Online AA in Liberal Studies Degree
- Duration 2 Years
- Cost per Credit $410
- Credit Hours 60
Program Benefits
- Gain foundational liberal arts skills for diverse industries
- Apply your associate degree credits to a bachelor’s program
- Learn in an interactive, virtual classroom
- One-on-one instruction from faculty
Open the Door to Unlimited Opportunities
Discover how a college education can transform your future with the online Associate in Liberal Studies degree from The American Women’s College of Bay Path University (TAWC). Through a customizable curriculum, this degree delivers foundational critical thinking and problem-solving skills that can be applied in nearly every professional field. You’ll graduate with career-ready skills, plus 60 credits that can be applied to a bachelor’s degree.
The Foundation for the Career You Want
College graduates with liberal arts skills are in high demand across a range of industries. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, those who complete an associate degree earn an average of $154 more per week than those who only complete a high school diploma, equating to thousands more per year.1 Take the next step in your career and start creating a better future for yourself and your family today.
Explore CareersCustomize Your Liberal Studies Experience
20 Total Courses
60 Total Credits
The online Associate in Liberal Studies degree offers a curriculum designed to be customized. You’ll complete core liberal arts courses along with a selection of electives that can be chosen based on your professional interests. Explore a variety of career fields and graduate prepared for the professional path of your choice.
Course Highlights
- Financial Wellness
- Research and Writing in the Disciplines
- Strategies for Career and Personal Growth
Apply Today
Transfer up to 30 Credits
6 Start Dates Per Year
Discover what you could achieve with a college education. Apply to the online AA in Liberal Studies degree today and start creating a rewarding future for yourself and your family.
Applicants will need the following to apply:
A completed application |
2.0 GPA or higher Note: Students with a GPA under 2.0 may be considered |
Official transcripts from your high school or all regionally accredited institutions you have attended |
Invest in Your Future
$410 per Credit Hour
$24,600 Estimated Total Tuition
Make an investment in your future and discover the options you have when it comes to financing your education. Learn about the financial aid resources available to you.
Tuition DetailsWhat You’ll Learn
Ideal for those with multiple professional interests, the online Associate in Liberal Studies degree delivers foundational skills that can be applied in nearly every field. Explore perspectives on social, cultural, environmental, and political issues and prepare to solve complex problems in a variety of industries.
By Graduation, You’ll Have Skills to:
- Engage and learn from perspectives and experiences different from your own and understand how your place in the world both informs and limits your knowledge
- Understand the interrelationships between multiple perspectives, such as personal, social, cultural, disciplinary, environmental, local, and global
- Integrate learning in all aspects of life
- Make simple connections among ideas and experiences, as well as synthesize and transfer learning to new, complex situations
- Apply critical thinking skills characterized by your comprehensive exploration of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events before accepting or formulating an opinion or conclusion
- Recognize that success in all disciplines requires habits of inquiry and analysis that share common attributes
- Demonstrate solid knowledge of disciplinary parameters and push beyond those boundaries in new, unique, or atypical recombination by uncovering or critically perceiving new syntheses
- Recognize creative risk-taking in order to envision a response
- Develop well-rounded thinking skills that support the ability to know when there is a need for information, as well as to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use and share that information for the problem at hand
Learn from Industry Experts
At The American Women’s College, your learning is expanded by the rich workplace experience our faculty bring to the classroom. Faculty are professionals who hold an array of titles in the fields they teach. Their involvement in the day-to-day challenges of their role and industry brings curriculums to life with real-world examples as you connect what you learn to what they share.
Faculty Spotlight
Each faculty member at TAWC incorporates real industry experience into each lesson. As a student, you’ll receive personalized, one-on-one support and graduate fully prepared to face the challenges of your chosen field.
Emily Thompson, MA, Director, Liberal Studies, Communications & Justice Studies
Emily Thompson began her teaching career in 2012 with the English department at Northern Virginia Community College. This formative experience instilled a passion for equity-minded pedagogical practices that make higher education as accessible as possible to all learner populations. Emily carried this passion for equity and accessibility when she joined The American Women’s College as an Academic Director in 2016. She strives to apply a student-centered mindset to every aspect of her academic programs.
