The Yellow Crayon

Western Governors University is a self-described as, “the nation’s leading nonprofit institution providing accessible high-quality education at a low cost.” Until about a year ago- almost to the date- I had never heard of the university before. After hearing of a family member that was enrolled in one of their programs, I decided to fill out an application. In a quick turn of events, I graduated with my Master’s of Arts in Teaching, Elementary Education from Western Governors University a few months ago. Here I am going to share with you, in depth, my experiences in the school of education, so you can decide if a degree from WGU may be the right choice for you.

Admissions

There is no fee to apply to Western Governors University. You don’t even have to pay to send your transcripts from the National Student Clearing House. WGU will obtain them for you. As far as other admission requirements go, there are few. WGU requires no letters of recommendation, personal essays, resumes, or GREs for graduate level course work. Likewise, SAT scores are not required for students applying to bachelors level programs. According to the college board, Western Governors University has an 100% acceptance rate.

Besides having literally the easiest admissions process of any program I’ve ever applied to, WGU also lets you apply any day of the year and start courses on the first day of any month. This was a big draw for me because once I decided I wanted to earn my master’s degree, I wanted to start right away and WGU let me do that.

Cost

Essentially, WGU charges you for how long you are in your designated program, in chunks of six months. One six month “term”, for a master’s in teaching program costs $4,125 in 2026. It took me about eight months to complete my degree program from start to finish including the required in-person student teaching components. I had to pay for two terms, so including the ebook and resource fee for each term, the total cost of my degree was $8,650. Comparatively, a master’s degree in education from Kutztown University, a local Pennsylvania state university, would have cost at least $21,516  assuming 33 graduate credits at $652.10 per credit.

Program Mentors

After getting accepted into WGU, you will be assigned a program mentor. This is your go-to person for any questions you have about your program. They will be the person to approve your new courses after you complete your previous ones. My program mentor was always super helpful and responsive to emails.

Competency-Based Education

WGU follows a grading model, or lack of grading model, called competency-based education. At WGU, there are no letter grades, percentage grades, or grade point averages for students. It’s basically a pass/fail system in which students are deemed either competent or incompetent. Students can retake exams and redo assignments if they initially receive a score of incompetent.

Unfortunately, I think the lack of traditional grading can be a disservice to students when applying for jobs because most employers want to know what the applicants GPA was within their major and WGU students have to write non-applicable for their GPA. (There are a lot of philosophies on grading and assessments in the world of education, and hey- maybe competency-based grading is the future, but we currently live in a GPA world, and I wish WGU would adapt to that.)

There are two types of assessments at WGU, performance assessments and objective assessments. Performance assessments are like writing assignments or projects and objective assessments are multiple-choice exams. 

Performance assessments may take some time and planning to complete, but if you came from an undergrad or high school of writing research papers, then the performance assessments will likely seem less involved to you. I was never assigned to write a traditional paper in my time at WGU, which was honestly a little disappointing as someone who has an undergraduate degree in journalism. 

Most of my performance assessments, in the school of education, were to write a lesson plan. Some of the performance assessments involved a “live” teaching component on a simulation platform called Mursion. Students are asked to create a lesson plan demonstrating certain skills in a certain topic in a specific age group, then they sign up for a time slot on the Mursion simulation to teach their lesson to a small-group of students for about twenty minutes. The small group of students is represented by CGI avatars who can speak and interact with the user in real time. These avatars are being played by adults, however they look, speak, and act like children. Yes, it is as awkward as it sounds. 

After the simulation, you get a report from the Mursion platform on things you did well and things you could improve on. With that information, you usually have to write a paragraph or so reflection to submit to WGU to complete your performance assessment.  My main problem with the Mursion simulation assignments was that there were limited time slots available, often at inconvenient times for working adults, and the time slots typically filled up weeks in advance. This was frustrating to me as I was trying to work through my courses as quickly as possible.

After you complete your performance assessment, you will submit it on your WGU student portal, and then wait up to 72 hours until the performance assessment gets reviewed. Each performance assessment is reviewed by an evaluator, an anonymous one with unknown credentials (I’m suspicious these evaluators are not even experts in the field of education, but rather people trained to grade to a rubric) and may be sent back for revisions. Typically, the evaluators leave very specific feedback on what you need to add to your performance assessment in order to score a “competent”. 

Objective assessments are exams that are taken online with a live proctor. WGU uses a third-party proctoring service, called ProctorU to proctor their exams. I found the ProctorU system to be invasive, frustrating, and uncomfortable. I don’t particularly mind being on camera but I do mind having to show under my desk, behind my laptop, and basically all around the room I’m taking my test in. Additionally, I did not like having to show my ID on camera to take my exam either. In my experience, the proctors on ProctorU were often foreigners and sometimes would speak to me in Hindi or other languages I do not speak. In short, I have privacy concerns about the ProctorU system however I put up with the system in order to get my objective assessments done and complete my courses. I wish WGU would explicitly tell prospective students about possible privacy concerns with the ProctorU system during the application process because I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone is going to be ok with showing a proctor their drivers license over the internet.

