In your situation, I might look to do the degree part-time while working. What do you perceive to be the downsides of the degree from Athabasca? I only ask be

In your situation, I might look to do the degree part-time while working. What do you perceive to be the downsides of the degree from Athabasca? I only ask because here, people don't really care about the institution, unless you're going for jobs in graduate programs at the big companies. I made the choice to go back to school to do a Bachelor's degree in CS, and graduated at 31 a couple of years ago, but I already had a couple of other unrelated degrees. I'm lucky in that I did not have to worry about the financial side of things, and don't have kids to worry about. It was an accelerated program through an Australian university, but done externally through my home country. I initially did my CS degree part-time in the evenings after work, and then went full-time for the last bit so that I could concentrate on the really difficult things - operating systems programming and the final year group project. On hindsight my degree was nowhere close to being as rigorous as I would have liked (we didn't do the calculus or crazy math that people have mentioned) but I did appreciate getting time to work on programming, having had very little experience before that. There are loads of opening for developers in my country, your situation might be different. If you're a citizen or permanent resident, as long as you have the ability to do the work, even a diploma would be sufficient, it will be dead easy to find a job. The deficiencies in my course have not been a problem yet in terms of finding a job. I don't regret my decision - I am now working full-time in a startup that does very interesting work. It pays decently, but of course nowhere close to Silicon Valley levels. I'm not at all interested in finding a job there, based on what I've learned from friends.