Sally Heppner had owned her own graphic arts business for 25 years near Portland, Ore., but she’d always regretted not finishing college. She’d taken classes at a community college after high school, but then began traveling, worked full time, married and had a family. When her oldest daughter started college, she thought: “I want to do that, too.”

What she wanted was a liberal arts degree so she could “broaden her base of knowledge,” she said. She enrolled at Marylhurst University just south of Portland and, after two and a half years, is working toward two degrees: an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts degree in cultural and historical studies and a bachelor’s degree in art.

Going back to college has been demanding, Heppner admits. Her graphics arts business has suffered. And with a large family — two children in college, two in high school, and a 15-year-old foster child — she finds it hard to juggle work, school and home. Some of the dense reading “takes a lot of mental concentration and focus,” she said. “But it is the best thing I’ve ever done. School doesn’t feel like work at all.”

Founded in 1893 as a Roman Catholic college, Marylhurst University was the Pacific Northwest's first liberal arts college for women. Since 1974, however, it has been a private, coeducational institution devoted to adult and lifelong learning. In fact, Marylhurst was one of the nation’s first liberal arts colleges to be designated as a college for lifelong learning.

The university offers bachelor’s degrees in the humanities, science and mathematics, the social sciences, business and the arts. It offers master’s degree programs in business and management, art therapy and interdisciplinary studies. Marylhurst also features a music department, a literature department and a writing department. And “because of our heritage, we have a strong religion program,” said Simeon Dreyfuss, director of an interdisciplinary studies program called the Liberal Arts Core. “We are different from a lot of schools with an adult population in that we are a full-service liberal arts university.”

The Liberal Arts Core is a required part of all undergraduate degrees. As at Sinclair, Marylhurst students can construct a degree around their own interests. To assess the prior learning of students returning to school, Marylhurst created an Academic Portfolio, now a Web-based interactive program that helps students reflect on their existing knowledge and skills as they plan their degrees.

“It is not a general studies degree, which is a random selection of courses,” explained Dreyfuss. “It is around a theme and learning goals. Students go through a degree-design process, articulate the focus of the degree, write learning outcomes for that goal, and then find the courses that will deliver that learning.”

Much of that learning is delivered in an “integrated” way, with Marylhurst’s instructors taking a team-taught, interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes the importance of problem-solving and helps students integrate theory and practice.

For example, Tabitha Dunn is an adult student who took three classes at once — one in politics, one in biology and one in communications. Each of the three professors taught his or her class with an overall theme of “genetics.” The content of the classes overlapped, as did some of the assignments. Projects were designed as joint efforts so genetics and its related issues could be considered from several perspectives: how they are covered in the media and how politics and policy affect and are affected by genetic issues such as cloning and bioengineering.

Online classes a complement, not a cure-all

Most instructors at Marylhurst teach part-time and are practitioners in the field they are teaching. About 33 percent of Marylhurst students are taking a class online. “But the majority of those students are also taking face-to-face classes,” said Dreyfuss.

Tabitha Dunn has done both. She decided to go back to school around the time she turned 30. “I never had the opportunity to go to college earlier, for various reasons,” she said. “But at age 30, I wanted to go back to a school that would take advantage of everything I had learned.”

Dunn is working on a business leadership degree and hopes to finish in about three years. “I usually average two classes per quarter, and I go year-round. I’ve taken a couple of breaks in the last few years, including one when I had my daughter.”

Initially, Dunn took her classes on campus. But once her daughter was born, she enrolled in Marylhurst’s online program to take math, principles of marketing and business strategy. “Now that my schedule is terribly hectic, I can’t give up blocks of my evening time or weekend time for classes without feeling guilty about what I’m sacrificing,” she said. “With online classes, I’m able to squeeze in short periods of time with more frequency. I don’t have to sit for three hours at a block.”

Dunn is proud of what she’s achieved so far, and she’s looking ahead with confidence. “When I’m finished, I will feel a strong sense of accomplishment,” she said. “It has been a goal for a long, long time. And it will be important in my career development.”