Overall, I found the objective assessments to be easy as well. If you do your readings, which are always very straightforward and explicit, you should have no problem passing your objective assessments. Additionally, WGU offers a pre-assessment that you can take before any objective assessment to help you prepare.

Course Content

There are 28 courses in the master’s in elementary education program. Only four of them require in-person experiences. They are the Early Clinical in Elementary Education, Advanced Clinical in Elementary Education,  Student Teaching One, and Student Teaching Two. The other 24 are self-paced completely online courses.

I thought about giving a breakdown of each of the self-paced courses, but unfortunately they were all so unremarkable and similar that it would be a waste of all our time. Each course provides you with a WGU text and only a WGU text. (There may be links to optional other readings within the WGU text, but they are optional readings and I never looked into them). The WGU course text reads like a manual. Personally, I felt like it was telling me what to think. I missed reading the case studies and academic journals that I had become accustomed to reading in my undergrad courses at Lehigh University. There’s just no comparative analysis at WGU. It’s here- let me feed you the answer, word-for-word, and have you spit it back out at me in a performance assessment, (and if its not word-for-word what we want, we’re sending it back!)

In short, everything about my courses felt watered down. Additionally, I had virtually no interaction with course “instructors”, which I guess would be akin to “professors” in the WGU world. That said, the watered-down nature of the courses is what enabled me to complete 3-4 courses a week while working full-time.

Early Clinical and Advanced Clinical, are courses that are mostly just your observation hours. I believe I did three full days of observations for my early clinical course and six full days of observations for my advanced clinical course. Early Clinical requires 15 hours of observations while Advanced Clinical require 50 hours of observations. I just wanted to get them done as quickly as possible by observing for full days consecutively, but as long as you get the required number of hours you can spread out your observations however you like.

Student teaching is split up into two courses, each one lasts for 30 days. I did my first placement in second grade and my second placement in kindergarten. WGU will reach out to a school district, close to you, and facilitate an agreement with a mentor teacher in whose classroom you will conduct your student teaching. Once you start your student teaching you will be assigned a clinical supervisor, your clinical supervisor is the person who will score your six video recorded lessons, three for Student Teaching One and three for Student Teaching Two. Similarly to previous courses, student teaching is conducted on a competency-based model. There are no formal grades for student teaching. 

A note that I received from my mentor teachers, was that WGU didn’t really provide them with clear expectations of what was expected of them as mentor teachers and of me as a student teacher compared to what other local universities provided. For example, other universities typically will provide a schedule of responsibilities the student teacher will take over in the classroom week by week, while WGU just provides vague guidelines like “the student teacher should take over all classroom responsibilities”, but with no timeline or no description as to what those responsibilities are.

As a part of your student teaching courses, you will also have to attend ten “student teaching seminars”, five for each course. These are held on a video conferencing platform and usually take between forty-five minutes to an hour. It gives you a chance to talk in breakout rooms with other student teachers and also typically involves some type of motivational speech from a clinical supervisor. To be honest, I found these seminars to be a waste of time. They are just another thing you have to check off to graduate. I guess it’s WGU’s attempt at peer collaboration.

Graduation

After you complete your student teaching and the courses pass, you are eligible for graduation. Your program mentor will send you a graduation application and within five to ten business days, your graduation will be conferred. You might have to wait a few more days for your transcript to be updated and a couple more weeks for the physical diploma to arrive in the mail.

Licensing

WGU will provide you with guidance on how to obtain a teaching license or teaching certificate based on your state. In Pennsylvania, I had to complete an online application, send my transcripts to the department of education and get a recommendation from WGU. I believe the whole process took a couple of weeks.

Value

Getting a master’s degree in teaching will increase your teaching salary (if you’re already a teacher) in most positions across the country. I was working as a paraprofessional before earning my degree. My salary went up from $19 an hour as an Early Intervention aid to $34.47 an hour as a Head Start Pre-K teacher, with better benefits. I’m also able to work more hours a week and more days a year as a teacher opposed to a paraprofessional– increasing my total earnings.  If I was teaching K-4 in a local Pennsylvania school district, I would likely be averaging around $40+ an hour. For me, the degree will pay for itself within the year.

Final Recommendation

If you are looking for an affordable and fast way to earn a master’s degree in education and a teaching certificate, then I would highly recommend WGU. There is no program that you will be able to get through quicker or for a lower cost. However, if you’re looking to be challenged in your graduate coursework, I would recommend a more traditional university. I don’t believe having a degree from WGU as opposed to a more traditional university, will hinder you in getting hired in a teaching position after graduation, mainly because there is a teacher shortage in the United States. Overall, if I had to do it all over again, I would still choose WGU over a traditional university.