Have you recently decided to go to school? Maybe you’re a first-timer  with your sights set on grad school and then a corporate job. Or maybe you are returning to school after a long break and lots of real-world work experience along the way. Whatever your story, odds are financial aid will be a part of your college tale. The average four-year state school education costs over $50,000.  And it’s going up more than 7% a year, which means that even if you put money aside, you need to be earning a pretty decent interest rate to keep up with that kind of inflation. Then there is ...

Welcome to part 3 of our series on distance learning.  You can check out past posts on whether online classes are right for you and what the significance is of accreditation for distance learners. Today, I am focusing on financial aid for distance learning. Here’s the good news:  As long as you are attending a nationally accredited program (here’s a link to a list of accredited online schools), you are eligible for the same federal and state financial aid as a student attending a brick and mortar school. This also applies to most private scholarships, although some scholarship...

As promised in last week’s post, Is An Online Degree Right For You?, I am back this Monday still talking about distance learning.  Specifically, we are going to take a look today at the accreditation of online programs — what is it and whether it’s important.  Let’s dive right in. What is accreditation? According to the U.S. Department of Education, the goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality. The DOE meets this goal by publishing an annual list of accredited schools in the Uni...

Not everyone graduates from high school at the age of 17, packs up all their worldly possessions in the back of a beater car, and drives across town — or across country — to enroll at a quaint little college on the hill. Whether it’s because you need to earn money NOW, or you just aren’t sure if college is the place for you, or any of a myriad of other reasons, the traditional four-year plan to a Bachelor’s Degree at a brick-and-mortar college is definitely not for everyone. The good news is that in the last decade, your options for education have grown exponentia...