I’ve known that for years. I did pretty well by myself when I went to my alma mater–in fact, between the college jobs and the scholarships, I actually managed to make money by going to college. Bonnie, however, owes, as do many of her friends, some of them quite a bit indeed. Looking into the future, I see the problem being a big one for Sparrow. Moreover, it’s a big one for me, because I’ll be the one expected to pony up for a good part of it.

Seeing as the world economy is heading into who knows what, I have to think about what might be cheaper ways to get a higher education. Part of the cost of college is the facility of the very ivy-ed halls that make the college catalogs so attractive. The burden is very trying indeed when you are trying to lay down a foundation degree: what is the point of paying extra student fees for that? But there are other ways.

One way is distance learning. Talked about in science fiction and World’s Fair kiosks for decades, it is really coming into its own now in this Web 2.0 world. Classes are flexibly held where you want, and when you want, from a desk at home to a coffee shop to seat on a bus. Instead of fitting your job around your classes–the typical bane of the early-twenty-something–a young person working to earn their education can fit their classes around their job.

An excellent example of this sort of open learning arrangement is Online Management Courses”>Kaplan University. An affiliate college of the University of Essex, Kaplan University is an entirely on-line institution that offers such programs as Foundation Degree in Business & Management, Foundation Degree in Entrepreneurship–very important these days–Foundation Degree in Internet Marketing, and Foundation Degree in Criminal Justice. Kaplan’s clean, attractive site, easily navigable, allows you to virtually tour their virtual campus, request chat with Kaplan’s representatives, request actual calls, or easily and quickly download other information. The enrollment process culminates in a phone interviews, to discuss the learning habits and interests of the applicant. The costs seem reasonable.

The Kaplan experience includes forum posts with classes of no more than twenty people, replicating the university classroom experience. This is the exciting part, so far as I can see: instead of just getting textbooks and plodding through online work, you actually get to interact with other people in the program, sharing and enriching the experience, working with others, completing projects, and getting feedback from the instructor. This is well-adapted to the online community orientation of today’s youth. Instead of interacting on Facebook, for instance, the students will do the exact same thing with their Kaplan classmates. It seems the perfect intersection of online leisure activities and class work.

And it is real work, taking real amounts of time. Each course of study is broken into sixteen modules, each of which lasts about fifteen weeks. Taking one or two modules at a time, it would take a minimum of two years for the degree–while it is an online educational experience, Kaplan University is a very real and serious one.

Bearing this in mind, I may recommend that Sparrow, when she gets around to going to college, use an institution like Kaplan to keep her educational costs reasonable, and her time flexible.