That undergraduate degree may just be the beginning … of another undergraduate degree.
By David Hodes
Most graduates of Northern Virginia colleges and universities have cycled through four or more years of coursework and called their education done. It was time to move on, get a job, be productive, earn a living and, ideally, do it in a field of endeavor related to their major.
That’s all the higher education they needed to make it in the workforce as they saw it when they graduated, and that’s why they chose the major, or the school, where their days of hunkering down were expected to finally pay off.
Then, reality kicked in. Life threw them a curve. The job changed, or they changed, or the market demanded more proof of academic firepower than evidenced in their original college degree. Or they may not have been able to get a job related to their original major at all. In fact, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, just 27 percent of all college graduates get a job in the field of their major.
The clear message: To get a better job, keep the current job or get a new job within the current field, it’s time to go back to school.
“Some of these professional fields, as they become more technology-driven, you have individuals that are trying to retool themselves,” Christopher Fleming, executive director of admissions for Old Dominion University, says. “Or they may have hit an earnings ceiling, or their industry may have decided that they are going to go in a different direction. So these people coming back for second degrees are trying to hone their skills and make themselves marketable again.”
Sometimes the decision to go for more education is all about timing … and economics. Dr. Ali Eskandarian, the dean of the George Washington University – Virginia Science and Technology campus and College of Professional Studies, says that there is a tendency to be anti-cyclical with the business cycle in academia. “In fact, when the times are not good economically, that is when people tend to invest in education since they have time, they are out of a job, and if they have some savings or get some loans, they try to prepare themselves for newer jobs,” he says. “In higher employment economic times, we tend to have fewer students because fewer people decide to study, and they can make more money by being on the job.”
Eskandarian says that at GWU there is a trend to go for a degree that is closer to the professional field that the person has been working in and that they want to change jobs or get a better position in their chosen field by adding to their existing knowledge and making themselves more marketable.
GWU has a second bachelor’s degree in nursing for people who have received degrees in other fields and now want to become nurses. They also have relationships with various community colleges in the Virginia system to allow students who finished their associate degrees with those colleges to come and get a bachelor’s degree with GWU.
Another second degree program at GWU is a post-baccalaureate certificate for pre-med students. “These are students who got their bachelor’s degree in various fields, not necessarily pre-med, but then decided that they wanted to go to medical school,” Eskandarian says. The certificate enables them to receive all of the correct educational training to be able to apply to medical school.
But sometimes he sees more head-scratching reasons for people coming back for second degrees. “For example, there is the landscape graduate program we have here,” he says. “And for the longest time most of the people who wanted to go to that were professionals who were tired of their professions and wanted to do something that was interesting to them. So sometimes we had doctors and lawyers who wanted to retire from their existing professions and find a more creative venue for their next endeavor, and landscaping was the kind of degree that they were seeking.”
Sarah Lindberg, assistant director of admissions for the University of Mary Washington, says UMW sees a lot of computer science students because these returning students are working out of the Marine base at Quantico, the base of the Marine research center that specializes in telecommunications. She also sees students coming back for second degrees in biology or English. “I do also see some administration as well, where maybe a student had a major in business administration and wanted to potentially sit for the CPA exam later down the road,” she says. “So they are looking for some undergraduate courses in accounting.”
Most admissions administrators agree that people coming back for second undergraduate degrees are overwhelmingly career-changers, with some going even further by pursuing a graduate degree as the better path to more earnings where they work. Some employers may prefer that their employee pursue a master’s instead of another bachelor’s as a demonstration of real commitment to doing more inside the company.
Employers are also more skeptical of the undergraduate degrees that come from nontraditional higher education, like distance learning and online coursework, as reported in Kiplinger magazine in a November 2013 article. Kiplinger noted a trend among job hunters today is to take the Graduate Record Exam, the entrance exam for grad school that anyone can take at any level of formal education, even if they are not planning on attending graduate school, and then use those scores on their resumes to entice employers.
The decision between getting another bachelor’s or pursuing a graduate degree instead should be made carefully. Fleming says there would be more costs involved in going for a second degree versus jumping into the graduate program because the incoming grad students could be eligible for federal programs such as Pell grants. Second degree-seekers only have scholarships and private loans available to them. “With every second degree, much of what you are eligible for as a student is going to be centered around loans,” he says. “So it’s kind of a trade-off, and you are looking at how much more ground can be made up with a master’s degree compared to another bachelor’s.”
