Many, if not most, school districts operate community adult schools. These programs are known best for offerings in crafts, cooking, yoga, languages and travel. However, as in Florida and Hawaii for example, they also provide for study in standard academic subjects, including economics. Because of the large number of students seeking general educational development (GED) degrees, the courses are offered as GED credit, and thus taught at the high-school level. For the homemaker or small businessman looking for a basic working knowledge of macro- or micro-economics, the adult school is a convenient and cost-effective choice. Usually holding classes in fall and spring, most community schools mail brochures weeks before the start of the semester.
Those who choose to study in the comfort of their own homes can take advantage of the many resources available on the Internet. Companies devoted to business training have a growing online presence. CBT Direct and the Global Finance School are but two enterprises that have developed an online curriculum that includes economics courses to supplement the study of banking, finance, insurance and risk. While there is a fee for most of the courses, students might want to check with their employers to see if a reimbursement program is available. Businesses often discover that employees attuned to economic factors are assets to the organization.
The advent of the iPod was a watershed event in the dissemination of information. Without having to sit through a 2½-hour lecture, a student can process the content of that discourse on her own time and in easily digestible bites. In the area of economics, this is both crucial and beneficial: crucial in that important details such as ratio formulas must be understood and retained; beneficial in that the listener can play and replay any sections of the presentation that were not grasped upon first hearing. Important to know going in, however, is that economics is not an exact science, and is thus subject to the political and social views of the speaker. Podcasts by the Liberty Fund Inc., for instance, approach the subject matter from a libertarian perspective.
Long before professional education became standardized, lawyers, doctors and engineers would begin their vocational preparation by reading. Spending months alone with their books, they mastered the theory before being allowed to counsel a client or diagnose a patient. Today such education is considered woefully inadequate, but a heavy reading load is still required as a component of such training. Economics, being highly theoretical, is expounded on in treatises, articles, newspapers and textbooks. There is certainly no dearth of information out there. Yet the abundance of material can inhibit an interested learner from starting his quest. Fortunately, more scholars and practitioners have worked to boil the subject down to its essentials. The "For Dummies", "Made Simple" and "Complete Idiots Guide to..." series all include volumes on economic topics. While not exhaustive, these works give independent learners platforms from which to initiate their studies.