Want to Complete Your Degree Online but Don’t Know Where to Start? What Worked For Me as a Working Parent
It was 9:42 on a Tuesday, and I had 17 tabs open on my beat-up 2019 MacBook, each promising I could earn my bachelor’s degree online in 12 months for $500 a credit. Half a peanut butter cracker was stuck to the space bar, my 7-year-old’s spelling test was tucked under the trackpad, and I still hadn’t folded the load of toddler socks that had been sitting on the dryer since Sunday. I’d had the thought for three years: I should finish my degree. I just had no clue where to even start clicking.
I dropped out halfway through my junior year 11 years ago, six weeks after I found out I was pregnant with my oldest. Rent went up that same month, and the part-time daycare spot I’d lined up cost more than I made at my front desk job. I packed my textbooks into a cardboard box for my parents’ basement and took the full-time admin job at the local elementary school where I still work. I like the job: I get the same holidays off as my kids, and the health insurance is decent. But the pay scale bumps sharply once you have a four-year degree, and the student support coordinator role I’ve eyed for two years requires one. Every few months, I’d sit down after bedtime to look into online programs, and 45 minutes later I’d close my laptop more confused than I started. All the ads looked the same, all the advisors talked too fast, and I couldn’t shake the fear I’d sign up for something, waste a thousand dollars, and flunk out because I didn’t have 10 extra hours a week to spare.
The next morning at work, I complained about the 17 open tabs to Rita Henderson, a second grade teacher who’d earned her master’s online three years prior while raising two teen boys. We stood by the copy machine, and she pulled a crumpled neon pink sticky note out of her lanyard pouch instead of the generic “you can do it” line I’d gotten from everyone else.
“First step isn’t looking at programs,” she said. “First step is pull your unofficial transcript from your old school. Don’t pay for an official one, just the free PDF off their student portal. Save it to a folder, and that’s it. You’re done for the week.”
I told her I’d assumed my old credits had expired after a decade, that I’d probably have to start all over. She shook her head. Most general education credits don’t expire, even after 10 or 15 years. Only specific career-focused credits, like nursing certifications or upper-level computer science, usually have time limits. For a general bachelor’s in education or liberal arts, nearly everything would transfer. That night, after both kids were asleep, I sat down and did it. I had to reset my password three times because my old college email was linked to an AOL account I barely checked, but 12 minutes after I started, I had the PDF: 58 credits, mostly A’s and B’s, one C in biology, one D in intro stats. I closed my laptop and didn’t look at another degree-related thing all night. I’d thought starting had to mean filling out an application, writing an essay, and committing to two years of work that first night. It turned out the first step was smaller than loading the dishwasher.
The next week, I stopped by the district HR office during lunch, a step I’d put off for years because I assumed we got no tuition help. I asked one simple question: what kind of tuition benefits do we offer for employees taking classes? She pulled up the policy in 30 seconds. The district covers $2,500 a year for any accredited degree related to school work, and pays the school directly, so I never had to front cost and wait for reimbursement. She also handed me a flyer for our local state university’s online degree completion program, built specifically for people who’d dropped out with 45 or more credits and wanted to finish part time.
I almost didn’t look at it. That same week, an ad popped up on my Facebook feed for a big national online school that promised I could finish in 18 months, no application fee, no essays. I’d already entered my phone number into the form before I remembered Rita’s next tip, when I’d run into her by the mailboxes: check regional accreditation before you give anyone your contact info. I backed out and looked it up. Regional accreditation is the baseline recognition that means your degree counts for district pay bumps, future jobs, and grad school if you ever want to go. A lot of the fast, heavily advertised online schools only hold national accreditation, which many public employers and traditional universities don’t recognize. It takes two minutes to check on the U.S. Department of Education’s database. The national school I’d almost applied to wasn’t regionally accredited. The state school was.
That weekend, after pancakes while the kids watched Bluey, my partner and I mapped out my available time before I talked to an advisor. I didn’t rearrange drop-offs or beg my mom for regular childcare. I just added up time I already spent scrolling my phone while waiting: 45 minutes every weekday morning before the kids woke up, when I usually browsed Facebook over coffee, and an hour every Wednesday evening, when my partner took both kids to his mom’s for dinner. That added up to just under five hours a week, no extra favors or schedule overhauls. When I talked to the program advisor, she pushed me to sign up for two classes my first semester, said most working adults did two to stay on track. I said no. I signed up for one three-credit educational psychology class, plus two one-credit gen ed classes to hit the 60-credit minimum. If it worked, I told her, I could add more later. If it was a disaster, I only had one real class to withdraw from.
I’m three semesters in now, with 17 credits left to go. It hasn’t been neat. The first week, my toddler had an ear infection and I was up half the night, missing the first discussion post deadline by 14 hours. I emailed the professor, and she wrote back in 20 minutes saying no problem, turn it in for full credit whenever I could. Most people in the program are in the same boat, she said; lectures are pre-recorded, and they don’t grade on showing up at a set time. Last fall, I had to withdraw from a child development class halfway through when my oldest needed his tonsils out and I spent three weeks swamped with follow-up appointments. My advisor didn’t give me grief or charge a penalty, just signed the form and told me to re-enroll when things settled. I filled out the FAFSA in 22 minutes one night, using the tax form I already had in our kitchen file, and a small Pell Grant covered the $112 I owed for books and fees after tuition benefit kicked in.
Last night, I sat at that same kitchen table working on a paper about classroom behavior support, and my 7-year-old climbed up next to me with his dinosaur coloring book. He colored while I typed, and didn’t ask for my attention once for 20 whole minutes. My coffee went cold halfway through, and I still found that same peanut butter cracker stuck under the space bar when I cleaned the keyboard last weekend.
I don’t know if I’ll get that coordinator job when I graduate next spring. I don’t even know for sure I’ll want it, by the time the diploma arrives. Some weeks I look at my to-do list and wonder why I added one more thing to the pile of permission slips and laundry and work deadlines. What I do know is I spent three years stuck because I thought I had to have the whole path mapped out before I could take the first step. I thought I needed enough savings, enough childcare, enough free time to do it “right.” I didn’t. I just needed 12 minutes to reset an old password and download a transcript. Everything else got figured out one small choice at a time, in the cracks of the life I already had.
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