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Featured Articles on OnlineEducation.com

As part of an ongoing commitment to provide students with clear and comprehensive guidance on online education and degree programs, OnlineEducation.com offers a broad range of informational resources on relevant topics in the field of higher education. These articles are meant to complement our rigorous research and reporting on specific online degrees, on trends in online learning, and on careers in fields linked to particular academic programs. The features section includes general interest stories, in-depth reports, and practical guides that delve into a wide array of subject areas, extending beyond online education, and reaching out into the larger world of knowledge and scholarship.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Employer-Led Approaches to Closing the Skills Gap

The rapid evolution of work due to technology, innovation, and globalization has had profound effects on the labor market, but educational systems have not been able to keep up. As a result, many young professionals feel ill-equipped to enter the workforce.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: New Collar Jobs

By 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that there will be two million vacant American tech positions. Given the rapid advancement of technology in the workplace, jobs will require an even more diverse mix of traditional skills and computer proficiency.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Public-Private Partnerships

The growing interest in public-private partnerships has been encouraged, in part, by governmental policies being put into effect. These are policies that propel reskilling and new collar job initiatives, and help prepare high school students for immersion in the new collar economy

Reskilling for Tomorrow: The Nonprofit Per Scholas Partners with Tech Companies

Learn about the innovative training nonprofit Per Scholas and how they support reskilling efforts in the American tech industry.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: The Reskilling Gender Gap

Women make up only 13 percent of engineers in the U.S. One of the few areas in STEM that they do outnumber men is in mathematics. But the average total earning potential of a statistician, math teacher, or professor is closer to the starting salary of a civil or mechanical engineer. This pattern is not confined within healthcare and STEM. It’s also observable in professions like sales, real estate, administration, and management, among others.

Reskilling for Tomorrow: Who Should Pay for Workers to Upskill?

Learn about trends in employer-led upskilling, reskilling, and how the face of the job market has changed with technology.

Short-Term Pell Grants: Opportunities and Risks

When the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) became law last year on July 4, community college and trade school administrators popped the champagne corks and celebrated. That’s because a key feature of the Act involves the introduction of short-term Pell Grants that fund brief educational programs.

Social Media Dos and Don’ts for College Students

Social media activity can impact the lives of college students with short- and long-term effects; online personas affect not only a person’s immediate circumstances, but also one’s future ability to secure a mortgage or job.

Social Work Month 2023: An Expert’s Advocacy Guide

Social workers are a vital part of our society, providing vital services to individuals, families, and communities. They support those facing poverty, homelessness, abuse, and neglect and assist people facing various other issues. Social workers also advocate for their client’s rights and interests in the political arena by working with local, state, and federal government bodies.

Socially Connected Professors on Twitter

Platforms like Twitter allow users to communicate with others beyond their direct connections. This sort of access allows even the most underserved student to connect with professors from schools like MIT and Harvard. This article explores the top twenty-three socially connected professors on Twitter.

Stanford and Google Launch AI Quests to Teach Responsible Artificial Intelligence

Students learn that bias in AI systems causes harm and that data collection requires consent, yet traditional instruction rarely shows how these concerns arise when building and deploying actual systems or what decisions address them in practice.

Staying Competitive: How to Upgrade Your Employability Online

There are myriad professional training and certification courses available online, many for free. Professional certification can be one of the most effective ways to improve your employability and ensure career growth in the long-term.

Strategies for Winning Scholarships

As higher education costs continue to rise, scholarships are becoming increasingly important for many university students, especially those who want to minimize or avoid student loans. However, these days, winning scholarships can seem like a daunting challenge.

Strategy Guide: A Playbook for Online Student Success

During the past two decades, online education has democratized access to learning, specifically with respect to geography and time. By illustration, a farmer in the American heartland may be hundreds of miles from the nearest university, but she can still enroll in an MBA program; or a nurse may have a demanding work schedule at a local clinic, but he can simultaneously pursue his graduate degree in nursing at an institution located six states away.

