Western Governors University has received a 1.2 million investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study how online college programs can boost college completion rates for low income students.

This initiative is part of the larger initiative of the Gates foundation to increase college completion rates for low income students.

“College enrollment rates have grown rapidly over the last 40 years, but completion rates have not kept pace” according to an article at the gates foundation website.

This will be an interesting study.  Especially if Western Governors University can find data that proves that online college education helps to boost completion rates for low income students.  That would be a major shot in the arm for the future of online colleges in my opinion and perhaps open the door to further grants from good charitable organizations like the Gates Foundation.

It makes sense to me that an online college can help lower income students.  A lot of, if not most low income students need to maintain some sort of job at the same time that they are taking classes.  So if they can have more flexibility in their ability to complete their college education, it only makes sense that it would increase completion rates. 

That is my own unscientific understanding of the advantage of online college programs for students.

It sure will be interesting to find out what the results of this study are after WGU completes it.  According to them, it will focus on :

• The effectiveness of the WGU academic model for low-income students ages 18-26;
• Interventions that improve the success and graduation rates for these students; and
• Federal and state advocacy efforts that address issues surrounding technology-delivered, competency-based education

There is a good article from the sentinelsource.com that talks about how online college degrees are becoming more accepted by employers.

Nearly 4 million people took a college course online in fall 2007, according to a survey of 2,500 colleges and universities by the Babson Survey Research Group, the College Board and the Sloan Consortium, a group of universities and colleges and suppliers of services, equipment and tools.

That is quite a large number of people taking online college classes, although I am not sure why their data is from 2007, that is quite a long time ago.  I am going to have to find some more recent statistics on the acceptance of online college degrees or its growing popularity to see where we stand right now if at all possible.

Here is a little tool that might help us gauge how popular online college education is becoming. 

This is a graphical representation of the total number of times that the word online college has either appeared in text printed sources or electronic online type sources. Now I am a little bit confused how the term online college would even be showing up previous to 1994.  But nevertheless it is quite clear from the chart that there has been an explosion in popularity of this term. Scientific results here? Well not necessarily but good enough for me.

Anyway, the article I referenced in the beginning of this post goes on to say about how important accreditation is and there is another good quote which I like:

“I think it’s becoming commonplace,” she said. “If a person has acquired a degree through online education I think it’s appreciated … It shows great motivation on the applicant’s part. We can’t all just drop out for four years.”

Great point!  I really think it should be appreciated if someone goes through the hard work and effort to get an online college degree.  A student taking on the task of any type of higher education should be applauded in my opinion, whether it is an online college education or not is a mute point. It is still a lot of hard work and effort with a lot of good intentions.

Pretty soon I am going to start sending out interview questions to several online colleges and start profiling them here right at AOnlineCollege dot com.  I want to do this because I think it is a good way of getting a bit more color on the online college choices available out there.

The online colleges I will interview will be accredited online colleges and will be scattered throughout the entire United States.  And after all why not?  That is by definition one of the primary selling points of any online college, that distance is an non factor.  So I am hoping to get a good sample to choose from.

More specifically all of the online colleges I interview at least for this first phase of interviews will be accredited by the DETC Accrediting Commission which is listed by the US Department of Education as the “nationally recognized accrediting agency” for distance education institutions. What that means in plain english is that the online colleges I interview will all have a accreditation from one of the most respected agencies in the United States.

The interview questions will cover just some basics of their approach to online college education and what they offer in terms of support and services to students.

Over time it will be interesting to see the variety of answers we get from the various online colleges I interview and hopefully you will gain something from the information and visit their sites if you find you want more information.  Feel free to use the search feature on this site to find info about specifics you may be looking for.

I just think this is a good way to start getting some information on some of the leading online colleges out there today. 

If you have any additional questions you want me to ask then please use the relevant ‘submit a question form’ at the very top of the site and I will be sure to include those questions as well.

I am excited about this project !  I think it will be fun to learn more about what popular online colleges are doing out there and what they have to offer. I hope this will be a good base to start with in terms of hunting for a good online college education.

Thanks for listening