Rural Students Benefiting From Earning Their Degree Online

Many a cartoon was built on the country bumpkin coming to the big city to make his or her future. What many city slickers may not know is it was representative of a problem of the previous century.

Country living has many a virtue, but they have struggled to give the same opportunities as their urban counterparts. Unless they are going into agriculture, most country kids graduate high school to few job opportunities in their local arenas.  Even the colleges they need to advance themselves are mostly located in metropolitan areas. So they leave. Some call this out-migration. 

That was the 20th century, this is the 21st. There is now a solution: online education. Rural students are choosing to earn their degrees through online universities. This solution comes with a side benefit; graduates greatly improve their employment prospects while they stay in the comforts of their home environment.

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.

There is one other factor that makes this an attractive consideration: cost. Virtual schools, on the average, cost much less than their on campus counterparts, even if advanced education is still expensive. This can be tough for rural areas, which are more likely to be economically challenged than the suburban and urban students.

That’s where another advantage of online colleges could come to play. Many rural students can work and then go to school after hours. They can also talk to the schools to see if they can get financial aid packages that could include grants, possible scholarships and even, thanks to Obama’s latest educational initiatives, tax credits.

That leaves only one last obstacle. Many new applicants, especially rural ones, may not have the right tools for online education. They are not accustomed to communicating with fellow students and professors they haven’t studied with face to face. 

That problem should be temporary. Social networks such as Facebook have become a fact of life. Further, millions of children are already taking either fully online or blended online/in person courses.

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