Nyack College was named a top school for earning a master’s degree in mental health counseling by OnlineMastersDegrees.org (OMD), an organization founded in 2020 to support the student search for online graduate level studies. Nyack’s Alliance Graduate School of Counseling (AGSC) was ranked at #9 after OMD researched and analyzed 31 counseling programs on a list of more 7,700 accredited schools. The OMD website’s data science team applied a proprietary algorithm to rank all qualifying mental health counseling programs. Data was drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and from the schools themselves.
“Our goal was to find the master’s programs that are making online learning a priority,” said Kyle Darland, co-founder of OnlineMastersDegrees.org says. “Each school in our mental health counseling ranking offers at least one partially or fully-online master’s degree option, and for a price students can afford.”
OMD’s data science team then applied a proprietary algorithm to rank all qualifying mental health counseling programs. Primary data points included:
• Number of online master’s programs in subject area
• Number of online students
• Online program tuition and fees
• Percentage of students offered institutional aid
• Amount of institutional aid awarded per student
Nyack’s recognition comes at a time when enrollment in master’s degree programs is on the rise. In October of 2021, the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) reported a 7.3 percent increase in first-time graduate student enrollment in Fall 2020. First-time, part-time student enrollment rose by 13.5 percent. The CGS report cites the growth of online and hybrid learning options as a primary driver of these trends.
Congratulations to Dr. Antoinette Gines-Rivera, AGSC dean, and her team of faculty and staff for their exceptional work, which garnered this remarkable recognition!