I’m an education nut.  Yep, if I don’t know something that I want to know, I take 2 approaches, I pick up a book or get a degree.  Currently I have a bachelors degree and 2 masters, 1 in health science and the other in business.  The business degree was earned at the University of Florida MBA program on their 2 year professional program.  The university of Florida is a public university, yet, somehow they felt it was ok to charge me 5 times the normal tuition because I was attending part-time.  That’s right.  The University of Florida part-time MBA is run outside of the “normal” process of courses and degree programs at the University of Florida.  Why do they do this?  Pretty simple, they can charge whatever they want if they conduct the course through the department of Continuing Education.  So, in 2002, where the full-time MBA student at the University of Florida was being charged about $300 per class, the group of us in the part-time weekend program were being charged about $1500.  Same faculty, same class rooms, very different prices.  But short of quitting my job and attending full-time, I had no choice, so I and my company paid for the degree. Currently the part-time MBA program costs $36,000.

But, I’m not writing this to rant about the University of Florida MBA program, even though I think what they are doing represents at best an ethical question of a conflict of interest and perhaps at worst an illegal business that sells public assets for the benefit of a few professors and administrators.  But seriously, that’s another blog entry.  Apparently, I may have to write that one as well …

But this article IS about the high cost of post-secondary education, especially graduate programs available to working professionals, and a great web site that I just discovered that may be able to help find programs that are more affordable.  That web site is distancelearn.org created by the Florida Distance Learning Consortium.  This consortium was established in 1996 by the State Board of Community Colleges and in 2003 merged with the Florida Virtual Campus.  Their mission is to  promote the delivery of educational programming “via a technology enhanced educational delivery system.”   So, in 2007 they launched distancelearn.org.

This is a great site in that it consolidates all online educational programs in the state of Florida.  This was needed because it is generally very difficult to find public online degree programs using a typical Google search.  The for-profit online programs dominate the search engines and the advertising for online programs available.  DistanceLearn.org cuts through the clutter to provide access to all online educational programs available at state schools in Florida.  This is not to say that all are cheap, but they are more likely to be.  Not every school with an education mission acts as irresponsibly as the the University of Florida MBA Program.

Enjoy the search and study hard.

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