By CATHY BUSSEWITZ

NEW YORK (AP) — After five years of working long nights as a truck driver, Julius Mosley wanted a change. He found driving unfulfilling, and his teenage son needed him to spend more time at home.

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So Mosley took a job as a customer service representative at a telecommunications company near his home. The employee benefits included being able to take job-related classes for free. He decided he wanted to study leadership so he could learn about managing teams and helping people become the best versions of themselves.

His company, Spectrum, paid for a 10-week front-line manager certificate program that Mosley went on to complete. Then it covered the tuition cost for a bachelor’s degree in leadership and organization studies that he’s currently pursuing. The company also promoted him to a management position while he took college courses online.

“It’s completely changed the course of my life,” Mosley said about the education benefit, which took care of his tuition up front instead of requiring him to pay and seek later reimbursement. “It’s truly a blessing to be able to do this.”

As higher education costs have grown to heights many U.S. residents find unattainable or illogical, some adults are looking to their employers for help defraying the expense of college and professional credentials. Nearly half of public and private employers have a tuition reimbursement program for employees, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, or SHRM.

Many employers that provide tuition assistance reimburse staff members up to $5,250 per year because that amount is tax-deductible, said Amy Dufrane, CEO of the Human Resource Certification Institute, which offers credentials to HR professionals.

Some companies offer more, including Bank of America, which provides tuition assistance of up to $7,500 annually, and Spectrum which, in addition to its prepaid tuition program, reimburses employees earning master’s degrees or enrolled in classes that fall outside the scope of its prepaid program up to $10,000 per year.

“For companies who are looking to attract Generation Z and Millennials, it’s a great way to bring them in because they’re keenly interested in how companies are investing in them and the benefits that are available,” said Dufrane.

Because many college graduates start jobs after accumulating student loan debt, about 8% of employers also offer help with student loan repayment, according to James Atkinson, vice president of thought leadership at SHRM.

If continuing education feels out of reach financially or seems incompatible with job demands, experts say there are ways to explore the possibility, either by by making the case to your employer or seeking a position at a place that provides education benefits.

A pay-it-forward model

In traditional tuition reimbursement programs, employees lay out thousands of dollars to pay for tuition, books and fees at the start of a semester, and usually must complete the course with a passing grade before a company would kick in its contribution.

That means employees would often wait four to six months before being reimbursed, which only works for more affluent workers, said Paul Marchand, chief human resources officer at Spectrum.

“The person that can afford to put it on their credit card and sit with $3- or $4- or $5,000 of expenses due back to them and not be concerned about that cost, that is not our average worker,” Marchand said. “Our average worker is making $25, $28, $30 bucks an hour, maybe having a second job, maybe a single parent with kids, … and they’re important workers for us, and we want to help develop them and grow their careers.”

Spectrum launched a program that lets employees sign up for an array of certificates or college courses while paying nothing themselves. The eligible courses and where to take them came from Guild, a Denver company that works with employers on workforce development and tuition assistance.

Walmart offers a similar benefit to its front-line associates, who can enroll in college or certain classes without ever seeing an invoice, according to company spokesperson Jimmy Carter. The benefit also extends to family members of the employees, he said.

Help with loan repayment

As recent college graduates have struggled with debts from college, some employers have added student loan repayment programs as well as tuition assistance.

Morgan Woods, 29, a training analyst at semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, graduated from college with a $20,000 debt load. Her employer is paying $125 per month toward her student loans, a sum that will increase over time.

Woods now expects to pay off her loans four years earlier than she anticipated doing on her own and hopes it will improve her options as she explores buying a house.

“The fact that I’m now ahead of where I thought I would be a little over a year ago is very nice to see,” she said.

Making the case

Not all employers offer education benefits, and when they do, they’re not always widely publicized. To find out if your employer offers such benefits, ask a manager or a human resources representative.

Show how a course or training directly relates to your role and how it would help you do your job more effectively, Dufrane advised. Even if there’s no formal tuition reimbursement program, your employer might have a training or professional development budget.

“If you’re taking on a stretch role or entering a new industry, you can advocate for training as part of your offer. Say something like, ‘I’d like to take a course to help me get up to speed in this area.’ In my experience, that shows initiative and employers often respect it,” Dufrane said.

You can also approach your boss and say, “I want to move up and I want to invest in myself. What recommendations do you have for me?” Dufrane added.

Finding the time

Fitting in classes, study sessions and paper writing can be daunting when holding down a full-time job, but there are ways to make it work.

Rene Sotolongo, a cybersecurity analyst at the Human Resource Certification Institute, earned a master’s degree in cybersecurity using tuition reimbursement benefits from his employer. To manage his time, he switched to working Monday through Thursday, studied on weeknights and dedicated Friday through Sunday to other schoolwork.