Emily holds an MA in English Literature from George Mason University and is a Ph.D. Candidate at UMass Amherst, specializing in English Renaissance drama and theatre history. Her other areas of interest include performance studies, body studies, affect theory, posthumanism, and decolonized pedagogy. Her dissertation studies the affective encounters between stage and spectator during staged bodily violence in Tudor and Stuart tragedy.
Shirley Montovani: Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us for the Bay Path University American Women’s College info session on the Education and Liberal Studies programs. This is a virtual open house. And we’ll be exploring the online learning opportunities here.
So we’re going to switch back and forth between education and liberal studies. But I’d first like to introduce myself and also the other program directors. So my name is Shirley Montovani and I am the program director for the Education– undergraduate Education programs here at the American Women’s College of Bay Path. And then I’ll hand it over to Emily.
Emily Thompson: Yeah, I’m Emily Thompson, and I’m the program director overseeing the Liberal Studies majors at the American Women’s College. And I also oversee Communications and Justice Studies majors as well.
Shirley Montovani: So the first slide will be– the first two slides will be about the concentrations for education and liberal studies. So for education, these are the options that you have. So we have two licensure options, which are either early child or elementary. These are– we can endorse you. We’re an approved Ed prep program for the state of Massachusetts.
But there is reciprocity. And those where it’s blue, it’s highlighted, it’s linked to the education programs handbook. So there’s more information. And then we also have an early childhood leadership program. It’s a non-licensure and you can do associate’s or bachelor’s. And this is for the student that’s looking for a preschool and/or daycare setting.
And we also have the coursework approved so that you can apply for a lead teacher or director certification with the Mass. Department of Early Education and Care. And again, you can click on that link. There’s also a reciprocity with that. Most states will have an early education and care department and should have some similar requirements.
So it’s a combination of work experience and education for those certifications. And then we also have education studies, non-licensure. For our students in particular, a lot of our students have a lot of transfer credits. And our two licensure programs are very restrictive and don’t have a lot of electives.
And so that can be really beneficial so you don’t lose out on, you know, previous time and financial investment. But it aligns with and it’s a very similar curriculum to the licensure programs. There is no practicum. We don’t require you to take state exams. But there’s opportunities do internships. There’s a capstone, which is an action research project.
And it also can be for somebody who is interested in the field of education, but just not sure and just really wants a education-focused bachelor’s degree. And maybe you intend to go on for your master’s for maybe school counseling, school psychology. Really, the options are endless.
And we have a lot of great adjuncts and faculty members here that can guide and mentor you. One thing I just want to point out, because this is always a confusion, the actual degree or diploma will say Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies. So that’s what the diploma will say.
But on your transcript, and obviously when we send information to the state to endorse you for licensing, it will say Elementary or Early Childhood or Early Childhood Leadership. But that always comes up at graduation when they get their diploma. So I just wanted to point that out. And again, with the licensure programs, it is for Massachusetts.
So if you’re in Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire we’ll just want to discuss– because when you do your practicum, it has to be in the state of Massachusetts. There’s really specific guidelines. But that’s why we also have the non-licensure option.
Emily Thompson: So for the liberal studies program, we have three concentrations specializing in liberal studies. The first one is just a general liberal studies concentration. And this major is really good for somebody who has a lot of credits already at other institutions in a variety of fields that you want to transfer in.
This is our most flexible major. It really is sort of like a create your own unique academic pathway. And it prepares you for mastering those human skills that a variety of employers are telling us they really need right now, such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, written communication, oral communication, things like that.
So this general studies major prepares you for a variety of careers. And because it’s so flexible, you can really focus on what you are most interested in. Depending on if you have a lot of things you may be interested in doing later on, then this will be a good exploratory major for you.
