Patten: Questions you should ask about online schooling
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When I wanted to go back to school, I didn’t know where to start.
At the time (2012), local colleges offered a lot of their classes during daytime hours, and I would have had to drastically adjust my work schedule. Even if I could have juggled it, running back and forth between work and college would have been like being a comic book character constantly switching between his super and secret identities, and we all know how well that worked for Peter Parker.
Online schooling was the logical alternative, but it took me time to get over the stigma. I didn’t want to pay-in time and money for something that employers would find worthless.
But I found that just like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, some online institutions are well-respected, while others fall more into that worthless category. My research led me to getting a bachelor’s degree in information technology from Salt Lake City-based Western Governors University. I completed all my classes for graduation last week, and overall WGU was everything I hoped it would be.
But what worked for me may not work for you.
I’m not an education expert, but from the perspective of someone who spent months looking at online programs and then actually completing one, here are some questions you need to ask:
What do you want?
Do you even need a degree?
If all you want is training or personal edification, you may be able to save yourself a lot of cash and grief. There are plenty of massive open online courses covering every topic you can imagine, from computer science to art history. And best of all, many of them are free, at least if you don’t want a certificate saying you completed the class. Check out Coursera, EdX, Khan Academy and iTunes U to get you started, but there are many more offerings than those out there! A lot of these courses are offered by experts and “established” schools like Stanford and MIT.
And don’t forget less formal offerings. YouTube is full of lectures on countless subjects. And something as simple as a book may be all you need!
What are you willing to pay?
You shouldn’t attend a school solely because it’s “prestigious.”
Take a good, hard look at income and expenses. You want to add as little to the $1.3 trillion student loan debt in the United States as possible. Check out grants and scholarships you might be eligible for.
And if you need to take out loans, don’t just take the first one offered to you – read the fine print. How soon could you pay it off? How much would your monthly payments be?
Also, what do you realistically expect your income will be when you have completed the program? Will it offset what you paid for it? If you buy a truckload of potatoes for $2 a sack and sell them for $1 a sack, you have invested poorly.
How much time can you spend?
Give this question a lot of thought.
Are you married? (Do you want to stay married?) Do you have small children at home? How many hours a week do you spend at your job? How long is your commute?
Find out what the typical course load for your possible school looks like and make sure you can make the commitment. It would be a shame to take out loans and work so hard only to find you can’t complete what you started.
How is the school perceived?
This goes back to figuring out what you want from your program.
Will your target degree from your chosen school get you past the gatekeepers in your industry or at other colleges (if you want to go on to get a higher degree)?
A good indicator is if your potential alma mater is accredited. This is more than a yes or no answer. There are different kinds of accreditation. This video explains it pretty well.
Also useful is looking at forums, blogs and social media pages to read what current students and alumni are saying. (Marketing materials probably won’t give you the outlook you need.) You’ll learn through the experiences of others about how the degree you want is actually regarded by the outside world, and how the students themselves perceive the degree and the school in general.
How flexible is your school?
Will you have to take a set amount of credits per semester? How many? Will you typically have weekly assignments — a possible euphemism for busy work — or is most of your grade determined in a big exam?
And what happens when life happens? You can sit down and calculate college costs. You can be a calendar master. But crises have a way of being unpredictable.
I ran into this during my time at WGU when I was diagnosed with a serious health problem and needed to be on medication that sapped my energy and affected my memory and focus. Unfortunately, WGU could not give me more than three months off at a time. I toughed it out, but even being able to take six months off consecutively would have helped me a lot.
How flexible are you?
Depending on what you want to do, you may not be able to do everything completely from home. If you’re in something like a nursing or teaching program, you’re going to have to step out of your living room and interact with people face to face. Even with my computer programming degree, I had to go to testing centers from time to time.
If you live in a rural area especially, you need to make sure you have the transportation and time available to go to other locations as needed.
A warning
You’re not going to find the perfect school. You’re going to have to compromise in some areas – just make sure the compromises won’t come back to bite you hard later.
Also, be sure the time you spend on choosing an online program is actually productive (even if you’re just eliminating possibilities) and not nervous procrastination. If you are committed to going back to school, you’re going to have to take that leap sometime.
Happy learning!