College Scholarships for the non-traditional student (Tulsa, Stillwater: high school, universities, military)

[OneDayAttaTime]

Scholarships for Students Who are Considered Non-Traditional

A non-traditional student is an adult student age 22 and older. More and more adults and re-entry students are entering the classrooms each semester but it can be hard for non-traditional students to find college scholarships. If you are a "non-traditional" student, and you have had trouble finding scholarships, you might find some excellent resources here.

[nomore07]

Thanks for sharing the info!

Aside from the financial aspect, many colleges are turning away adult students in favor of recent high school grads. This has been my biggest stumbling block.

[TulsaArtist]

I find that hard to believe and very unfortunate, "turning away adult students in favor of recent high school grads". Many people, including myself, went in to the military to get the GI Bill and college fund. So right off the bat your automatically going to be a non-traditional student and likely starting at an older age. Plus many many people go back to college in their mid 20s early 30s in order to further their career aims. Often companies require that you have a certain degree of education in order to be promoted. Say you start at a company at one level, then a few years later want to get promoted, you go back to school to move up the ladder. Also, more and more a person is going to have several careers over a lifetime, often due to the rapidly changing nature of the modern economy and technology. A person who started off working in the automobile industry in Detroit for instance, is going to have to go back to school and "retool" to begin in another job or career. I have heard of companies that had to leave Tulsa because they couldn't maintain an educated workforce here and were constantly having to "import" people from other cities. If you wanted to move up in the company, you had to move away to get that education, and the company would likely bring in someone from another city to give that job too regardless. It really sucked if you were in some high tech or science related field where you do have to go back to school every so often, and or, you want to move up the career ladder and get a higher degree. Those higher degree offerings to a large extent, still don't exist in Tulsa because our small, new, colleges are too young and small.

Those instances, and many more, are why the numbers of non-traditional students have skyrocketed, and will continue to remain high. This is why it was SO frustrating for Tulsa to have been the largest city in the US without a publicly funded, graduate university, for so long. I knew so many people who had to leave, or couldn't move to, Tulsa, because there weren't the available colleges and courses to continue their educations here. It made me so angry that the old farts who make the decisions on where the colleges in this state go, and where the money still goes to expand them, apparently have no clue about today's world, and seemed to only consider colleges as a place where kids right out of high school go. That's absurd. Adults shouldn't have to rip up their families, abandon careers mid-stride, etc. in order to move to another city to do what they need to do. And it sure as heck doesn't make Tulsa, its companies and people, competitive with other cities who can offer colleges in them.

Look at the cities that are very successful, they often have great universities right in or near them. Why they decided to put OSU out in Stillwater for instance, and not in Tulsa,,, well, I know their reasoning. But why they continue to spend hundreds of millions expanding that campus and pitifully little on expanding the campus in Tulsa? When people here are begging for it. I have no idea. Imo, it would be far more beneficial to both OSU and to Tulsa, to put more effort into expanding OSU Tulsa at this time. It would improve the image, attractiveness, and the economics, of both.