Types of College Degrees

Your college journey is also a personal one. What’s right for someone else, even someone with similar career goals, may not be right for you.

When deciding what type of college degree you want, ask yourself, what kind of journey am I looking for? The cheapest and fastest way from here to there, or a journey offering group learning, lasting friendships, and personal and intellectual growth?

There are two types of undergraduate degrees and two types of graduate degrees.

An Associate Degree is… Choosing College, career researchers Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta encourage students to put themselves in the driver’s seat when it comes to forging their personal college pathway. To use the authors’ analogy, it’s like you’re hiring the college to get yourself something important.

In an age of technological change and business disruptors, COVID-19 ushered in more changes, including changes to teaching and learning. Not only did the explosion of remote communication tools impact how young people learn and how some new degree programs are structured, it also impacted how people think about preparing for jobs.

COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of remote learning, and today many colleges offer remote or hybrid learning options that provide flexibility that can be especially helpful for students who want to hold down a job while earning a college degree.

Remote learning options may also help reduce the costs of getting a degree, reducing travel and living expenses and perhaps lowering fees too.

The world of workforce learning is also changing. Traditional linkages between college degrees and good jobs are being impacted by new, individualized and flexible approaches to job training. Researchers with EdSurge tell us that 4-year degrees remain the “gold standard” for getting good jobs, but there’s growing demand for reskilling that relies on online courses, microcredentials, or vocational certifications.

As young entrepreneurs create open-learning platforms for lifelong learning (think 2U, Udemy, and Coursera, for example), and technology giants (think Google and Microsoft) seek to influence workforce training by offering online “badges” and “certificates” in ways that support and promote their technologies, there’s significant potential for disruption to traditional college degree pathways.

College decision making can sometimes feel overwhelming, but whatever you study in college today and whatever degree you get now, you’ll probably need to learn new skills in the future, possibly for jobs or careers you never imagined would exist!

Putting yourself in the driver’s seat, learning about occupations at your local career center, chatting with a skilled and compassionate Academic Advisor, and not being afraid to find the degree program that will deliver on the learning and personal experiences you want — these are all positive steps that will help put you on a path to both satisfaction and success.