Success Stories

Hannah Winters Is Doing College Her Way

Modern States Education Alliance has helped almost 700,000 learners prepare for and take the College Board’s College Level Examination Program (CLEP) since its founding in 2017. The organization has also learned plenty since then, including that the path to and through college is unique to each individual and anyone who seeks our support deserves it.

While many students use CLEP and Modern States to ease their journey directly from high school to a “traditional” four years on campus, that is simply not the college experience for millions of students. Often, life gets in the way.

Hannah Winters, a 28-year-old from New Hampshire, is among many Modern States learners who got a late start to college, but she’s catching up quickly.

“Throughout those years I had a bit of trouble with mental health and things like that, so it slowed me down quite a bit,” Winters, an aspiring editor, said in an interview. “I decided I was ready to start thinking about my career and figured getting a degree was going to be really helpful for that.”

Since April 2024, Winters has taken and passed nine CLEP exams after studying with Modern States, earning 36 credits toward her associate degree at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. She also spent one semester on campus during which she took four courses, leaving her within range of finishing her degree this spring.

Modern States courses are completely free and our philanthropy also pays our learners’ CLEP test and test-center fees. Passing CLEP test scores can be used as credit at more than 2,900 colleges and universities, including Bunker Hill.

Combined with Pell Grant funds Winters has received, the cost of college for her thus far has been only a couple of thousand dollars.

“Colleges can be crazy expensive and I’ve run into that problem before with my planning of what I was gonna do,” she said. “I decided it’s just not worth putting all of that money into it when you can do it for much cheaper. (Without Modern States), I’d be done with only my first semester.”

Winters was homeschooled, something she said made a transition to college difficult. She’s also battled physical ailments, making Modern States’ self-paced online courses ideal for her style of learning.

“I’m not going to be 100 percent every day, so it really helps,” she said. “It opens things up for a lot of different types of people. The self-paced aspect just makes it so much easier for all kinds of people to be able to complete those credits that they need.”

The CLEP exams Winters passed are: American History I; American History II; American Literature; English Composition; Human Growth and Development; Analysis and Interpretive Literature; French Language; Sociology; and Western Civilization II.

She studied for about three weeks on average prior to scheduling each exam, and for some even more quickly as she already knew the material well.

“I was able to go a lot faster for that reason, because I didn’t have to wait around for what I already understood,” she said.

A fiction lover, Winters is planning to complete a four-year degree and major in English before seeking a career in publishing. What’s not fiction is that she’s well underway, moving at a pace that suits her – and without the burden of significant student debt.

That’s a fact, and we could not be happier for her.