Degree completion programs come in all shapes and sizes. Colleges, both online and campus-based, take different approaches toward helping adult learners get back to school to complete their degrees, all of which can work, depending on your particular needs. Here are some examples of how schools work with students returning to college.
Bellevue University, a Nebraska-based private school with an accelerated online degree completion program, allows students to transfer the 60 or so credits they have already earned for an associates degree and apply them toward a 120 credit bachelor degree in one of several career-focused majors like criminal justice administration, healthcare management,
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web technology or business. Even if you don’t have a complete associate’s degree, the school has a liberal credit transfer policy that will allow you to apply a significant number of credits you earned previously. And like many other schools, it has “articulation agreements” with a long list of community colleges and other schools that it will accept 100% of your credits from. If you bring in the maximum number of credits and actually have the time to take classes on an accelerated basis, many of the school’s accelerated bachelor degree programs (both online and on campus) can be finished in about 12 months. Even if you need to work at a slower pace, you can still get a pretty past college degree. Closing out your studies in 18 months is a fairly realistic goal. Bellevue’s approach is indicative of what many colleges offer in terms of degree completion.
All Kinds of Accelerated Degrees
Post University, another large player in the online learning arena, offers not just bachelor’s degrees on an accelerated basis, but also associates degrees, graduate degrees and even certificate programs in about 40 different areas including health care and nursing, psychology, marketing and early childhood education. Post offers courses in 8-week accelerated modules. It’s a nice format, which allows the student to dive deeply into just a few subjects at a time, finish them and then move on to another small group of accelerated modules, rather than taking eight or ten courses that stretch over six months and all involve lengthy research papers and big mid-term and final tests. Quite a few other schools have adopted this module approach to effectively let their online students learn subjects in slightly smaller “bites.”
An example of a smaller, more traditional school that’s gone into online teaching with a particular focus on accelerated learning is Tiffin University, an Ohio schools that’s been around since 1888. Tiffin is focused on just three bachelor degree completion programs: a BA in Professional Studies, a BBA in Organizational Management and a BCJ (Bachelor of Criminal Justice) degree in Justice Administration. All are offered either on-campus or online. These programs are for students who have already finished “approximately” two years of school already. The school is flexible about allowing “non-traditional” students (a popular term for adults with families and jobs) to finish their degree in under two years. Tiffin’s approach of offering a limited number of specialized completion degrees is not unusual. Although you can quickly find a huge variety of accelerated degree programs at the large online schools like Phoenix and Walden, you’ll probably need to do a bit more searching if you want to find a completion degree program at a smaller or more specialized school.
Finally, be aware that just because you are an adult returning to school, it doesn’t mean you can’t get the same kind of financial aid as a brand new high school graduate just starting college. Make sure to raise any questions you have about financial aid while you are discussing credits for your degree with an advisor at your chosen school.