Take all the courses you can manage in a six-month term for only $3720!
No matter what sector, a good HR department is an essential element of a thriving workplace. HR professionals, in many ways, exist to help others succeed, and help the organization succeed in turn. But the skills required to serve in one of these critical HR roles are specific, and they take time, effort, and money to acquire. To move ahead in your career as a problem-solving, hard-working, organization-shaping HR professional, you need credentials! And while the world of HR is constantly evolving, and new best practices or even new laws emerge (requiring people in HR to welcome change and adapt), there’s a baseline of qualification that will set someone up for future success in the field: a bachelor’s degree in human resources.
Going back to school as a working professional can seem daunting, though, and for good reason. Most of the time, college is expensive and time-consuming, frequently with difficult course schedules and half-a-dozen (or more) entry-level classes before you get to the real meat of the program. For working adults who are already in their chosen field (or adjacent to the field they’d like to enter), that kind of costly, rigid structure is often prohibitive, regardless of how much a degree might help them advance in their career.
That’s where WGU can help. Right now, WGU offers a Bachelor of Science in Human Resource Management. For those with a bachelor’s degree who are looking to take the next step, we also offer a Master of Science in Management and Leadership (MSML), and a Master of Business Administration (MBA).
So, let’s look closer at those two most common obstacles—time and cost—and the ways in which WGU is uniquely designed to address them.
- “I don’t have time to go back to school – I have a job!”
A lot of brick-and-mortar schools cannot accommodate the work lives of older potential students, and a lot of online schools are for-profit (and therefore high-cost) or unaccredited. WGU, on the other hand, holds regional accreditation (the gold standard for university accreditation), as well as ACBSP accreditation for our business programs, while being a nonprofit, 100% online and flexible. WGU works wherever you are. You can do your coursework at night after working at your full-time job, while having your coffee before work in the morning, on weekends, while you’re traveling the world or on vacation—it’s entirely up to you. There are no set lecture times or in-person tests. You drive your educational experience.
Additionally, with WGU’s competency-based education model, you earn credit for a course when you demonstrate mastery of the material. It is common for our students to finish assessments early and move immediately onto the next course, especially when they’ve already been working in or near the relevant field. This shortens the overall amount of time it takes most students to complete a degree.
- “I can’t go back to school – it’s too expensive!”
Cost is obviously a—if not the—major factor when deciding whether and where to go back to school. WGU takes this extremely seriously, and we do everything in our power to make sure our students graduate as quickly as possible, with as little debt as possible (preferably none).
We keep our costs low: about $3,720 per six-month term. The exciting thing about WGU, too, is that the tuition pays for an unlimited number of courses in any term. So, as mentioned before, students can complete assessments as soon as they are ready, rather than waiting until a set date in the term to complete a course. If you test out of a course early and move onto the next one within the same term, that’s still covered by that term’s tuition. As such, you can fit as many courses as you can manage into a six-month term, all for that single flat rate. WGU isn’t interested in requiring a bunch of lengthy prerequisites that jam up your progress and fatten our pockets. We want to see you succeed, and fast.
It’s also worth noting that many of our students receive some kind of partial scholarship even though our tuition is low, so it’s always worth applying for those. You might just get one!
If you enroll at WGU, you’ll also be brought through our Responsible Borrowing Imitative. All students who apply for financial aid receive a personalized Financial Aid Plan, which recommends that students borrow only their “unmet direct costs”—tuition and fees minus any grants or scholarships. The personalized plan includes information about cost of attending WGU as well as links to financial aid tools and resources.
Since 2013, the average borrowing per year per student (of those who borrow) has decreased by more than 30%. And the average student loan debt of WGU graduates in 2019 (among those who borrowed) was less than half the national average.
WGU’s model works for HR professionals. In fact, B.S. Human Resource Management graduates report an average salary increase of $14,637 after completing their WGU degree. And on average, WGU graduates see an income increase of nearly $30,000 within four years of graduation.
If you’re ready to take the next step, WGU is ready to help.
To learn more, visit WGU.edu.