I Graduated!/UMPI Degree Plan For Fiancé

[karaloehrer]

I always meant to do an “I did it!” post with my finalized degree plan, costs, and a HUGE thank you to this helpful group as I graduated with my Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration in General Management from Thomas Edison State University last year on 12/11/2020 but I imagine my catalog is outdated. This invaluable resource has truly changed the course of my life and I wouldn’t be where I am today without happening upon this forum. If you have contributed anything to this space, I have probably read it and taken a ridiculous amount of notes from it, so I greatly appreciate everyone here. Anyways, here I am, asking for help again as my fiancé is embarking on his own journey to get his bachelor's degree.

Working backward, ultimately my fiancé is looking to get his secondary/single subject teaching credentials in California. There’s talk, not an official offer, from his alma mater private high school looking to hire him as a chemistry or math teacher (pre-degree and pre-credential) this upcoming Fall 2022 if he runs their baseball program. There isn’t necessarily a rush to finish a degree but I think having his bachelor’s completed or mostly completed could help with salary negotiations and increase his chances as a candidate. We would also like to get him started in the process of getting credentialed so he has more options in the future, potentially a move to the public sector. I got email confirmation that the local teaching credential school will accept a UMPI bachelor’s as I was concerned about the transcript having most credits labeled as “CR” (Credit) and not graded. One day, we would love to go after our Master’s degrees together at Western Governors University. I’m looking into WGU’s Masters of Arts in Teaching in Mathematics Education (Secondary) leading to licensure as a possibility for him but the teaching credential process is a whole other world for me to learn about and we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. I am primarily focused on getting his bachelor’s out of the way.

As for our priorities, it’s the classic battle between time and money when going about this process and this time around, we are looking to save money as we plan on getting married next year. I recently jumped back into researching on this forum and it looks like UMPI is the way to go. So far, I am assuming his best course of action would be pursuing a Bachelor’s of Arts in Liberal Studies in Management as he has completed 90+ lower-level credits from various sources so he’d hopefully only need to do 30 credits at UMPI. Just to hit every box on what you need to know, my fiancé is 25 years old and although he applied for the FAFSA, we are prepared to pay out of pocket.

I attached a Google Sheet link below with a tab of completed credits and another tab with a degree plan I’ll fill in once I find out some more information. If possible, can you let me know if I am heading in the right direction and if I am missing anything?

Also, can we pause UMPI in between terms like Study.com? I can’t seem to find information on this. Let’s say we pay for and complete one term, can we hold off on paying and enrolling into the second term if we wanted to take a few months off? I ask because my fiancé’s baseball coaching job has on and off seasons throughout the year so we would like to plan which terms on UMPI’s academic calendar we would like to participate in.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y9V2MiSfshQPRRTLrWk2eVX5tq0na5aojauGR6nuN2k/edit?usp=sharin