Lencias

Been lurking, had to chime in. Regarding your response to Duna, the gentrification-concern dynamic is present around many wealthy private institutions residing in less wealthy areas, including Penn, Yale, etc. not just at USC. As an alum, I have my fair share of gripes about SC - including, like you said, gentrification of the surrounding area, as well as its overall corporate structure and I could go on and on - and make them known to anyone I talk to, but it fails to make sense to me how such biased generalizations about a university from, I presume and please correct me if I'm wrong, someone who has never attended the university should be relevant in another person's academic decision-making; and as far as communication goes, USC Annenberg is without doubt one of the top programs. And based on your generalization, I would say I never got friendly, "Fight on, man!" from strangers while walking through less-than-affluent neighborhoods central LA, but I definitely did quite often.

Submitted USC back in Oct, finished submitting the remaining eight over the weekend!: Ohio State, Michigan, UCSB, Illinois, Northwestern, Penn, Stanford, Cornell.

Based on my experience, all the non-ETS practices were harder than the ETS practice, and I consistently scored lowered on the non-ETS PT's than the ETS. But I found the actual GRE a little harder than the ETS PT, yet scored basically the exact same score I did on the PTs. *shrug*

Relating what rising_star and wanderalbatross said: Will the PSU degree specify it's from the online program? Or is it, for all intents and purposes, the same degree someone doing the program physically on-campus is getting?

"And I am looking at the schools in the Northeast where the Penn brand is stronger." Penn State != Penn. That said, globally and nationally, I feel like the Penn State brand is stronger than the ECU brand, but the on-campus vs online thing kinda makes it a tough call... I'm a fan of on-campus, person-to-person interaction, but you might be someone who does just fine with an online program, *shrug*.