And then the next one is our digital information design and society major. And this pertains to the field of digital humanities, which I consider this to be sort of like the liberal studies and the humanities of the future. Because it really combines those human skills, like I mentioned before, like critical thinking, writing, emotional intelligence, analysis, synthesis.
But you also explore those skills and learn those skills through those hard tech mediums like digital technology, computation. You learn things like coding as well. So this major is good for people who are interested in learning those combinations of the human skills and the hard skills.
And in this major, you’re going to explore those same, you know, typical liberal studies and humanities questions, but you’re going to use digital technology and computation and coding and, you know, those hard skills to explore and answer those questions. And then our final concentration is health foundations.
And this is for someone who’s interested in going on to further study in Health and Human Services or health-related degrees, and also health-related career fields. And it explores that intersection of science and human health. So again, you get that liberal studies foundation, but it focuses more on the science and human health if you’re interested in going on to health-related professions or careers.
Shirley Montovani: These link to the education programs handbook to give more detailed information. But essentially, about two years ago, the undergraduate department for all programs aligned to the Mass Transfer alignment and really looked at the core curriculum. And so for the majority of programs, but specifically for education, the University core curriculum is 40 credits.
So a bachelor’s degree is you need 120 credits. So this is how it’s broken down. So as you can see, as I said earlier, the licensure programs are a little more restrictive. The major requirements, which also includes liberal– the liberal studies core, that is pretty significant part of the degree requirements.
And 15 of those credits are your practicum. So it’s actually the student teaching and the seminar you attend. But there are some room for a few general electives. For education studies, though, which is the non-licensure, as you can see, it’s a little more balanced.
So while there are still a significant amount of major courses– which, again, are aligned. It’s a lot of the same classes as the licensure major, but there’s also options to take electives and a capstone, which is an action research project, which can be really great to put on a resume and if you want to do an internship. And then there’s, again, 44 credits, a lot more opportunity to transfer credits.
And then kind of the same with the early childhood leadership major. So I just put the one for the bachelor’s degree. But again, it’s a little more balanced. And another important thing to note is we just aligned our graduate academic calendar. So prior to doing that, financial aid would always be a barrier to taking graduate courses.
But now there’s more opportunity. So you could possibly take– you could even do a certificate, a graduate certificate but at the undergraduate rate. And so there’s a lot more opportunity to do that, especially if you have general electives that you need to take.
Emily Thompson: Yeah, so for liberal studies, this is the breakdown in terms of the credit breakdown you can expect. As Shirley mentioned, the majority of our undergraduate programs aligned with the Mass Transfer Agreement. So if you bring in those credits from a community, you know, another Massachusetts institution, those will transfer into our university core curriculum, which is 40 credits. Except for our health foundations major, which has 43 credits in the core curriculum.
And then as I mentioned earlier, our liberal– our general liberal studies is the most flexible. So, you know, only the 30 required credits of actual specific liberal studies coursework, and then you have 50 credits of general electives. So if you have a lot of previous coursework from other institutions in a variety of fields, this major would be the most likely to accept those transfer credits.
And then for digital information design, you have the 42 credits of the major specific courses with 38 general elective credits. And then for health foundations, you have 65 credits of major specific courses. A lot of those are going to be health and science courses. And then you have 12 credits of general electives.
Shirley Montovani: So each program has program learning outcomes or objectives. And again, these link to the programs– the program handbook for education. But with the licensure programs, we really align and are required– because we’re an approved Ed prep program with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Ed professional standards for teachers.
And so it’s essentially those standards. And we really design the degree and the specific education courses to align. We map out the courses to make sure that they align with these program learning outcomes and course competencies. And so any kind of assignments that you have to do, or any field work, is all built in for you.
And you have everything you need to be approved for a licensing once you, you know, go through all the steps of practicum and taking state exams. We do– I probably should add that in here. For those of you in Massachusetts– or really any other state– but Massachusetts is required for licensing to take MTELs. Other states are the practice, but for our program, it’s the MTELs.
