Dr. Cop, Ph.D.

I was a member of the 12-year club. That means it took me well over a decade to finish college while working as a cop. Quite often you hear college graduates (civilian types) comment that they were members of the "5-year club," in that it took them at least five years to complete their bachelor's degree. Where they smarter than me? Certainly not; actually they just had it easier. How many of us "pushed black-and-whites" during the early morning hours while working the midnight shift and then went directly to class while our partners went home to sleep during the day? How easy was it to balance working rotating shifts with changing days off, evolving investigative assignments, extra jobs, court time, and writing term papers while trying your best to raise a family? You know who I'm talking about; that select group of cops who were sarcastically referred to as "the professor" by members of the shift or platoon. That cop is you (and me) who busted our rear-ends attending the "State University of Anywhere" and trying to study for that statistical analysis final exam in our patrol car, in the ghetto, while hearing random gunfire in the distance. For those of us still "on the job" and who started their career during the 1980s to early 1990s, the only way to attend college was sitting in a classroom when we should have been sleeping. It doesn't have to be that way anymore.

I learned early on the benefits of being a college-educated police officer, with employment mobility being one of the most notable. As an old friend once told me when drawing the comparison between having academic credentials and not having them, especially when applying for a security management position, "... not having a degree is like trying to enter an expensive restaurant without a suit jacket or a tie … you must have it to get in."

Around 1995, as I was pursuing course work in the "brick and mortar" traditional college, I noticed more and more universities were starting to offer classes online. Although not very popular then, primarily due to the fact that online education was considered relatively new and unproven, the idea of earning a college education via the Web has drastically changed over the last decade. The success of online degree programs and the exponential growth of Internet-based post-secondary education changed when common availability and use of the Internet grew similarly among the general population. In my estimation the prospect of an officer now attaining a college education the way most of us did in the past, by sitting in a classroom, is not effective when compared to the readily available technology-driven models.

The online advantage

Just look at some of the advantages of earning your degree online instead of the traditional classroom:

No class schedule: Class participation is literally 24/7. Since you work schedules based on providing services 24/7 as a cop it only makes sense to have the same flexibility when squeezing in time to take the class.

Gas is not cheap: I don't know where you live, but in Ohio the price of gas has been hovering around $3 per gallon. Additional costs would include a campus parking pass.

Time is money: You save time (and in theory money) by not wasting time driving back and forth between the police department, home and class. In some cases, semesters are not a full 15 weeks, but condensed, or completely without parameters, so that once you complete the class you can take the next one immediately. In effect, you graduate a lot faster.

College credit for police experience: You have to do a little research, but many "non-traditional" degree programs will give you college credit for the hundreds of hours of police training you have accumulated.

Police discount: Again, a little bit of research will save you potentially thousands of dollars when you find a program that will discount tuition if you are a current police officer.

What to look for in online ed

The list of pro's keeps piling up, especially if you have a spouse who constantly reminds you they do not see you enough due to your patrol schedule. However, there are a couple of issues you need to be aware of when searching for that online degree program.

Accreditation: It is an administrative process that is directed toward the degree-granting institution, but in the end it protects you, the student. Make sure your online school is accredited by the U.S. Department of Education and by one of the six regional accrediting bodies, which depends on where you are taking classes. If the school has this distinction, then your degree will be widely accepted by employers as well as other colleges and universities. In other words, earning your degree online is just as valid as if you earned it sitting in a classroom.

Diploma mills: Stay away from them. To a cop a diploma mill equals one thing: fraud. I recall a retired officer I knew, who bought a fake advanced degree from a diploma mill and would go from one security manager job to another. Each position was short in tenure, because it was not long before others found out his degree was purchased instead of earned, which always resulted in his termination.

Thanks to technology, times have changed. We prefer to text rather than talk, read e-mail on our phone, complete incident reports on laptops, and are even dispatched to calls for service through a Blackberry. It only makes sense that the old methods of learning would also ride the wave of change as they merge into the fast lane of the information superhighway, and give way to a better, more effective, process to earn a college degree as a law enforcement officer: the online way.

Web Links

• About.com: Distance Learning