[Music] Don't give up--
You can still do it, it doesn't matter
how old you are.
I didn't do the traditional college track
straight out of high school, I went back to
school when I was thirty.
You can do it at
whatever age you need to.
Online education at the college level
is more popular than ever and women are
leading the charge in fac,t women make
up-- get this-- 70% of the total online
college aged population.
Wow.
Not only do online
educations give a great return on
investment but the convenience of
attending class from particularly
anywhere it fits the needs and schedules
of today's busiest goal-oriented
women.
So here with all the insight is the
president of independence University
Eric Juhlin good morning.
Good morning.
Can you tell I'm pumped about this?
I'm very excited, thank you for having me.
No thank you for
being here, because I've actually thought
of doing online education so let's talk
about the popularity.
Sure.
Why so?
So what you're seeing today is
people really need flexibility to go to
education and to go back to college you
know, they have jobs, they have kids, they
have all these demands and online
colleges frankly, you know fit their
schedules.
Now all of them are flexible,
but what sets your online program apart?
We believe the right way to do it is
have a tremendous amount of student
support to help those students while
they're online-- So its student advisors,
its counselors, its interaction with
other students that's what makes Independence University
different is the amount of student support we
provide.
Every single student at Independence
University is assigned a student advisor
and they're part of a team that engages
with those students on a weekly basis as
they're going through school then if
they have problems or challenges we have
free tutoring 24/7, we have live people
that can help them on how to write term
papers and work through you know becoming better at written
skills.
So you have all these layers of support
built in to help the student and
engage with the student proactively
to make them successful.
You also help in
terms of career development when they're
done, it's not like okay you graduated,
move on-- You help them also move on.
We have a career services team that
starts engaging with students a couple
of months after school and they
work on interview skills and how to
dress and they do mock interviews at the
end and they help them with job
placement leads and help them find a job so
we're not about just education for
education sake we're about career specific
education to get in, get out, and get a job.
And what about credits from other schools
or some times those credits not
counting, how does that work?
We believe that we should
try to give a student as much credit as
we can for any education they've done
because think about what that does, that
shortens the amount of time they're in
school to get that degree to help them
get a better life.
And I know you have a
very high satisfaction rate, you do it
differently don't you?
We do, we don't run
semesters, we run classes four weeks at a
time and you take one class every four
weeks and at the end of those four weeks
we survey our entire population and
we're very proud we run about a 95 to 98
percent satisfaction rate.
Let's talk
about areas of study that people are
doing today.
Sure, we run all degree programs;
associate degrees, bachelor's degrees, and
some master's degrees, but what we find
are the most popular programs right now
our business programs-- like business
management and accounting-- and then the
medical field-- there's a lot of demand in
the medical field.
There always will be, yeah.
On our medical programs with the aging
population we're seeing strong demand
for that.
A lot of people out there will
say well it's online I don't really get
to meet anybody face to face but you do
something differently, there is an
opportunity.
We go around the country to
different areas periodically, and we hold
these group meetings and we invite all
the independents University students, all
the faculty that teach from that area-- I
go to some of them.
It's like a retreat!
It's like a get-together, a little family
reunion, for all the IU students and then
then they also have the graduation every
year where we invite all the Independent
students to come to Salt Lake City Utah
where we do all our graduations.
So you can study independently, but you're
never alone.
Never alone, in fact that's the
worst thing to happen you know, you don't
want to be alone, you need student
support, faculty support, student advisors,
career services, you need all of those
things to be successful in online.
So for someone out there that's been
dying to get a degree and says I can't, I
can't afford it, I don't have time,
I've got kids, I'm a single mom, you
would say?
You can afford it!
We have a whole team of
students, what we call financial planners, and they work with
every student to find scholarships and
financial aid that they qualify for in
grants and tuition reimbursement and
employer programs so that we help each
student design a plan that helps make
college affordable for them and so they
can be successful.
Go to our website it's
independence dot edu and once there they
can find out everything they need to
know.
Thank you so much Olga.
Appreciate it.
I just love your attitude too, so
passionate.
Also you can visit our website thebalancingact.com for more
information [Music]