More nontraditional students attending Pee Dee college

It’s back to school time, and while the majority of college freshmen are fresh off the graduation stage from high school, non-traditional students are joining their ranks in a big way.

Francis Marion University has a student organization called the Association of Non-Traditional Students (ANTS) for students who either are older than 25, have children or work while attending classes.

Coker College offers students the chance to earn a bachelor’s degree while attending class at night in the same amount of time if they went during the day.

And Florence-Darlington Technical College is widely known throughout the Pee Dee as being the place to go for an associate degree that will work around a job.

Termetris George, 30, is a student at Florence-Darlington Tech. She is working toward an associate degree in criminal justice, which she plans to parlay into a bachelor’s degree in social work from Coker College eventually.

“I started here in 2006,” she said. “I’m almost finished. I’ll be finished in May.”

George has a 15-year-old daughter and she lost her son last Mother’s Day in an accident, but she said never lost sight of her goals.

James Jolly, Coker College’s director of marketing and communications, said it’s not unusual for Florence-Darlington Tech students to transfer to Coker to build on their two-year degree for a four-year one.

“For a lot of people, it is the next step,” he said. “They get their associate’s at tech and then their bachelor’s at Coker.”

At Francis Marion, some students are taking matters into their own hands to increase the offerings for non-traditional students.

Rhoda Ellison, the president of ANTS at FMU, said there are 28 members in the organization that uses the apt acronym of the small, but determined, insects.

“I think it’s a little more tough for someone who waits a little bit longer to go to school because we start a life and get a home and car that require you to work and pay them off, in addition to trying to work and study and go to work and focus on how you’re going to survive,” she said. “It’s hard.”

Ellison said she’s found that many of the professors tend to think all students at the school are 18 and relatively free of responsibilities to people other than themselves.

“I will say they pile the work on, so much so that I’ve had to trim down the days I work,” she said, adding that during a class she took this summer, she “actually had a teacher tell us if we had a job, we needed to quit it to keep up with the class.”

But despite a number of stories like Ellison’s across the campus, Dr. Kenneth Kitts, associate provost of FMU, said he thinks the university does a great deal to assist non-traditional students in acclimating to college life.

“In short, we do try to support the needs of our non-traditional population,” Kitts said. “This fall semester alone there were 14 academic programs in which we offered evening courses.”

Kitts said the faculty at FMU have learned through experience how to work with non-traditional students.

“I think that compared to most colleges, this faculty is used to dealing with a wide range of students,” he said.