And we build in a lot of support. We also have grant funding that we’ve been able to pay for vouchers to take the exams. And we have an amazing MTEL support coach and a support site. Any MTEL-aligned courses have preparation built in. So you– the takeaway is that you are not alone in that process.
We really will guide you and make sure you’re prepared. We know that that’s, you know, in addition to taking courses. You’re probably working. You might have family or caregiver. And to add on the exams is a lot to take on. So we are here to guide you through that process.
Not only will you be assigned an advisor, but I work closely with your advisor, and I work with you as well, to make sure you’re on track each semester. And the education studies non-licensure is actually– we just updated it, but it’s very similar to the licensure program. Because a lot of students that choose to go into that program are still on that track of wanting to be an educator in a classroom.
So again, it’s very similar program learning outcomes. And then for early childhood leadership, NAEYC, which is the professional association, these are the standards. And the learning outcomes are aligned, and they were created based on those. And so similar to DESE, Department of Elementary and Secondary Ed or Department of Early Education and Care, NAEYC has standards.
So we again, just like the licensure programs, we ensure that the degree itself and each course that you take– that is, the major courses– are aligned with any assignments. But all the course competencies, everything’s aligned with these learning outcomes and NAEYC.
Emily Thompson: So for the liberal studies program objectives, these are the kinds of high level competencies and skills that you’ll be focusing on in this program. So starting with mastering the ability to engage with and understand multiple perspectives. So this is where that critical thinking comes in, where that emotional intelligence comes in, things like that.
And then, also, mastering integrative learning and synthesis. So, you know, creating connections across a variety of ideas, a variety of perspectives, and then diving deeper into analysis. And this builds onto, again, embracing contradictions, connecting divergent ideas, being able to see the forest for the trees and think laterally.
And then ultimately, also you’ll master skills in information literacy and become a communication professional. And information literacy especially, I think, is becoming even more of an imperative knowledge set, with just the different sort of modes of ways that we are able to get information from a variety of sources, both legitimate or not.
So all of these skills build towards you becoming this information professional or communication professional. You know, an idea of professional. And that’s what you’ll be focusing on in this major.
Shirley Montovani: So just two last slides about just career opportunities. So with education, you know, the licensure programs are pretty straightforward. You know, for early childhood or elementary, it’s– initial licensure, it’s for those specific age groups. You know, early childhood will be that younger group of the pre-K to second grade, or elementary is the first through sixth grade.
So, you know, those are really for somebody who would want to, you know, be a public school classroom teacher for those specific grades. There’s also opportunities for private schools or the parochial schools. And then there’s the lead teacher or director roles and jobs at a preschool or daycare setting.
You could also– I mean, there’s other requirements, but you’d have a lot of foundational knowledge for opening your own home daycare, a paraprofessional or any kind of support professional in a school or a tutor. And then, as with most of the education degrees and careers, most go on for graduate school. And that can really open up so many opportunities.
You know, there’s special Ed, there’s reading specialists. Or you could do ABA, you could do school counseling. You know, it really just gives you the ability to earn your bachelor’s degree and get some foundational knowledge. But at the graduate level, you know, there’s more options. You could even choose to go in a completely different direction and maybe go psychology or business.
The link there is to our education-related graduate programs. And again, I mentioned earlier with the general electives, now that the calendars are aligned, it’s going to be easier to take graduate courses and possibly even a earn a certificate, a graduate certificate, which is very, very helpful.
And we do have an amazing career department here that is free service. And they always encourage reaching out to them because they can really help update your resume to become very marketable. And a lot of times when you’re applying to things online, you’re needing keywords and things like that.
Emily Thompson: And for liberal studies career opportunities, as I said, this program really sets you up with a vast array of transferable skills that are going to equip you to go into really a wide variety of fields and graduate study, if you so wish. So because it equips you with those human skills and some of those hard skills that are really in demand from, you know, a variety of employers and professional fields today.
