecture — pages built by different offices, never reconciled. But the effect on the student is identical to intentional opacity: the single most decision-relevant number, the total price of the degree, is the hardest number to find.
What the medians actually are
Once computed, the landscape is legible. Median total tuition: MCS $26,215; MBA $27,244; DBA $49,032; business bachelor's $50,480; BSCS $52,680. The spread within each category is enormous — the cheapest online MBA we verified costs under $10,000 all-in; the most expensive exceeds $100,000. Students comparison-shopping without total prices are navigating that 10x spread blind.
The honest footnote
Our own dataset includes five programs operated by ACLAS itself — flagged in the operator_owned column. We publish them for the same reason we publish everyone else's: a tuition benchmark that excludes the publisher is a marketing document, not a dataset.
Every figure in the dataset links to the official page it was verified against, and every estimate shows its arithmetic. If a university publishes a total price we missed, tell us — we'll correct it with attribution, per our independence charter.
Data currency check. Re-verified 2026-10-19: 740 programs, 537 institutions, 587 estimates (79%) — all medians unchanged (MBA $27,000, MSCS $26,250, DBA $48,024). Tuition figures move slowly; we re-scrape quarterly, and the next scheduled refresh is 2027-01. If a university has since published a total price we estimated, tell us — the estimate gets replaced with the published figure and the changelog records it.
— Study Intelligence, from Online Degree Tuition 2026. 740 programs, 537 institutions, CC-BY-4.0.
Study Intelligence is a research initiative by ACLAS College.