Flexibility

In an online college class, you are not required to be in the virtual college classroom at any specific time of the day. Instead, you simply involve yourself in the class discussion and do your schoolwork at any time that’s convenient to you, even if that means you’re typing away at the computer at three in the morning after you’ve gotten the kids off to bed. You can take as many or as few classes as you can handle. While there are still deadlines in an online class, the times you choose to devote to your work is entirely up to you.

Work Experience

Most college students find that it’s nearly impossible to go to school and work a full-time job. However, the flexibility of an online school can allow a student to work full-time and go to school part-time without all of the time restraints of having to be on a campus four times a week for three hours a day. This can lead to valuable work experience in your field that will set you ahead of traditional college students after you graduate. Because you’re able to go out and get a full-time job, you can pursue a career in your field even before you have your degree, and you won’t have to worry about your work and school schedules conflicting. This will make your degree much more marketable than it would be for someone with just a degree and no real world experience.

Check out our entire selection of online college degree at Online Degrees Today including mba degree, business degree online, online law schools, nursing degree online and more.

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Look for Schools with Accreditation

In the U.S., there are six main college accrediting agencies: Middle States, New England, North Central, Northwest, Southern, and Western. When you looking for a school’s accreditation, make sure that they list one of these agencies or provide contact information for one that is not listed here. Some schools list fake accrediting agencies and even create websites for them. This is not good for you for two reasons: one, schools that are accredited by national accrediting agencies have been deemed competent to offer postsecondary education, and two, some employers and graduate schools will not accept degrees from non-accredited colleges. Therefore, it’s important to choose an accredited school.

Take Note of the Program Requirements

If you want to finish your online degree as soon as possible, then you’ll want to look for a program that allows students to take as many courses as they want each semester or quarter. If you want to take very few courses a semester, then you’ll want to choose a school that has a program that doesn’t have a graduation time limit. Furthermore, if you can’t commit to being online at a certain time each week, then you’ll want to make sure that the school you choose doesn’t have class times in which its students are required to be present in their classroom.

Consider the Student Amenities

The best online universities will offer online students the same amenities as campus-based students. This includes things like financial aid, professor office hours, a career services department, job placement services, an online bookstore, an email account, and access to an online library. Ideally, studying at an online college should not be much different than studying at a campus. If a school that you’re considering does not offer these amenities to their online students, then you may want to consider applying to one that does.

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Medical student Clarence Lam marveled at the feast that a drug company sponsored this spring at the Inner Harbor’s upscale Capital Grille.

The night’s appetizer was seafood, the entree was filet mignon and dessert was cheesecake.

“They paid for everything,” recalled Lam, 26, who attends the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “They even covered the wine.”

Like other drugmakers, Novartis Pharmaceutical Co. sponsors such events to woo practicing doctors and to promote its products to future physicians such as Lam. It’s a common marketing tactic that is raising concerns on medical school campuses nationwide. Medical scholars and student groups have called for tighter restrictions on industry access to the nation’s medical students.

The Association of American Medical Colleges has a task force investigating the issue, and several medical schools have adopted policies that restrict such marketing. Officials at UM and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine are considering similar rules.

Is marketing to people in medical school going too far for the Pharmaceutical companies?  Whether pharmaceutical companies will continue to woo future doctors or not will be looked in to by Association of American Medical Colleges.

News 8  Austin has this story:

Manuel Munoz is a junior in high school, but he’s already taking college courses at Austin Community College.

“I’m taking some history courses so I can be ahead both in college and in high school,” he said.

Munoz doesn’t have to pay a dime. He’s part of ACC’s Early College Start program. It’s one of several programs ACC offers academically eligible high school students.

ACC President Stephen B. Kinslow said the college encourages minority students to take part in school and hopes they’ll be more inclined to stick to the college life.

“It’s not just about getting people in the door to college but helping them to be successful,” Kinslow said.

Next fall, ACC predicts 25 percent of it’s population will be Hispanic. If so, ACC will become a Hispanic Serving Institution. Under the current Higher Education Act, ACC would then be eligible for more state and federal funds.

“Texas risks not having enough educated, highly skilled workers to meet the needs of business and industry. Providing access to affordable higher education is the solution to those challenges,” Kinslow said.

This is a great way to ensure that Texas continues to have skilled, college-educated workers.  These high school students who want to earn their degree can get ahead by taking college courses now.

Many career fields are seeing an increase in the numbers of foreign students. This is especially prevalent in medical school.  The Washington Post recently posted an article on diversity at med schools.
 
The six members of Medical Team 4 have a lot in common. Each wears a white coat, has a stethoscope for a necklace and has stayed up late this week. They can all start an IV and work up a solitary lung nodule.

They share something less obvious, too. With one exception, none has a grandparent born in the United States.

In the past 15 years, U.S. medicine has seen a huge influx of first- and second-generation immigrants. It follows and augments a different demographic trend that began 30 years ago with the acceptance of increasing numbers of women into medical schools. As a result of that earlier revolutionary change, half of new practitioners today are women.

The Norman Rockwell-Marcus Welby image of the American doctor — an avuncular white man, often in a bow tie — is rapidly disappearing.

From 1980 to 2004, the fraction of medical school graduates describing themselves as white fell from 85 percent to 64 percent. Over that same period, the percentage of Asians increased from 3 percent to 20 percent, with Indians and Chinese the two biggest ethnic groups.

