Engineering Degree Online | Housing Bust creates online learning Opportunity

Posted by bposton on November 11th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

OK, I guess I shouldn’t call it a Bust…:-)

But the fact is that housing sales are down. Ah, but there’s a silver lining…

Why am I taling about housing sales and what does that have to do with an online degree?

Well, just hear me out my door room buddy, especially if you’re a Realtor…

The fact is that sales are down pretty much everywhere. According to the October 2006 Freddie Mac Economic & Housing Outlook, home sales for this year are expected to fall 9 percent from 2005 figure.

And projected sales for next year are even worse. To prove the point, sales of existing and new homes in August were down 12 and 15 percent, respectively, from 2005.

So what’s a Real Estate agent to do?

Try going back to school for that degree!

If you’re an agent who wants to remain competitive, then you should think about these points made by the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics:
 
1. As real estate transactions have become more legally complex, many firms have turned to college graduates to fill positions.

2. A large number of agents and brokers have some college training.

3. College courses in real estate, finance, business administration, statistics, economics, law, and English are helpful.

4. For those who intend to start their own company, business courses such as marketing and accounting are as significant as courses in real estate or finance.

Here’s some more facts and figures:

According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) Member Profile, back in 2001 about 26 percent of Realtors had bachelor’s degrees and they earned 30 percent more than Realtors without degrees.

The 2005 NAR Member Profile now shows that 20 percent more Realtors (46%) now have at least a bachelor’s degree.

So if the market is slowing and your workload is decreasing, maybe now’s a good time to consider getting that online degree.

Ben

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engineering degree online : Indiana distance learning skyrockets

Posted by bposton on October 24th, 2006 — Posted in engineering degree online

I read an article today that focused on the growth of distance learning just in the
state of Indiana.

Although the numbers here are specific to that state, I think they reflect the trend
across the nation - online education is growing fast and furious.

OK, so in Indiana alone, there were 104,000 student enrollments in distance-learning classes during the 2003-04 academic year, according to the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Nearly 90,000 of the enrollments were for online courses, which for that state is a 57 percent increase from the previous year.

If you took those students that were taking online classes under what would translate to a full time status, and put them all together in one place, they would phycially represent the sixth-largest university in the state - over 10,135 students. By comparison, Indiana University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne this year has about 11,000 students.

I’m pretty sure this is a nation-wide trend.

Distance education has been around in one way shape or form for over 100 years, but of course the delivery and quality of this type of education has changed drastically in the past few years.

This came about With the rise of the Internet, and now students can get degrees from prestigious universities in the comfort of their own homes.

Nonetheless, there still appears to be a sort of stigma with this term “distance learning” or “distance education”, which I guess is a throw-back to the correspondence courses Sally Struthers used to promote on late-night television commercials as a way to make more money.

Unfortunately, this stigma has been helped in recent years by the growth of online diploma mills, which essentially sell diplomas with little or no college coursework. A dark underbelly of this trend which can also be associated to the rise of the internet.

But the trend is good because local colleges and universities are trying to erase that stigma while they try to increase their enrollments and provide students a way to get a degree who don’t have time for a traditional college education.

So think about it. The person you sit next to at work, the waitress at the cafe, the solider in Iraq, or Afghanistan; there are people from all over the country taking online courses and getting their degree. And they all have at least one thing in common. A desire to improve their lives while maintaining their current lifestyle and schedules.

Ben

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