A county with two large universities, a technical college, three school districts and a dozen libraries has more adult education than almost any place its size, and almost none of it is organized in a way that a newcomer can find. The UVU catalog is on one site, BYU's evening program on another, the districts' adult diploma programs on a third that nobody visits, the Covey's classes on a fourth. The result is that a Utah County adult who wants to learn Spanish, finish high school, take a BYU course, become a welder or paint on Saturday mornings can do every one of those things within twenty minutes of home and does not know it.
This guide is the map. It covers each provider — what it offers, who it is for, roughly what it costs — and then sorts them by what you actually want, which is a more useful organizing principle than who runs them. Prices are categories rather than numbers, because every provider reprices annually; the current figure is on the provider's site. This page is about adults; the youth catalogs at the same providers are larger and are covered in our homeschool guide and the classes pages linked at the end.
UVU Community Education
Utah Valley University's Continuing Education division runs the largest general-interest catalog in the county, and it is the answer to most "I want to learn how to" questions.
What it offers. The community side of the catalog has covered computer and software skills (the office suites, design programs, coding introductions), art and photography, dance and fitness, languages (Spanish above all, in a county where it is the second language of daily life), personal finance and real estate, writing, cooking, parenting and family topics, and test preparation, along with a rotating set of one-day and one-evening workshops. The professional side runs certificate programs — project management, human resources, bookkeeping, medical coding, various technology certifications — and contract training for employers. Classes meet at the Orem campus, the Lehi campus, and at sites around the valley; a growing share are online or hybrid.
Who it is for. Anyone. No admission, no transcript, no age limit beyond the class's own. It is where a retiree learns a language, a small-business owner learns bookkeeping, a parent learns a software package for a job change.
What it costs. Per course: a few dozen dollars for a single workshop, a few hundred for a multi-week course, more for a certificate track. Enrollment is online through the catalog, with a phone line and an email address for questions.
The for-credit side. UVU's regular evening and online sections are open to admitted students, and UVU is open-enrollment for admission, so an adult who wants credit toward a degree can enroll as a student and take evening classes at resident tuition. Our UVU student guide covers admission; the residency guide covers the twelve-month rule that decides what you pay.
BYU: Evening Classes, Continuing Education, and Education Week
BYU is a private university with a selective admissions process, and most Utah County adults assume its classrooms are closed to them. They are not, quite.
Evening Classes. BYU has offered evening instruction since its founding — Karl Maeser's 1875 academy taught adults at night — and formalized it in 1956 as the Department of Evening Classes. Each fall and winter semester it offers several hundred evening sections of regular BYU courses, taught by faculty and adjuncts, open to degree-seeking students and to non-degree adults who qualify for registration through the Office of Visiting Students. These are real BYU courses, for credit, at BYU tuition, under BYU's standards including the Honor Code; a visiting-student registration is an application, not a walk-in. For an adult who wants a BYU history, religion, language or writing course at night, this is the door.
Continuing Education's own programs. FlexGE lets people who are not admitted students take general-education courses for credit; Post-Bacc Prep serves graduates preparing for medical, dental or other professional school; Independent Study is the large online course catalog, at the university and high school levels, with record enrollment in recent years; and the conferences-and-workshops arm runs professional and personal programs through the year.
Education Week. The largest adult-education event in the state: a week in August of hundreds of lectures and classes across campus on religion, family, history, health, finance, the arts, open to the public for a registration fee, drawing tens of thousands. Our Education Week guide covers registration, parking and the strategy for a week with more sessions than anyone can attend.
Campus events. BYU's public lectures — the forums and devotionals, the department colloquia, the museum programs — are free and open, and they are a form of community education that Provo residents use heavily without calling it that.
The School Districts' Adult Programs
This is the least-publicized and, for the people who need it, the most important education in the valley.
Provo Adult Education, run by Provo City School District at its Independence Avenue site, offers the adult high school diploma — a real state diploma, earned by credit — and GED preparation and testing, academic skills classes, and an adult English Language Acquisition program with morning and evening classes Monday through Thursday, taught by educators, volunteers and teachers-in-training from the two universities. The program has expanded into career pathways, including a certified nursing assistant course run with training partners, and connects students to vocational rehabilitation and other services. The English program has been housed at Dixon Middle School and was scheduled to move to a new location for the 2026–27 year; call before you go.
