Un-College

            To be quite honest, I love the idea of the un-college.  To work with mentors and get real life experiences while working on higher education goals makes sense to me.  As I have thought about my return to college as an adult to finish both my undergraduate and graduate degrees, I thought up a list of things that Un-College students would benefit from (that would not apply to traditional college students). Here they are in no particular order.

1.  No erroneous college fees and administrative costs.  You are not paying for an athletic fee that you will probably never use, or paying other fees that you do not even have the faintest idea of what they apply to.

2. You will probably not incur student loans.  The price is right and there probably aren’t any highly priced textbooks that can be sold back for a whopping ten dollars. 

3. This mentor system intrigues me.  Not that I didn’t have a great set of professors guiding me through school; but there are the few that aren’t as helpful.  This system seems that it would bring in the people that want to help the student.

4. College Requirements: I had an associates and one year of bachelor’s under my belt when I decided to return to college six years later to complete my degree.  The logical answer to how long it took would be about 1- 1 ½ yrs to complete a four year degree.  Wrong.  It took three more.  So much had changed with education degree requirements that I had to take multiple classes to finish up.  I don’t see this happening with Un-College- especially since the program usually takes about three years to complete. Oh and my question still remains unanswered-if teachers needed to know all of the new things I learned, did they have to go back to school too?

5.  Most of the school is online or while you are out in the field.  In the education programs, I am shocked to see how late students are volunteering/observing/teaching in a classroom.  Some get to this point and decide it isn’t for them.  Sure classroom experience is great, but it is no match for the real world.  Un-College promotes this.

So was this blog a rant about my experiences, or a plug for Un-College? I’m not sure.  I just hope it works out as well as it seems.