“Without the tuition reimbursement or the organization’s flexibility, there’s no way that I would be able to” earn advanced degrees, said Sotolongo, who is now pursuing a PhD with assistance from HRCI. “It’s rewarding in every aspect.”

Providing flexibility shows commitment to employees, Dufrane said. “You’ve got to be flexible around learning because people have parents they’re taking care of and kids they’re taking care of, and going home at night isn’t always the best time to be writing a paper,” she said.

Fitting in schoolwork while also meeting the needs of a son, a fiancee, a full-time job and a puppy has been challenging for Mosley, but it also provided a way to model studious behavior for his son.

“Instead of me just telling him he needs to do his, now he’s seeing me doing schoolwork, so that actually helped out with him wanting to do his work more,” Mosley said. “We actually take time to sit down together some days to work on our homework, so it’s been a life-changing situation.”

Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at cbussewitz@ap.org. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well

Margaret Giles, Morningstar

Many of the best investing moves are made on autopilot. Just look at the track record of automatic payroll deductions and savings increases.

Other investing decisions, like a transition into retirement, require a more hands-on approach.

Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning, recommends taking a preemptive approach as you get closer to retirement. The key is to visualize what you want your retirement to look like while you have enough time to make any adjustments you might need to get you there.

Here are five steps to take now if you plan to retire in the next five years:

1. Consider the role of work in retirement

Decide whether some kind of work is realistically part of your retirement plan. That income stream can make your retirement spending simpler, but it shouldn’t be the linchpin of your whole plan. That’s because you may not be able to work even if you want to.

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2. Track your expenses

Understand what you’re actually spending today and see whether your spending will change over the next few years and into retirement. Getting a grasp of your future spending needs will help you determine whether your plan is on track.

3. Check up on Social Security

For most people, Social Security is a key source of income in retirement. Create an account on the Social Security website and make sure they have your correct information. This will let you model out different Social Security claiming dates using your own information.

4. Assess your current retirement savings

Look at your spending and subtract Social Security to get a sense of what you’ll need from your portfolio. If your spending doesn’t align with roughly 4% or less of your portfolio, you may need to make some changes. Consider saving more, investing differently, putting off your planned retirement date, or adjusting how much you plan to spend in retirement.

5. Derisk your portfolio

As you get within 10 years of retirement, you’ll want to make sure that your asset allocation can help protect your retirement plan from getting derailed by market volatility. If equity losses happen early on in your retirement, you can spend from your safer assets and wait until the market recovers to pull from your stock portfolio.

By thinking about retirement preemptively, you’ll have a better sense of when you want to retire and what you want it to be like. Plus, you can make any course corrections needed to make it happen.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance

Margaret Giles is a senior editor of content development for Morningstar.

To say that sage grouse now are extinct in western North Dakota might be stretching things — but only slightly — after surveys of the leks, the birds’ communal mating grounds, this spring failed to find a single male on the mating grounds, a Game and Fish Department biologist says.

This was the first year that state and federal surveyors failed to count a single male sage grouse in Bowman County, the last place in western North Dakota with a remnant population of the beleaguered grouse species, said Jesse Kolar, the Game and Fish Department’s upland game management supervisor in Dickinson.

Zero. Nada. None.

They did count one female, Kolar says.

“I wouldn’t say they’re extinct from North Dakota, but I do think you could argue they’re functionally extinct,” Kolar said. “I don’t think they’re going to bounce back from as low as they are right now to any meaningful numbers.”

Unless, of course, the western grouse species has “some really successful production years” in adjacent areas of South Dakota and Montana, “which hasn’t been the recent trend,” Kolar said.

The decline in North Dakota’s sage grouse population dates back as far as the 1950s, Kolar says, but the downtrend worsened in 2006 or 2007, when West Nile virus was confirmed in the species.

“That was a significant factor and possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “Once our (lek count) numbers dipped below 150 males, we’ve never seen consistent rebounds in the population.”

North Dakota’s last sage grouse season was in 2007.

A variety of factors are behind the decline, Kolar says, including loss of the Big Sagebrush species — Artemisia tridentanta — upon which the birds rely, rangeland conversion, agriculture and energy development.

Ideally, sage grouse prefer 10- to 20-square-mile tracts of Big Sagebrush habitat that is relatively undisturbed, Kolar says.

“In North Dakota, we haven’t had that for many years,” he said. “That’s why I sometimes say it’s surprising they held on for as long as they have.”

The frustrating part, Kolar says, is there’s no single cause behind the species’ disappearance from the western North Dakota landscape.

“If it were just energy development, we could go and combat energy development in a part of their range and try to set up a core where we didn’t have energy development,” Kolar said. “Or, if it were just agricultural development, we could do habitat easements and find a big enough core where we could really protect it from agricultural conversion.

“But no, it’s an ‘all of the above’ (scenario).”

