College Degrees Online Is Within Reach As A Rural Student

It used to be the fodder of comedies about the country kid coming to the big city to make his future. What many may not realize is it underscored something that is endemic of the 20th Century, i.e., rural settings have struggled for years to provide career opportunities for their children. Unless they are going into agriculture, when country kids graduate from high school they can’t find jobs around their home towns. Many times they have to move even to go to college, which also tends to center in metropolitan areas. Some demographic experts call this out-migration.  This is changing and a student can now earn anything up to and including a distance learning PhD.

This is thanks to recent technological innovations and more and more towns may have a solution: online education. Country kids can choose to earn their degrees through the e-learning programs and can improve their employment prospects. To top it off, benefits come from continuing to live in their home towns.

There innumerable studies proving online degrees give any graduates a leg up in the employment world. A number of corporate recruiters will testify online graduates have a matching skill set for a profitable worker, including good time management abilities, strong self-motivation skills, and technological know how.

The only problem with all this is access. Many rural districts are missing one critical element for distance learning: broadband access. They lack the needed communications infrastructure to move beyond dial-up modems to DSL or T-Lines. Most online schools require high speed connections for many of their educational tools to work effectively such as streaming video, real-time chat sessions and downloading textbooks in a timely manner. Broadband allows students to hookup from home without having to worry about cable, putting them on an equivalent playing field as his or her classmates. Further, once they graduate they can now find jobs that require telecommuting, or web-based jobs, instead of having to move to the big city for employment.

Another factor making online education a natural fit for rural America is cost. Recent studies show virtual schools cost about 40% less than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, even though the price of advanced education is still considerable. This is particularly critical for rural areas, which tend to be economically depressed.

Here are some other options regarding the cost factor. Many rural students work and then go take their classes after hours. Further, they can talk to their school’s financial aid officers to see what kinds of grants, scholarships and even, thanks to Obama’s latest educational initiatives, tax credits are available to them.

This does leave one last challenge. A final obstacle for new users, especially rural ones, may not have the physical tools necessary for online education. Many rural kids are not accustomed to communicating with peers and teachers they aren’t within eyesight of. That picture is changing though. More and more kids are finding e-learning as a fact of life. Millions of kids between kindergarten and high school today are either fully online or taking blended online/in person classes.

So it looks like your distance learning college or bachelor degree is a true alternative for rural students. It can even mean that going to the big city for your online degrees is a road that doesn’t need be taken.