Alpine Adult Education, run by Alpine School District from its American Fork center, does the same for the north county — diploma, GED, English — with satellite English classes in Eagle Mountain and elsewhere, and summer hours. Enrollment starts with a phone call to schedule a two-hour registration assessment and a counselor meeting. The district's 2027 split will reorganize it; the programs are expected to continue under the successor districts.
Nebo School District serves the south county with its own adult programs.
The programs are free or nominal for Utah residents, run day and evening, and are the right first stop for anyone who left high school without finishing, anyone learning English, and anyone who needs the GED for a job or a program. The districts also run the GED test itself. Our school boundaries guide tells you which district you are in.
Mountainland Technical College
MTECH is the state's technical college for Utah County — campuses in Lehi, Orem and Spanish Fork — and while it is a college rather than a community-education program, it is where the valley's adults go for the shortest path to a trade. Programs in health care (nursing assistant, medical assistant, pharmacy technician, dental assistant), the trades (welding, automotive, HVAC, electrical), technology, business and manufacturing run from weeks to a couple of years, lead to industry certifications, are open-enrollment for adults, and are priced far below university tuition. MTECH also runs short courses and custom employer training that look exactly like community education. Our trades and apprenticeships guide and coding bootcamps guide cover the programs and the alternatives.
The Arts Providers
The Covey Center for the Arts in downtown Provo runs adult art classes and workshops alongside its youth programs and its performance season; drawing, painting and the occasional performing-arts workshop have appeared in its catalog, priced per session in the tens of dollars.
The SCERA in Orem runs an arts-education program with classes for adults as well as children, in theater, dance and visual art.
The studios. For anything beyond a first class, the county's dedicated studios are better: the pottery studios with their wheel classes, the quilt shops with their guilds and lessons, the dance studios' adult sections, the music schools' adult lessons, the paint-night businesses. Our dance classes guide and music lessons guide cover the studio market, and the community-choirs and pottery pages on this site's roadmap will cover the rest.
The Libraries
Free, monthly, and underused by adults who think of the library as the children's building. The Provo City Library runs adult programming — author events, writing groups, craft and maker sessions, technology help, English conversation, lecture series — every month, and its educational-resources page is the best single index of adult education in the county, listing the district programs, UVU, MTECH and the community centers with phone numbers. The Orem Library and the county's other city libraries run their own. Our Provo Library guide and libraries guide cover the buildings and the cards.
English, Citizenship, and the Community Centers
The district adult programs are the backbone of English instruction in the county. Around them: the South Franklin Community Center in west Provo, a United Way site, offers free ESL, family classes, tax help and fitness; the libraries run English conversation groups; and citizenship-preparation classes have rotated among the district programs, the libraries and community organizations. The current schedule is a phone call to Provo Adult Education or the library. None of it requires documentation to attend, and all of it is free or nearly so. Our food help guide lists the same community centers for their other services.
The Senior Version
The county's senior centers — Provo's, Orem's, and the others — run their own class calendars: computer help, fitness, art, languages, lectures, at little or no cost to members. Our senior centers guide covers them. BYU Education Week and UVU Community Education both draw a large retired audience, and the universities' public lectures are, in practice, the valley's free senior university.
Why There Is No Community College Here
Newcomers from states with a community-college system look for the Utah County one and do not find it, and the explanation is the shape of the valley's education. Utah Valley University began life as a vocational school in 1941, became Utah Valley Community College in 1987, became a state college in 1993 and a university in 2008 — and it kept the open-enrollment, everyone-welcome mission of its community-college years while adding degrees. So the functions a community college performs elsewhere are split here: UVU's admitted-student side handles the associate degree and the transfer pathway, its Continuing Education side handles the non-credit catalog, and MTECH handles the technical training that a community college's vocational wing would. The district adult programs cover what a community college's adult basic education would. There is no gap; there is just no single building with the name on it, which is why this page exists.
How the Calendar Works
The providers run on different clocks, and knowing which is which saves a missed semester.
