Advice on earning a college degree through distance education.
The Online Education Database has published their second annual online college rankings. This is a good reference if you have several distance education schools in mind and are trying to decide between them. The metrics gathered appear to be very thorough, though my own alma mater, Thomas Edison State College, didn’t make the list for some reason, despite the fact that it is fully accredited.
The Teaching Home is a magazine for Christian home educators. A few years ag, they published some suggestions for parents and students who are considering higher education. If you’ve been wondering what the Biblical motivations and goals behind higher education should be, this is an excellent read.
While the price of a college education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation, many careers for which colleges prepare their graduates are disappearing. U.S. News‘ Best Careers guide concludes that “college grads might want to consider blue-collar careers” because B.A. diploma holders “are having trouble finding jobs that require college-graduate skills.”
I worked hard to get good grades my first few years of college. My last year, I was tired of the whole college deal (and was working full time in my career field already) so I didn’t stress out quite so much about getting straight A’s.
I still got a decent GPA, but in the end it didn’t really matter since I’ve never had a potential employer ask about my grades. They generally only care about whether or not I can do the work.
Being good at book learning rarely equates to being good at any particular job.
Does studying for 60 to 80 hours a week, pulling all-nighters and not having time for socializing describe your college life? It describes 25-year-old Jon Morrow’s, and in this retrospective essay he questions whether it was worth it.
Get Rich Slowly is a personal finance blog that I track regularly. One recent post was about how important it is to have actual job experience after graduating.
The premise of the article is that a typical college grad won’t have any experience and will be forced to take an entry-level position as a receptionist or mail clerk. Gradually, the grad will be able to work him/herself up to a more interesting position with better pay. The author gets it wrong, though, when she says that working a boring post-graduation job is inevitable.
It’s true that a grad coming from a traditional college setting typically has little choice in the matter. But by earning a degree through distance education you can get the “peon job” period out of the way while you’re studying and be ready to enter a better paying, more interesting job upon graduation (if not sooner).
Why prolong the process of securing a decent job if you don’t have to? Distance education leaves your schedule flexible enough to accommodate experimentation in a variety of job fields without suffering through the post-graduation doldrums of a boring entry-level position.
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Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth
by Ben Shapiro
Accelerated Distance Learning
by Brad Voeller
Baker’s Guide to Christian Distance Education
by Jason D. Baker
The Harsh Truth About Public Schools
by Bruce N. Shortt
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question
by John G. Miller
