I was active duty Army for several years. I don’t know if you plan on retiring, but if not, take the GI Bill and get a real degree after you ETS.
If you’re from Texas or Illinois (there might be more states), they have a veterans grant which will cover 100% tuition, and the GI Bill (around $1800/month for me – make sure you get the kicker!) is just like a paycheck on top of that. Get a job if you need extra cash, but the GI Bill is pretty sweet. If you can’t get the veterans grant, join the reserves, they’ll pay 100% tuition, too, and the rest of the month you can work alongside school. A free ride to college is the best thing the Army ever did for me.
The thing is, and I’m not knocking online education as a whole here, but the schools on post and the UofPheonix seemed pretty low quality to me. I think they were mostly a way for officers to get their “MS” in general studies so they could advance in rank and/or inflate the Army’s college graduate statistics and make the military look better in general. The training you received in AIT will be worth more to employers than that. (Unless you’re infantry, I guess.)
I’m an engineer, and everybody I know in the profession went to a real brick and mortar school with real live professors and real live classmates. The same goes for any kind of management. If you just want to tickle your fancy, by all means, learn something online. If you want a good job, sacrifice a few years of earning by busting ass at school, learning technical things that you can’t glean off a webpage. It will pay off in the long run.
I am with even sven here. PoliSci and Psych are the “I gotta major in something” majors. Unless you have a compelling speech on why you chose these majors, it’s going to be a mark against you. Even if you are interested in politics, I’d recommend going after a specific area. If you are interested in the economic part, study economics, if you are interested in crime, study criminology, if you are interested in social justice, study sociology etc. Any of these will show me that you have a specific interest in something.
Beyond that, you really need to figure out what you like and what you are good at. Engineers are different from accountants who are different from Polisci people.
The last thing is, you really need to examine where you are going to get your degree from. Online programs are nice, but its not the same as a brick and mortar school. I’d say the best option is to cover your basic pre-reqs online, and then plan to attend a university for a couple years to finish off your degree.
You have a lot of good information, but I’d like to add some things, if you don’t mind. I’m a vet who is just transferring to a 4 year.
The GI Bill is really friggin sweet, although they don’t do the “kicker” anymore. That was for the Montgomery GI Bill, now we’re under the Post 9/11 GI Bill, which are two different things. The Montgomery paid you around 1200 a month whereas the Post 9/11 pays your tuition, gives you up to a grand a year for books and pays your BAH at an E5 w/dependent. If you’re in the middle of bumfuck Kansas, it isn’t much. But if you’re on the coast you’re looking at making a good $1800, which is nice. It’s all dependent on what’s your schools zip code.
IRT employers and your military job, unless you were a truck driver and you’re trying to be a civilian one, the military doesn’t teach you job skills. What they do teach is life skills. Infantry is really good for this. A job won’t hire you because you were infantry, but in the interview when they ask “when have you been under pressure?” you can answer something along the line that you were responsible for the lives of this many men, you had to make a decision, etc, which sounds a lot better than you just talking about that time your group had a really hard project in school.
I’m in your boat in that I don’t know what I want to do when I get out and it’s costed me a year in school. I’m a history major. I’ve always loved history and I think that’s a good general major in that it’ll help my writing (which you can see is atrocious) and gives me good research and comparison skills. I’m going to minor in either Sociology or Anthropology. I need to make that decision by the end of this week.
In my college career so far I’ve wanted be:
a child psycologist
nurse anesthesiologist
agricultural engineer
Air Force officer
CA Highway Patrol
history professor
spaceman
And now I wish I could be an accountant, but I only have two years left so I’m sticking with history. After college, if I don’t get picked up by any agencies (Marshals, ATF, etc) I’ll either go to law school (I really want to be a tax lawyer, for some reason) or hide out in grad school.
I switched from Psychology to Political Science and graduated in 1993. (Another bad job market.) I ended up in insurance because I’d worked at insurance companies while in high school and college. In short I got a job because I had a college degree and experience.
If you like your MOS (and it has civilian applications unlike say artillery) do something that furthers it. In and of itself a Poly Sci degree doesn’t help other than to show you’re a college grad. In short I say don’t do it. Go to college and learn a skill.