UVU Community Education runs continuously, with courses starting throughout the year and a catalog that refreshes by season; a class can usually be joined within a few weeks of deciding to. UVU's for-credit sections run on the university semester — fall, spring, summer — with application and registration deadlines months ahead.
BYU Evening Classes run on BYU's fall and winter semesters, with the visiting-student application due well before the semester begins; a would-be visitor who decides in August has missed fall. Education Week is one week in August with registration opening in early summer. Independent Study enrolls year-round.
The district adult programs enroll on a rolling basis through the school year, by appointment, with reduced summer hours; the English classes follow the school calendar with a summer break in some sites.
MTECH programs start on their own schedules, several times a year for the popular ones, with waiting lists for health care.
The Covey, the SCERA and the studios run session-based classes, typically in six- to ten-week blocks with seasonal starts. The libraries are monthly.
The general rule: decide in spring for fall, and decide in early fall for winter; the non-credit catalogs forgive a late decision, and the for-credit ones do not.
The Employer Angle
A meaningful share of the county's adult education is paid for by employers, and a Utah County worker should ask before paying. The large employers — the tech companies of the Lehi corridor, the hospital systems, the universities themselves, the county and the cities — commonly offer tuition reimbursement for job-related coursework, and several contract directly with UVU Continuing Education and MTECH for custom training that employees attend on work time. The hospital systems fund nursing-assistant and other health-care certifications for existing employees; the tech companies reimburse certifications. BYU and UVU employees have tuition benefits at their own institutions. Our best companies to work for guide notes which of the county's large employers publicize education benefits, and the jobs guide covers the market that the certificates feed.
What a Class Here Is Actually Like
Two features of Utah County adult education surprise people from elsewhere. The first is the age range: a UVU Community Education Spanish class or a BYU evening course seats nineteen-year-olds beside retirees beside parents on a night out, because the valley's demographics put all three in the same room, and the instructors are used to teaching across it. The second is the volunteer density. The district English programs, the library groups and the community centers are staffed to an unusual degree by volunteers — returned missionaries who learned a language abroad, education students from the two universities, retirees — which is why the free programs here are better than free programs usually are. A class at the district level may have a certified teacher and three conversation partners in the same hour. Expect the schedule to bend around the church calendar (nothing meets on Sunday, little on Monday evening) and around the universities' semesters, and expect the room to be full in January and September and half-empty in July.
Choosing, by What You Want
A credential. Diploma or GED: the district programs. An industry certification: MTECH, or UVU's professional certificates. A degree: UVU admission, evening sections.
A skill. A language, a software package, photography, finance: UVU Community Education, or the studio that teaches it.
A university course, for credit, at night. BYU Evening Classes through the visiting-student office, or UVU's evening sections as an admitted student.
A week of lectures on everything. BYU Education Week.
A free hour. The library.
English or citizenship. The district programs and South Franklin.
A trade. MTECH.
Something for a child. The youth catalogs at all of the above, which are larger than the adult ones.
The Short Version
Utah County has more adult education than almost any place its size and no index for it. UVU Community Education is the general catalog; BYU's Evening Classes and Continuing Education open real BYU courses to non-students who apply as visitors, and Education Week opens the whole campus for a week in August; the Provo and Alpine districts' adult programs offer a free diploma, GED and English; MTECH is the trade school; the Covey, the SCERA and the studios teach the arts; the libraries are free and monthly. Sort by what you want — credential, skill, credit, lecture, free hour, English, trade — and the provider follows. Confirm prices and schedules on the provider's site; every one reprices each year.
Related Guides
- BYU Education Week: The Complete Guide
- UVU Student Guide
- Utah Residency for In-State Tuition
- Trades and Apprenticeships in Utah Valley
- Coding Bootcamps in Utah Valley
- Provo City Library: The Complete Guide
- Libraries in Utah Valley
- Senior Centers in Utah Valley
Frequently Asked Questions
What is UVU Community Education, and who can take the classes?
Can a non-student take a class at BYU?
Where do adults finish high school or get a GED in Utah County?
What about learning English, or citizenship classes?
Where are the art, music and craft classes for adults?
What is Mountainland Technical College, and is it community education?
How much does community education cost here?
Which one should I pick?
