Today I came across in interesting school I had not heard of previously. It’s Charter Oak State College, a school that was established in 1973 by the Connecticut legislature in the town of New Britain. It’s been involved in online teaching since 1998, when it introduced its first low-cost distance learning programs in an effort to be “Connecticut’s public online college.”
Today, Charter Oak is extremely focused on online college completion degrees, both at the bachelors and associates levels. Like a community college, it’s programs are career-oriented, with degrees in business, health care, public safety and technology/IT. To maximize it’s value for adults who want to complete a degree, the school allows transfer of up to 87 credits in from other schools and gives credits for passing CLEP tests. With a mission statement saying it wants to “advance the nation’s workforce,” Charter Oak steers clear of programs that don’t have applications in the real world.
The school has a nice diversity in it’s student body, with 63% of it’s students being female and about 13% African American. A whopping 92% attend school part-time, an indication of the tremendous concentration of working adults in the student body.
Unlike many other state schools that have taken a rather half-baked approach to online degrees, Charter Oak has gone full bore into this type of education. Its website is smart, very marketing-focused and open and honest about fees. There’s no reason to hide tuition costs – the school’s tuition rates of $203. per credit for in-state students and $275. per credit for out of state students are about half of what some other online schools charge. Here’s where you can get information on Charter Oak State College.