Studying on the Second Shift: Midnight College Classes

a working parent, taking a 6 p.m. class is also an impossibility since by the time you fight your way through traffic to pick up your kids at daycare, get them home, feed them, check their homework and then put them to bed, it's 9 or 10 p.m. But Bunker Hill Community College in Boston has a smart solution. They offer classes that start at 9 p.m., and if that's not late enough, they also have ones that begin at 11:45 p.m. and end at 2:30 a.m. the next day.

In the video above, student Paige Fahy, who currently works in a restaurant, says she became a night owl because "I don't want to work those kinds of jobs for the rest of my life." The midnight-oil-burning classes are mostly beginning courses on college writing and algebra, and they also offer noncredit classes that teach students fundamentals like reading, writing, and speaking English. Although Bunker Hill's midnight classes sound extreme—and completely exhausting—if we really want a more educated population, and want to make it easier for working adults to go back to school, this is an idea that more colleges would be smart to copy.