But some students come back for a second undergraduate degree just to pass the time because, well, they can. George Mason University had 251 second bachelor’s degree students enrolled in 2014-15, but all were not just job changers. “We had an 84-year-old transfer [student] from Northern Virginia Community College a couple of years ago with an associate’s degree who was just a lifelong learner,” Darren Troxler, director of admissions operations at GMU, says. “We have some students coming back for a second degree who are just at a point in their life economically where they just have a pure passion to pursue another field. Occasionally you will see someone with a bachelor of arts in history or philosophy who suddenly 25 years later decided they want to be a system engineer or get a mechanical engineering degree,” he adds. “And that is a steep climb.”
Jane Todd, associate director for transfer initiatives at Virginia Tech undergraduate admissions, sees students coming back because of different things in their personal life. “Maybe they got divorced and decided to go back to school,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a single mother and she is now in a position to come and take courses.”
As a general rule, academia always tries to match employer needs with their course offerings, with the goal of being constantly relevant and responsive to the marketplace so they can keep attracting the next wave of students.
Fleming says that ODU is courting the rising entrepreneurs in the business world, structuring a curriculum around helping students achieve their entrepreneurial goals after they graduate with a bachelor’s degree with new courses such as how to start a business or how to do marketing analytics. “Those are programs where the average person may not know where to start, but this program is designed to assist you in making that transition into being a better informed and more educated entrepreneur,” he says.
Getting a second undergraduate degree takes a real commitment as either a full-time or part-time student because most area colleges and universities want to see that student on their campus, face-to-face with teachers during the day and, for some, at night classes, instead of doing the work online.
Even with the uncertainty some employers feel, online courses can be useful. Fleming says that the evolution of online courses has helped propel the idea of a second degree because it seems more convenient. Plus, some online programs are somewhat accelerated, he says, so students who already have the basic requirements taken care of with their first undergraduate degree can complete a second degree quickly.
The steps for admission into a second-degree program vary, but most institutions want transcripts from all other institutions. They will then review which credits transfer and which credits will not according to the type of degree being sought and charge a nominal application fee.
Some do not offer second-degree programs at all, such as James Madison University, and most don’t track the specific numbers of second degree-seeking students.
Other institutions will help place students using work experience that they convert into class credit, especially those coming from a military background in information services or cyber security.
But here is where things get a bit murky.
Eskandarian says that the universities in general have a hard time translating work experience into credit hours. “But in recent years, we have paid a lot of attention to that,” he says. “More and more, it is a trend among the universities to try to encapsulate that, but it’s not very easy to standardize it.”
He says that the reason translating work experience to credit is so difficult is that when people have work experience, they don’t have specific goals and objectives associated with that experience the way schools do with the development of the syllabi for the courses. “If the course says that you need to have the following five objectives to meet all of these by the time you finished the course, then in order to get the equivalent credit you have to be able to find a similar type of competency in the person’s work record,” he says. “And oftentimes, the work records are not encapsulated in that way.”
At Virginia Tech, the top three second degrees are in the engineering, business and sciences areas, Todd says. “Less so than in the liberal arts,” she says, “But certainly they can come for anything.”
When they apply as a transfer student at VT, Todd says, they have to apply to a specific major with the appropriate math, science and English for that major. “If they were a liberal arts major, there is a good chance that they did not have calculus or engineering, so they will have to complete that at the community college before they come to us,” she says. They would submit a transfer application, with transcripts from every school of higher education that they have ever attended. “If they are coming in as engineering majors for second degrees, we want them to have more of a strong mix of As and Bs, especially in math and science.”
Second undergraduate degree programs are a relatively new offering at institutions of higher learning, but they are growing in popularity, and schools are evolving to meet demand.
Eskandarian says that they are putting in place a new bachelor’s degree program in cybersecurity at their Virginia campus that is going to be launched fall 2016. “People who already have a bachelor’s degree can come there,” he says. “They can either get another bachelor’s degree in cyber security, or a select number can have a few cyber-related certificates that they can choose from, become conversant and proficient in one of those certificate areas, which will than allow them to be employed immediately.”
Fleming says what they do at ODU for someone seeking a second degree is reach out and try to find what that student wants to achieve. “We want to assist them in navigating the process for them, where they can get more bang for the buck,” he says. ODU wants those students applying for a second degree to think beyond the “next rung on the ladder.”
“Let’s think 10 or 15 years out,” he says.
(May 2016)