In an effort to jumpstart the population, the Game and Fish Department translocated sage grouse from Wyoming from 2017 to 2020. The department translocated 205 sage grouse — 60 males, 84 females and 61 chicks — during the four-year effort.

“We tried a lot of different things, spent a lot of money trying to supplement the population and unfortunately, none of that worked,” said Bill Haase, wildlife chief for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department.

From a low of five male sage grouse in 2017, the count rebounded to 29 in 2019, Kolar says — still far below the previous high of 199 males in 2007. That was followed by 74 in 2008 “and steady declines after,” he said.

The rebound in 2019 could be due, at least in part, to the department’s translocations, Kolar says, but surveyors didn’t see many males with leg bands during the spring lek surveys, which would have indicated Wyoming birds.

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“It’s a bit unclear as to what caused the rebound, especially since areas outside of our translocation area also rebounded,” Kolar said. “Ultimately, the expensive translocations were not feasible to continue long-term, and we saw an immediate decline following the translocation project — further supporting the futility of continuing translocation efforts.”

Given the declines, Game and Fish isn’t investing as much effort into sage grouse counts as it did 10 years ago. The department used to count all historic leks two to three times every spring, Kolar says, but many of those hadn’t had sage grouse for more than 15 years, and so efforts in those areas were discontinued.

“I’ve done searches from the air to see if any of those have re-ignited, but searches have not turned up any grouse that we were not finding from the ground,” Kolar said. “It’s likely that there were a handful of sage grouse males remaining in North Dakota that we did not detect, but not likely that we’re missing enough to change the story of a decline toward extirpation from the state.”

Cardboard toilet paper rolls. Egg cartons. Vintage film slides. Most people wouldn’t think of these as art supplies, but the St. Paul nonprofit ArtStart sees potential for these materials to become projects such as fairy houses, lanterns and jewelry.

And after 32 years of providing affordable art materials at its ArtScraps Creative Reuse Materials and Idea Center on St. Clair Avenue, the nonprofit is purchasing the building in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.

“We’re really happy to have the building, because it helps us keep doing what we’re doing,” said executive director Anne Sawyer.

ArtStart collects donations of recycled materials and art supplies and sells them back to the public at low prices at its ArtScraps center. The organization also offers youth art camps, workshops in libraries and artist residencies in schools across the Twin Cities.

Sawyer said the nonprofit moved into the building on St. Clair Avenue in 1993, but didn’t have funding to purchase the building at the time.

ArtStart paid for a large portion of the building’s down payment this year with a grant from the F.R. Bigelow Foundation. Now the nonprofit is fundraising for the rest of the building’s payment and repairs, partly because it’s receiving less support from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

The Arts Board is giving less to organizations such as ArtStart this year because the board received about 25% less funding from the Minnesota Legislature, according to Sue Jens, executive director of the Minnesota State Arts Board.

“The fund is supported with sales tax revenue. So if sales tax revenue decreases, then the funds available in that are also lower,” Jens said.

ArtStart has currently raised $4,000 of its $10,000 goal, and is asking the community to help.

Community impact

A customer walks out of ArtStart’s ArtScraps ReUse Center in St. Paul on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

ArtStart supported artist residencies in 20 St. Paul schools and provided 17,000 children and adults with workshops and camps during the 2024 fiscal year.

Puppeteer and artist Kallie Melvin was born in India and adopted to St. Paul. She attended the first ArtStart “Passport to India” youth camp 30 years ago as a student. This summer, she taught students how to make shadow puppets at the 2025 “Passport to India” camp.

“I had this opportunity to teach an art form from the country that I’m from with ArtStart,” Melvin said. “It was so amazing to just see the kids really drawn into creating their own puppets.”

Melvin said that as a kid, she would go to ArtScraps to find materials for crafts and school display boards.

“It’s just this really fun, vibrant place, even from the outside,” Melvin said. “Going there to get things for school projects was so exciting.”

Kris Klas is an adult basic education science teacher at the Hubbs Center in St. Paul. She often gets materials for hands-on classroom work and experiments at ArtScraps.

Klas said she’s especially grateful for ArtScraps now that Joann Fabrics and the nearby Treadle Yard Goods are closed.

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“We live in St. Paul, we don’t have a car, and we’re like, ‘How are we going to get fabric anymore?’” she said.

Klas also gets supplies from ArtScraps for leather working, block printing and home remodeling. She was looking for fabric for placemats at ArtScraps on Thursday.

“They bring so much light to the community. They’re just such a wonderful resource,” Melvin said. “It’s really exciting that they were able to buy the building.”

Sawyer said people can contribute to the ArtStart campaign by donating on Facebook at facebook.com/artstart.artscraps, mailing a check to the store at 1459 St. Clair Ave. or rounding up their next in-store purchase at ArtScraps.