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.
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.
Here’s an interesting article about distance education that was published by a news station in Madison, Wisconsin. Despite the fact that it’s targeted at adults who want to go back to school, it contains a good overview of distance education along with some valuable warnings about what to watch out for when picking a program.
My brother, David, and I are in the process of developing a web application to make the work of building professional high school transcripts (suitable for submission to colleges) fast and easy.
Traditionally, the process of building a transcript for a home schooler has been quite involved. My own parents and I designed my transcript using an Excel spreadsheet. It was painstakingly slow! Many books on home schooling through high school have transcript templates in them, but the process of photocopying and filling them out is time consuming.
It is because of this that we decided to create Teascript, a web application that makes generation of transcripts simple. Teascript is still under development, but we’ve put up a teaser page highlighting some of the planned features of the application. The page also allows you to sign-up to receive notification when Teascript goes live. We encourage you to take 30 seconds and check it out!
We truly want this app to be a useful service to other home schoolers. Comments or suggestions from people who will actually be using it are much appreciated. If you think the idea is worthy, please also consider sharing the link with your friends or blogging about it. The more home schoolers who know about this app, the easier it will be for them to generate transcripts.
One question I received after the distance education workshop at NCHE this year was if ITT Technical Institute is accredited. I assume the attendee who asked was considering them as a possible distance education provider.
The answer is yes, ITT Tech is accredited, but not by a regional accrediting body. Regional accreditation is what to look for when choosing a good distance education school because regionally accredited schools have met very high educational standards. Also, if a school is regionally accredited it is typically easier to transfer college credit into and out of the school.
This goes back to the question of what your ultimate educational goals are. If you want to earn a degree that will generally be recognized by employers as being from a quality institution, regional accreditation is a must. If your only goal in attending school is learning a skill that you will then put to use in your own business or in an employment scenario that is less strict about such things, regional accreditation becomes less important.
The bottom line is that you should opt for regional accreditation as often as possible. For more information on the various types of accreditation, check out this article.
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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
