Working a full-time job is hard enough and adding in a spouse, children, and other responsibilities life can quickly seem pretty busy. Like many adults you may be tired of your job and constantly think about returning to college. Returning to school as an adult really is not as hard as many people think. With a few simple tips you will find yourself managing your time better than ever.
1. Schedule Homework Nights
It is vital that you stay on top of your college assignments. Starting them the day or night that they are assigned is always a good idea. For most people the best thing to do is make a specific day of the week your “homework night” so your family knows when you need to be left a lone to concentrate. This also ensures that you are not waiting until Midnight to write your papers.
2. Find a Do Not Disturb Place (maybe not at home)
Find a place that you work well in. This may be your bedroom with your laptop, a local McDonalds or Starbucks Coffee shop, home office, friends house, etc. Just find a place where you can stay focused for several hours if needed so you produce the best possible results on your homework.
3. Get Plenty of Sleep
Adult college students that work late into the night on projects and rise early the next day for their full-time jobs often find themselves exhausted by mid-week. When our bodies are tired we are more likely to get sick, forget important information, and produce lower quality results. So get some sleep!
4. Keep Your Goal In Mind
When you started college you more than likely set a goal for yourself. For some it is getting a promotion, earning a degree, learning new skills, or just finishing something you started years ago. It is pretty easy to forget why you started school again as an adult with all the things that make for a busy schedule. Stay true to your goal and focus on what you need to do to complete each class you register for.
5. Stay Creative
The best ideas come from creativity…did I really need to say that? Well its true though. We have to be creative to find new and better solutions to everyday things we encounter at work and home. Creativity can easily be forgotten with a busy schedule so take the time to go for a walk, listen to CD, go for a drive, take smoke break (not promoting smoking), or whatever you need to do to clear you mind and think of some new possibilities in life.
6. Just Breathe
This is the easiest tip, but very often it gets overlooked the most. SLOW DOWN and just take a deep breathe. Refocus on your work, school work, or family and do what you need to do to get things done. If you have an idea for your assignment make a note and dive deeper into it on your homework night.
If you’re thinking of taking online college classes to qualify for a better job, get a degree or boost your paycheck, you’re not alone.
“When economic trends get tough, college enrollment has a tendency to go up,” said Michael Ball, associate director of Washington’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. “More and more schools are moving toward online course work. Just about all the major colleges have online classes.”
These days, services that offer classes from several online schools advertise heavily. One such, EarnMyDegree.com, has run an ad at the top of The New York Times Web site, nytimes.com.
Online classes are a tempting idea and can be a good one.
You can study on your home computer or, with a laptop, anywhere else, and make your schedule as flexible as you like.
Just do some homework before you pick an online school, officials say.
“Some are legitimate and some are not,” Ball said.
You can really mess up if you spend your money and time with an online school that — although it offers a curriculum and is not a considered a diploma mill — isn’t accredited or authorized by state education officials in Washington and Oregon.
If that happens, your effort and cash can be wasted — and it’s a gross misdemeanor in Washington to knowingly use a false academic credential.
Fortunately, it’s not hard to separate the schools that will advance your career from the ones that are worthless and even harmful.
In Washington, the coordinating board where Ball works in Olympia keeps track of such matters.
Online schools that operate here and seek authorization to grant degrees or certificates undergo intense scrutiny.
– For starters, they must be accredited by an agency approved by the U.S. Department of Education.
– And there’s a 15-page initial application form from the state board for degree authorization, based on state laws and rules. The form wants to know everything: tuition, fees, academic standards and responsibilities for students, financial condition, faculty names, degrees and where they were educated, on and on.
It’s a blizzard of details and technicalities.
But if a school makes the cut, the degrees and certificates its students earn are deemed valid and legal to get a job, obtain a license to practice a trade, or qualify for a promotion and increased pay.
“Basically, our job is consumer protection,” Ball said. “We’re here to help ensure that we don’t let someone operate in the state who can’t provide a quality education.”
Whether a school operates here or in another state, Ball can tell students whether it is properly accredited.
Among online schools that are authorized to operate in Washington are University of Phoenix, Capella University, Grand Canyon University and Argosy University, Ball said.
Kaplan College is authorized here but Kaplan University is not, Ball said.
An example of an online school whose degrees are not valid in Washington and Oregon is Canyon College, said Ball and his counterpart in Oregon, Alan Contreras, administrator of the Office of Degree Authorization in Eugene.
They said Canyon College is not accredited by an agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education and has no legal authority to issue degrees.
Indeed, Canyon College “degrees” would be considered a “false academic credential,” unlawful to use, Ball said.
A telephone call and e-mail from The Columbian to Canyon College officials were not returned.
When in doubt, students should contact officials with both states’ offices and find out whether a school is authorized and/or accredited. If you take a class in Southwest Washington but get a job across the river, you’ll need it to be valid in Oregon as well.
Students also should make sure they know a prospective school’s location and spell its name exactly right, to avoid mistaking it with another.
Public schools in Washington don’t need to be authorized by the board, nor do some Bible and seminary schools or schools that don’t operate in Washington.
“The definition of ‘operating’ includes a physical presence, a mailing address and/or phone number, or (they) are specifically recruiting Washington residents,” Ball said.
College catalogs in the future will reveal how much textbooks will cost for each course. The seven-page financial aid application form will be simplified into a two-page document. And universities will be required to report their operating costs to the federal government and explain reasons for raising tuition.
It took Congress five years — longer than it takes many undergraduates to earn their degrees — to pass the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which spells out dozens of regulations for the nation’s colleges and universities.
As the federal government irons out details of the law, which President Bush signed in August, schools can expect the wide-ranging measure to make a bold impact on campus life as it touches on areas including veterans’ benefits, tuition, safety and illegally downloading music.
CollegeInvest, Colorado’s nonprofit higher education financing resource, is helping families translate how the law — which is hundreds of pages long — will affect college affordability.
Officials at the University of Colorado, and schools nationwide, are waiting on the federal government to hand down the regulations. There are various deadlines for when they go into effect.
The Higher Education Opportunity Act calls for an increase in the maximum amount for Pell grants, the most common form of financial aid for low-income students. The maximum award for 2008-09 is $4,731. The law would gradually raise that amount over the next six years, bringing it to $8,000 in the 2014-15 academic year.
The increased funding would be a welcome step toward assuring that low-income students will be able to afford college, said Janet Gullickson, chief outreach and client relations officer for CollegeInvest. But she pointed out that the authorization for those amounts doesn’t guarantee funding by Congress. The federal financial aid budget hasn’t increased in the past decade, so grant money gets shuffled around — meaning that an increase in Pell grants is the result of the loss of money for another type of award, Gullickson said.
At CU’s Boulder campus, 3,538 undergrads received Pell grants in 2007-08, according to Gwen Pomper, director of the financial aid office. The campus enrolls about 25,000 undergraduates.
The lengthy “Free Application for Federal Student Aid” form will also be scaled back to a two-page document. The new form will make applying for financial aid a less daunting task, according to CollegeInvest. The organization and CU encourage all families to fill out the form.
“We tell students to go ahead and fill it out because they may be surprised that they are eligible for aid,” Pomper said.
About 72 percent of in-state undergraduate students completed the form last year, she said.
The new federal law will also lead to the creation of Web-based calculators that provide students and families with early estimates of college costs, and allow them to predict the annual and total cost of a college education based on each school.
Other measures include helping colleges recruit students with disabilities; creating a new scholarship fund for military personnel and their families; starting programs to bolster students’ interest in science, technology and critical foreign languages; and requiring schools to come up with ways to squelch illegal downloading.
By Brittany Anas (Contact)