Traditional college wasn’t built for working-age adults with scarce time, resources or flexibility to attend college. Calbright is designed to provide that support – making a career-boosting education accessible. Cindy Carney, who heads Calbright’s Medical Coding program, sees how much that support matters for her students every day.
“I meet with students who are taking care of their families and working full time,” she said. “I have a student who has an autistic son and she’s also raising her nephew. I have a student whose father has Alzheimer’s and she just went back to work full time because her husband lost his job. None of them can study at a traditional college. Calbright is the only way they’re going to get the skills and training they need.”
Carney understands how hard that is for them, and how to help, because that’s how she got her education, too. She was that student.
“I went back to school at 42,” she said. “I was an online student, working full time, raising my children, taking care of my grandmother.”
It was incredibly hard, and she was working with systems that didn’t understand her needs. But it changed her life.
“The opportunity Calbright provides is what I needed when I was doing it,” she said. “I get how difficult it can be for students to want to log in. And I tell the students this in our kickoff sessions: Being an online student is a challenge. Because it takes a lot of self-discipline. But without these opportunities, we’d be stuck. So it’s a challenge I’m grateful for.”
That knowledge, and empathy, for what adults who want to enroll in college are struggling with impacts the way Carney teaches, and the way Calbright listens.
Finding Another Chance
College wasn’t supposed to be for Carney. Her family said so.
“I spent my junior year of high school homeless, our family living out of a hotel, and I wanted to go to college,” Carney said. “I always wanted to go to college. But my father told me he wasn’t going to pay for me to go to college because I would be taking a job away from a man who needed it to support his family.”
So she did what she was “supposed” to: got married, had kids, and got on with life.
But her father had been wrong, of course: Covering the cost of living and providing for a family in California requires almost everyone to have a job, even when they already have full time jobs as parents and caregivers. And so Carney still found herself working, but without the college degree she’d always wanted. “I didn’t have any experience,” she said. It seemed like she’d missed her chance.
She took a job as a nursing assistant – “hardest job in the world,” she said – and worked in a skilled nursing facility for 18 months. Then she worked in a hospital for three-and-a-half years. In 2001, she got a job in a doctor’s office. That’s when she realized that maybe, with a lot of hard work, she could have another shot at higher education.
“I started at the front desk, and moved into referrals. Then they asked me if I wanted to learn how to do billing, and I said yes. And when I realized that medical coding was part of billing, it was like ‘yep, I’ve found my niche.’”
The job lasted until 2009, and when she was looking for work again she got the opportunity to teach medical billing and coding at a local community college, taking over a class for an instructor who was going out on medical leave. “So I kind of got thrown into the deep end of the pool,” Carney remembers, “and yes, by that point I had the work experience. But I really wanted to go to college to get a degree in what I was teaching!”
Once she started, she didn’t stop. She got her associate’s degree, her then bachelor’s, and even her master’s in healthcare administration, all online, while working and caring for her family.
“I don’t know how I did it, people ask me and all I can say is ‘time management,’” she said, laughing. “But it’s turned out to be a great learning experience and I absolutely love what I do.”
Now it’s her turn to help other people do it, and thanks to Calbright’s unique approach to online learning for adult learners, she can make it easier for her students than it was for her.
“What makes me passionate about Calbright is we are offering an opportunity that so many others probably have always wanted, but wasn’t sure that it was in their grasp,” she said. “That’s the fire that keeps me going. That’s my motivation for our students. And I get to see how successful they are. I’ve had one student who went into teaching. I had another student who has achieved her goal of working from home. That’s the satisfaction of the work we do here at Calbright.”
Learning How To Learn
“Like me, a lot of students had goals for their lives, and then life handed them something else,” Carney said. “I feel like I’m in it with them, to make the choices they want, even if it’s difficult.”
Often she shares her story with them. Sometimes she works with them on time management skills, the same ones she had to learn. For students who have close families, Carney always gives the same advice: Communicate with them. Make sure they know what you need and why this is important to you.
“If you have a close family, then you have to have your family’s support to be successful, especially in an online school,” she said. “They have to understand: You need to close yourself away for a little bit and focus on what you need to do. It seems so obvious to say: Get your family’s support. But often we’re so busy caring for them and supporting them that it doesn’t even occur to us that they need to know what we need when we’re in an online school.”
Carney also listens, and learns, from her students about what they need – and works with Calbright to provide new and innovative kinds of support.
“People who don’t understand what we do say ‘oh, you’re just an online college,’ but there’s so much more to Calbright than that. We don’t just ‘teach classes,’ we’re constantly offering new opportunities and hope for students. I have a student right now in the program, she’s almost finished, and she’s 100% deaf. We’ve been teaching her through sign language interpreters – and this is something I’ve never had to do in my career. It would be so much more challenging at another institution. But Calbright is designed to take struggles like this and find ways to work through them that don’t put an added burden on the student, and that’s what we do. We adjust. We get aware, and learn to anticipate what she needs so that she can focus on learning. And then we take what we’ve learned from each student and bring it to more students, so next time they don’t have to teach us what they need – we already know. We’re already ready for them.”
That kind of innovative support takes many forms at Calbright: Each student’s classes are individually tailored to the skills they already have and assessed based on the skills they still need to master; students are able to set their own pace and schedules for learning, and to have control over decisions about their program progression. Tutors are accessible, with counseling and coaching within reach at any time; students with basic needs in areas like housing, food, and medical care are connected with state agencies that offer support.
“It’s such a joy, it’s because we’re not just ‘online,’ we’re and focused on meeting students where they are, whether that’s with a disability or a chaotic work schedule, or caretaking for loved ones,” Carney said. “We’re never going to stop because we’re always learning more about our students, we’re always getting new people with new struggles, and finding ways to support them teaches us how to be better for everyone. It’s great. It’s what I want my program, and my career, to be.”