It is just going to give you a lot of set you up for a lot of different opportunities that you may be interested in, both in terms of going directly into a career professional field or into graduate school. So some things like, you know, the general liberal studies could set you up for things like public policy, political advocacy, nonprofit, non-government relations, even journalism.
And then our digital humanities major will especially equip you for things like UX, UI design, which is a really burgeoning field right now, instructional design, also web design. And, you know, both of those can also equip you for things like information science or library science, editing and professional writing.
And as I mentioned, for the health foundations major, if you’re interested in going on into graduate programs that are health-related, that’s a really good starting point. But yeah, this really just, you know, provides you with a lot of skill sets and knowledge sets that are going to give you a really great jumping off point for a variety of fields. So if any of these interest you, liberal studies might be for you.
You know, at the end of this, find yourself wondering, you know, why education or liberal studies at Bay Path? We always pride ourselves on having an innovative curriculum. You’ll be engaging in cutting edge courses, prepare you for a variety of fields and careers in these disciplines.
Our community is so supportive. As Shirley mentioned, you will– you will not be alone. We have a close-knit relationship between our student community, and especially our advising community, and our faculty and staff who are really passionate about supporting students through their learning journey.
We are career-focused, so you’ll notice that we tried to pinpoint a lot of career paths that you can go into with these majors. And so we really want to set you up for success to be a professional in the career of your choosing. Our class sizes are small, so you’re going to get that really personalized interaction and engagement with both your peers and with your instructors.
And then, yeah, just an amazing– an amazing squad of dedicated faculty who are also in addition to teaching with us, working in the field. So they bring in a lot of really impressive experiences and expertise. Because they have a lot of career experience in this field. They can also help you foster that career path that you want to follow as well.
Anise Fareed: My name is Anise Fareed. I’m the Director of Enrollment here at the American Women’s College. So we’re going to go over some quick and easy steps to get you started. We’ll need a completed application. We’d like to see a GPA of 2.0 or higher. And then we’ll need official transcripts from your high school or all regionally accredited universities you’ve attended.
You can fill out the application to any of the programs that you’ve heard here tonight. The page will save as you go, so your progress isn’t lost if you’re interrupted. You can submit transcripts via mail to the American Women’s College at 588 Longmeadow Street, Longmeadow, MA 01106, or by email at transcripts@online.baypath.edu.
We do also have a transcript ordering service that we can send you over a form that you’ll fill out and send back to us. And we can try and order transcripts on your behalf. So it’s very easy, super simple. One of my team members will be happy to walk you through the process.
Shirley Montovani: OK, well, we’d be happy to answer any questions. We can be reached via email. And we’re happy to set up a phone or a Zoom appointment if you have any questions about the program.
Watch our Latest Virtual Open House
Hear directly from the Program Director to learn more about the online course format, program curriculum, career outcomes, admissions process, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Explore our frequently asked questions for in-depth answers. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, reach out to us.
You can complete the program in just two years. To see the curriculum, view our courses page.
Tuition is $410 per credit hour. You’ll need to complete 60 total credits for a total tuition of $24,600. You may transfer up to 30 credits, which may reduce the total cost of tuition. You can review all tuition costs on our tuition page.
Yes, the online AA in Liberal Studies program accepts up to 30 transfer credits. You can learn more about our admissions policy on our admissions page.
You’ll complete 60 credits to earn the online AA in Liberal Studies degree. You can review the courses now.
The requirements for the online AA in Liberal Studies program include:
- Submit your application.
- Submit official high school transcripts and college transcripts if applicable.
- Have a minimum cumulative GPA of 2.0.
You can learn more about our admission requirements on our admissions page.
Those who complete the online AA in Liberal Studies degree graduate prepared to pursue a bachelor’s degree or begin a career in roles such as communications specialist, social media coordinator, event organizer, and more. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field of media and communications is expected to grow 6% through 2031, making now an ideal time to gain essential liberal arts skills with an online degree. Learn more about your career options by visiting our careers page.
Source
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Career Outlook. “Data on Display; Education Pays, 2021.” Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm.