Choosing a college to stick can be a very daunting task. Not only are there a lot of institutes out there vying for new students – there are a total of over 4,100 private and public 2- and 4-year institutions, with nearly 18 million total college students as per Info Please – but what makes your journey even harder is that aside from simply choosing a campus, you also have to choose a course, and finally, decide whether you want to study locally at the dorms or learn from home, in order to support a job and other obligations while you learn.
Your choice is made even more significant by the fact that it’s financially irreversible. College tuition costs have risen dramatically in the past few decades, at a much faster speed than other common lifetime costs like car or home ownership as per Time Magazine, and despite a growing number of applicants year in and year out, less and less people are actually capable of completely affording a college education straight out of high school.
This means many college students are professionals revisiting school after years of proper job experiences, with the goal of finishing their studies and furnishing their resume with an additional hallmark to present to discerning human resources departments.
As such, schools not only cater to young, fresh-faced students, but also hardened professionals looking to step up their game, or just do something different with their time. Curriculums are adaptive, courses become flexible, and learning methods vary from circumstance to circumstance. So how do you choose the right place and way to learn among this maelstrom of academic choices? Well, it’s a step-by-step process.
Figure Out What Skill Set You Need
When it comes to choosing college courses, your exact major doesn’t matter quite as much as knowing what it is you probably want to do in the future, as per Forbes. Now, those two may sound related, but the truth is that college is best used to attain two things: a degree, and a skill set.
The knowledge you build in college is useful in many hard sciences and areas of rigorous study, like law, physics and medicine, but in soft courses like English, Psychology and Marketing, what matters more is that you utilize your time in these courses to work on skills you’re weak at (public speaking, writing, research, online communication), and to capitalize on and improve skills you feel you are very good at.
Choose a Reputable Institution
Once you’ve decided for a course that can help you work on your skill set, improving your strengths and building on some of your weakest spots, it’s time to go over what schools in your area offer the best courses for such skills.
Remember that one particularly relevant skill in today’s workforce is online communication, best built though pursuing a degree through an online Christian university like CBU Online. Through an online college, you can also eliminate on-campus costs and benefit from a more flexible work and study schedule.