As the American population becomes more diverse, so will professionals in many fields.  Regardless of ethnicity, the need for doctors and healthcare workers will continue to attract students to the field of healthcare. 

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration has proposed new rules aimed at clamping down on conflicts of interest in the student loan industry.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings had previously said she would issue the rules about this time and the department publicized the proposed rules Friday.

The action comes amid high-profile investigations into the student loan industry by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers in Congress. They have accused the Education Department of failing to police improper relationships between student lenders and colleges or their employees.

Cuomo’s investigation unveiled arrangements between universities and lenders in which schools received some of the money lenders made from loans at those schools. And in some cases, the investigators found schools or loan officials were given incentives to place loan companies on a school’s preferred-lender list.

The Education Department’s proposed rules state that schools must have at least three companies on a preferred-lender list and must explain how they were selected.

The regulations are expected to be finalized in about a year. Congress may act more quickly.

The House recently passed legislation aimed at tackling the problem of too-cozy relations between universities or their employees and the loan industry. The Senate hasn’t yet acted but is expected to in the near future.

Just because some universities have questionable relationships with lenders doesn’t necessarily mean that you are getting a bad loan.  It just means that they might be putting their best interest ahead of yours.

Why Create More Work?
There are several reasons why workers don’t use all their vacation time: having too much work to do to take a vacation (36%), not being able to afford a getaway (34%), wanting to save vacation time for emergencies (32%), and worrying about coming back to an excessive workload after a vacation (15%).

Taking a “Mental Health Day”
When people do take time off, it’s often used in ways unrelated to vacations. In fact, nearly a third of respondents (31%) said they use the time to run errands, such as doctor visits, and 30% said they often use vacation time as “mental health days” to cope with stress.

Make the most of the time you DO decide to take of.

• Choose the vacation that best meets your needs. You may need a peaceful retreat from stress, or you may benefit from something more active and exciting. Avoid the kind of vacation that will leave you even more exhausted than before.

• Plan ahead for your time off. Take practical steps to manage your workload with your upcoming vacation in mind. Try to wrap up important projects before you leave. Don’t leave behind time-sensitive tasks that only you can handle.

• Enlist help. Ask a trusted coworker to back you up while you’re away and offer to return the favor. It’s much easier to relax when you know someone’s got you covered.

• Have no regrets. You earned the vacation, so enjoy it!

You deserve some time off, and your family will appreciate you more when you are less stressed.  Balancing a career and family is always a challenge, so dont add more stress by not taking some time for your self.

American men in their 30s today are worse off than their fathers’ generation, a reversal from just a decade ago, when sons generally were better off than their fathers, a new study finds.

The study, the first in a series on economic mobility undertaken by several prominent think tanks, also says the typical American family’s income has lagged far behind productivity growth since 2000, a departure from most of the post-World War II period.

Are You Better Off Than Your Parents? 
In 2004, the median income for a man in his 30s, a good predictor of his lifetime earnings, was $35,010, the study says, 12% less than for men in their 30s in 1974 — their fathers’ generation — adjusted for inflation. A decade ago, median income for men in their 30s was $32,901, 5% higher than 30 years earlier. Ms. Sawhill said she isn’t sure why men’s wages have stagnated. “It seems there’s been some slowdown in economic growth, it’s possible that the movement of women into the labor force has affected male earnings, and it’s possible that men are not working as hard as they used to.”

The study suggests that absolute mobility — the rate at which an entire generation’s lot improves relative to previous generations — has declined. But within a particular generation, individuals can still get ahead if relative mobility, the rate at which the rich and poor trade places, remains high. Poor fathers may have rich sons, and vice versa.

The report also found that between 1947 and 1974, productivity, or output per hour, and median family income, adjusted for inflation, both roughly doubled. Between 1974 and 2000, productivity rose 56% while income rose 29%. Between 2000 and 2005, productivity rose 16% while median income fell 2%, challenging “the notion that a rising tide will lift all boats,” the report says.

One sure way to increase your salary potential is to hold at least a bachelor’s degree.  The more education you have under your belt will help to ensure that you remain on the higher end of the salary scale.

Does dating a coworker jeopardize your career? Do you try to keep a relationship secret or formally announce it? What’s the company policy? Spherion’s latest Snapshot survey looks at these issues and how workers today feel about them. Here’s what we found:

Derailing Your Career. According to the Spherion survey, 41 percent of U.S. workers think openly dating a coworker would jeopardize their job security or advancement opportunities.

What’s the Company Line? More than half of U.S. workers say their employer does not have a policy regarding workplace romances, and 16 percent say their employer does have such a policy, according to the Spherion survey. Perhaps most noteworthy, nearly one-third of workers surveyed were not sure if their employer has a policy regarding workplace romances.

Mum’s the Word. When it comes to secrecy and office romance, Spherion found that 41 percent of workers who had a workplace romance said it was conducted in the open, while 35 percent claimed they kept it a secret.

Cupid’s Success Rate at the Office. Among those workers who have had a workplace romance, 30 percent say they dated for several months, 15 percent dated for several years, and one quarter resulted in marriage.

As with any relationship, approach with caution.  There are potentially more problems than good when cruising the office pool looking for love.