College Education

Last week Wal-Mart announced that it will offer 15% tuition assistance to as many as 1.4 million workers. Here are the outlines of the plan: To get the tuition assistance, employees have to work full-time for one year, or part time for three. They need positive job reviews. They need to enroll in American Public University, an online university that offers both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Wal-Mart and APU will allow some employees to receive college credit for what they have learned on the job. Offering college assistance to employees and their children is not a new idea. But Wal-Mart has taken the idea to a whole new level, by helping more than one million employees go to college. Seen from that perspective, Wa ...

"Some colleges offering 3-year bachelor's degrees" An article just published in USA Today, reports that a small number of American colleges are starting to offer degrees in three years instead of the traditional four. Justin Pope, author of the article, writes: "Not much else seems to be helping keep down college costs, so maybe this will: a three-year college degree." What colleges are offering three-year degrees? One is Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, According to Pope, Hartwick is the "most high profile school yet" to offer the option of completing a degree in three years. But other colleges have officially entered the fray too. A little online research shows that they include Chatham University, Purdue University the Uni ...

An article entitled "Will You Get Enough Financial Aid?" in U.S. News just reported some troubling news for students who are applying to college. Here's a summary of what the article's author, Kim Clark, has to report: Fewer students are getting financial assistance. "Fewer than 3 percent of all the colleges in the country promise that they will award enough financial aid to meet the full financial needs of admitted students in 2010," Clark reports. Loans are replacing scholarships. Clark writes that ". . . the downturn in the economy has forced a growing number of even the wealthiest schools to increase the amount of loans they plan to ask needy students to take." Colleges are looking at your home's value. According to Clark, so ...