Does your work place have any program in place to pay for your education? My previous job paid 100% tuition and books, at the time I was taking online classes at a junior college. One thing I did notice is how easy it is to underestimate the amount of work and/or how easy it is to procrastinate with online classes and, at least for me personally, I found it really hard to stay motivated.

It just didn’t work for me in the end, and at the moment I am doing the part time job, full time school thing. Even though I only work 20 hours per week I still get a large portion of my expenses paid for by my job and fill the monetary gape with financial aid. Being in my last year of school, I am finding it to be harder and harder to do even 20 hours of work per week given the 30-40+ hours of homework per week. These last few quarters are project classes, which can easily turn into four times the work you plan for. I am amazed that my work place still puts up with me calling into my 20 hour a work week at least twice a month (in the last month I have called in once a week).

Edit: I was also completely mystified by Financial Aid, and that was a large part as to why I didn't attend school full time for many years, but it has definitely worked out well for me, of course you have to be careful. I have seen many cases in which people have completely screwed themselves over running up their FA.

One guy at my work accrued nearly 200,000 dollars worth of debt on his way to his doctorate and finally had to drop out and start working full time, given he has a pretty good job, that's a lot of money per month to pay. One fellow I used to know of, back when I lived in California was on his seventh year at UCSF on his undergrad before they finally gave him the boot, he had "other problems" though, and snorted most of his FA. And there are tons of people at my school that fail boat and fuck up in their classes quarter after quarter, adding more and more to their debt.

However it has proven to motivate me to put 110% into school given the knowledge that I will have to pay this money back. There are also scholarship too, I recently was accepted into a school in SF on scholarship called the Art Department/Massive Black. It costs 30,000 up front, 45,000 incremental, and offers no degree, something I wouldn't have the means to pay or the want to W/O scholarship. However, it is one of the best art schools for concept art illustration, so I am pretty excited =)