COLUMBIA - If Christina Sadowski-Shaw were to break down her life by numbers, it would look like this: She's been a nurse for 16 years and now works two jobs, one full-time job at the Truman Veterans' Hospital on a surgery unit and one part-time as a staff nurse with the University Hospital's step-down progressive care unit.
The Columbia resident does this with three children, and she studies 10 to 15 hours a week for her bachelor's degree in nursing from Western Governors University Missouri.
All of her papers are submitted online, and even her tests are proctored online. It's probably no surprise, then, that WGU Missouri is an online, private, nonprofit university.
It uses a competency-based model, which means that Sadowski-Shaw doesn't have to spend her time completing assignments on information that she's known for years as a nurse.
Here's another number: Sadowski-Shaw received a $2,000 scholarship for courses at WGU Missouri. Beginning in October, she will also be eligible for a new discount from the university.
WGU Missouri will offer a 5 percent discount on tuition for students who are employed by the state. This discount amounts to about $150 per its six-month terms, for which standard tuition is around $3,000, depending on the program.
The discount is a price break, funded entirely by the revenue that the university makes from student tuition. Since WGU Missouri is a state affiliate of the national WGU, it also tempers its cost of courses by its earnings from 50,000 students nationwide.
"We're growing as a university," said Angie Besendorfer, WGU Missouri's chancellor. "So we're able to filter that growth right back to the students. We're self-sustaining in our tuition."
WGU and its new discount for state employees has Missouri's economic interests at heart, said Ryan Burns, public information officer for the state's Office of Administration.
"From the state's perspective, it allows our employees to have opportunities to get a degree while staying in the workforce," Burns said. "Since the state puts a priority on education, it's a win-win situation."
WGU Missouri was created with a $4 million federally sponsored Community Development Block Grant, which Besendorfer said came with stipulations such as hiring Missouri residents who were unemployed or underemployed.
Currently, WGU Missouri employs 86 faculty and staff members and has more than 500 graduates. As of Aug. 31, it had 1,092 enrolled students, including Sadowski-Shaw.
Although she received her associate's degree from Columbia College in 2002, she was ready to earn her bachelor's.
"I was a supervisor where I worked, and they revamped the requirements for supervisors," Sadowksi-Shaw said. "To stay in upper management, you had to have your bachelor's degree in nursing within three years."
So, she did her research, and rather than choosing the University of Missouri, which limited the number of classes students could take for tuition reimbursement, she chose a much faster track - WGU Missouri. She began in May and hopes to graduate in a year.
Sadowski-Shaw is among the several WGU Missouri students who have a degree already and aim to further their education, Besendorfer said, or who began to study for a degree and never finished.
"In three years, we can change a whole family," Besendorfer said. "Children who come from families with parents with higher degrees come out better. We build better families, better communities and a better state."