2026 Best Value Online Economics Degree Programs

The Ranking

Scored on median graduate earnings (40%), debt-to-earnings ratio (25%), in-state tuition cost (20%), and completion rate (15%). Full methodology and data sources below.

Which one to pick

With three options the honest answer is that the choice is smaller than it looks, but it is not a coin flip.

FAU wins on pure economics: lowest cost, competitive outcome. $4,879 in-state against $74,056 in median earnings is a better ratio than either alternative, and it carries the lowest debt-adjusted cost of any program on this entire site, finance and business rankings included. The caveat we will not soften: confirm the online Economics major is currently active before you apply, its program pages change by term and we could not fully verify current status during this research cycle.

Mizzou is the safer bet if you want fewer surprises. It has the highest completion rate of the three (75%), which is a genuine signal that students who start the program actually finish it, and Mizzou Online is a more established, better-resourced distance program than FAU's. It costs three times as much in-state, $14,837 against FAU's $4,879, for a median earnings outcome that is actually slightly higher, $74,661. If certainty matters more to you than saving $10,000, take Mizzou.

FIU is the weakest of the three and we are ranking it third for a reason, not just alphabetically. Its median earnings, $70,022, are the lowest of the three, its debt is the highest, $19,250, and like FAU it needs direct verification of current Economics-major availability before you apply. If FAU and Mizzou are both genuinely unavailable to you, FIU is still a reasonable choice. It is not the one to start with.

Why this list is short, on purpose

When we pulled the federal field-of-study data for economics bachelor's programs flagged as available via distance education, we got 21 rows. After filtering to programs with a real sample size and dropping schools where the "online" flag turned out to apply to a graduate credential rather than the undergraduate degree. A mistake we caught early in this research and want to be upfront about. Three programs held up under direct verification against their own admissions pages.

That's the honest number. Other sites publish "top 10" or "top 20" online economics rankings by counting any business school that offers an economics course or minor as an "economics program." We're not going to do that. If a program on this page stops offering the standalone online economics major, or if we find another school that genuinely qualifies, we'll update this page and note the change.

If none of these fit: the alternative path

Most people searching for an online economics degree are actually trying to build quantitative and analytical credibility for a finance, consulting, or policy career. Not trying to become an academic economist. If that's you, our online finance degree ranking and online business degree ranking cover a much deeper pool of verified, standalone online programs, several of which include economics coursework inside the major.

How this ranking was built

Every figure above comes from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard field-of-study data, cross-checked against each school's own published tuition and program pages. We did not survey these schools, and we do not have a paid or affiliate relationship with any of them. Read the full methodology page for the scoring formula, data vintage, and what we excluded.