Student Debt Relief: How “Plan B” Relies on This 1965 Law

In late June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden Administration’s student debt relief plan, holding that the program lacked authorization under the 2003 HEROES Act. Biden’s program would have wiped out $430 billion of debt by canceling at least $10,000 of federal student loans for qualified borrowers with incomes under $125,000 per year. It didn’t take long for the President to unveil a new strategy at a White House press conference only hours after the ruling.

Student Guide to Phishing Attacks

Hackers and scammers use a continually evolving set of tools to break through computer security. One of the primary modes to get access is phishing, or sending fake emails from speciously reputable companies in hopes of gaining access to credit card numbers, bank accounts, or other sensitive information. This guide helps students identify and respond to phishing attacks.

Student Loan Forgiveness: “See You in Court” Say PSLF Advocates

According to government data, PLSF enrolled more than two million borrowers through certified employers in December 2024. They include public school teachers; doctors, nurses and other clinicians who work for nonprofit hospitals; firefighters and police officers; public interest lawyers; and military employees of the Department of Defense. The program incentivizes people to choose lower-paying jobs and careers crucial to society’s functioning by offsetting some of their financial sacrifices through student loan forgiveness.

Student Loan Forgiveness: Answers Borrowers Need Now

The U.S. Department of Education’s launch followed decades of expanded federal education funding. Those efforts started with Sputnik-era and Cold War math and science initiatives, followed by President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Higher Education Act of 1965, which attempted to open college access irrespective of any student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic background.

Student Loan Forgiveness: Could the New Administration Claw Back Your Award?

Alarming reports that employees from billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency Service (DOGE) gained access to computer systems inside the U.S. Department of Education containing student loan records. Millions of borrowers who’ve benefited from student loan forgiveness programs worry that the new administration could suspend or reverse their discharges.

Student Loan Forgiveness: Why Economists Say Income-Driven Plans Are Always Superior

The Clinton Administration’s introduction of the first income-driven repayment (IDR) plan for student loan borrowers in the early 1990s was a milestone in the history of higher education finance in the United States. For the first time, borrowers struggling with high loan balances and limited earnings could elect a payment option that provided relief from the burden of what were, in many cases, unaffordable monthly payments required by the standard plan at that time.

Student Loan Forgiveness? Rate Slashes in New GOP Plan

The bipartisan Affordable Loans for Students Act (ALSA) from Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) would cut interest rates on existing and new Direct Loans to only 2 percent from the 6.5 to 9 percent range most borrowers currently pay at the time of this writing in April 2025. That works out to a 69 percent decrease from the rate undergraduates pay, along with a 78 percent decrease from the premium PLUS loan rate paid by graduate students and parents.

Student Preference for Online Learning Jumps 222 Percent In Only Two Years

Educause’s October 2022 survey of 820 university undergraduates across America found that student preferences for online learning had soared by a sensational 222 percent since before the pandemic. But oddly enough, that newsworthy figure appears nowhere within the language of the report.

The $335,000 ChatGPT Skill Savvy Online Students Need to Know

Anyone who interacts with an AI chatbot to elicit desired responses from that system engages in their own form of prompt engineering, which some have described as the most valuable computer skill in history. As shown in this guide, some prompts are more effective than others. Online students who can optimize their prompts by applying the principles, best practices, and tips we suggest will likely obtain more useful results from AI systems in less time.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Degree Programs

The challenges for online students are well documented. We do not talk enough about the strengths that online students bring to the classroom. Recognizing the experience and passion that adult learners bring to the classroom is fundamental to supporting students.

The Affordability Gap: Why are Many Public Colleges Beyond Low-Income Students’ Reach?

A surprising new National College Attainment Network (NCAN) analysis finds that many public four-year and community colleges remain financially out of reach for students from low-and moderate-income families.