The program, which will provide a two-year track to the campus associate’s degree with a business emphasis, will offer students condensed classes only seven to eight weeks long, combining evening meetings with online interaction and materials, UW-BSC Returning Adult Advisor Bobbie Boettcher said.

"This program is going to enable (nontraditional students) to stay on track to earn their associate’s degree in approximately the same amount of time as a student who can be here during the day taking those classes full-time," she said.

About 30 percent of UW-BSC students are older than 22 and classified as "returning adults," Boettcher said, and often many of them have impediments to a traditional student schedule, such as full-time work, children, or other commitments.

Some younger students might still have the same needs and require extra help, as well, she said.

"Even a 19-year-old that has a family or a child, I would consider a returning adult," Boettcher said. "They have just as many concerns as someone who’s 40."

Despite extra challenges, adult students often bring a useful set of experiences to the table, she said.

"Our faculty for the most part love having returning adults in their class because they know they’re going to contribute," Boettcher said. "A returning adult has real life experience and for the most part is showing up every day and getting the work in."

In addition, she said, the program was part of the statewide Adult Student Initiative, a push to increase the number of degree-holders in the state, with the goal of eventually benefitting the economy as well.

"The theory is that if we can bring the programs to people in areas that don’t have four-year degrees in their backyard, we can increase the number of degree holders," Boettcher said.

Campus dean Thomas Pleger said students who start out as returning adults often provide more direct economic benefits to communities around universities.

"These graduates tend to stay in their communities," Pleger said. "There’s potential for a real economic impact to Sauk County."

Baraboo resident Tiffany Deyo, among the first to sign up for the program, said while she wanted a degree, she couldn’t do traditional classes.

"I can’t go to school during the day because I work full-time," she said.

In addition, having a  4-year-old daughter means she has to find childcare for evening commitments, one of the reasons she left a similar program in Madison that required one four-hour evening meeting per week.

"We would have to literally leave right when I get done with work," Deyo said. "With the two-hour drive on top of that, it just became too tedious."

"That’s what makes (UW-BSC) so nice and so convenient," she said. "You can’t even make up a reason to why it won’t work."

The condensed class format will allow students to focus on one class at a time, Boettcher said, while still completing the program in a timely manner.

"Historically, with the student working full-time during the day, they could get their associate’s degree by taking evening courses but it would take them five years," she said.

At the same time, she said, the program was flexible, and students could still take daytime courses, traditional 15-week evening classes, and tweak their course load to fit their needs.

Diane Miller, who teaches business and accounting at the college, will be teaching the first course for the FastTrack program in January, a seven-week introductory business class.

She said the seven-week version of the class would depend heavily on students doing the online work outside the weekly class meetings, but also on real-life work experience that older students are more likely to have.

"Because they’ve worked, it’s different than trying to explain something about employers and about how businesses are organized, profit, (and) risk management," she said. "They’ve got a frame of reference already.

"I’m taking what they already know and enhancing it."

Boettcher said the campus hoped to start a small group of students in January that would progress through the program together, beginning with Introduction to Business in January and ending in 2012 with degrees.

"It would be a learning community and something that could be very beneficial for students," she said.