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Table of Contents
How a 40-Year-Old Idea Became Higher
Educations Next Big Thing

College, on Your Own

10

An Online Kingdom Come

16

Online Venture Energizes

Vulnerable College

21

Advising Gets Personal With

New Coaching Services

25

Spotlight on Retention

28

Retention in the Trenches

31

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How a 40-Year-Old Idea Became Higher

Educations Next Big Thing
DAN BERRETT

SEPTEMBER 22, 2015

While this model has long been used to expand access and
lower costs, particularly for adult students, it is now attracting
attention as a way to shore up academic rigor.

One of higher educations elder statesmen could see a shake-up

coming.
An odd bit of administrative protocol, the credit hour, had
outlived its usefulness, he thought. It forced students to bide
their time for weeks, months, semesters even if they had
already mastered the material.

But this surge in interest has also sparked questions. How

effective a method is it for students with varying levels of
preparedness, or is it really only suited for the academically
talented who can learn on their own? Can it assure educational
quality, or is it just being offered to the disadvantaged as a
cut-rate version of the full college experience?

They should be free to move through college by demonstrating

their achievement, he wrote, instead of deferring to time
spent in class. A new day was dawning, wrote Walter A.
Jessup, who was the leader of the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching the group responsible for creating
the credit hour in the first place.

The story of how competency-based education has become the

latest Next Big Thing after being around for four decades is a
tale of timing, of money and politics, and of shifting academic
norms.

American higher education, he predicted, appears to be well

on its way to another stage of development.

Advocates for competency-based learning have seen Big Things

get hyped in the past, only to flame out. Still, they hope that
this model of learning can ultimately achieve a grand goal:
staking a claim to, defining, and substantiating quality in higher
education.

That was 1937.

American higher education still hasnt gotten there.
Meanwhile, the concern that Mr. Jessup outlined has only
intensified in the 78 years since, magnified by the growing
conviction that a bachelors degree is now the ticket to the
middle class, the escalating costs of earning a degree, and shifts
in demographics that are sending more adult students and
those from first-generation and low-income backgrounds to the
nations campuses.

Just maybe, the new stage of development that Mr. Jessup

envisioned decades ago may finally be arriving.
A generation or two after Mr. Jessups prediction, a different
sort of challenge confronted higher education. The end of the
Vietnam War and broadening opportunities for women meant
that adults who were older than the core demographic of 18to 21-year-olds were flocking to college. But with jobs and
families, they did not have the luxury of spending hours each
week in a classroom.

These pressures are intersecting with another mounting

concern: educational quality. Together, these forces are feeding
an unusual bipartisan consensus, and they are prompting
higher-education leaders to take a fresh look at an old idea:
competency-based education. It allows students to make
progress at their own pace by demonstrating what they know
and can do instead of hewing to the timeline of the semester.

Competency-based education as a concept began in that

era, the 1970s, with programs emerging to serve those older
students. Places like Excelsior College (then Regents College),

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Thomas Edison State College, DePaul Universitys School for

New Learning, and the State University of New Yorks Empire
State College were among the first to offer such programs. They
wanted to expand access.

Key Eras of Growth for Competency-Based Learning

Competency-based learning has been a part of American
higher education for over four decades. Here are some key
turning points.

Then, as state support for higher education dropped and tuition

and student-loan debt rose, so did concerns about cost.

The 1970s

Those two goals, access and cost, have dominated years of

efforts to remake higher education. Now, a third goal
educational quality is driving change.

Institutions like Alverno College, DePaul Universitys

School for New Learning, Regents College (now Excelsior
College), the State University of New Yorks Empire
State College, and Thomas Edison State College are
the first adopters. They seek to make higher education
available to a growing population of adult students by
using demonstrable outcomes and measures of previously
acquired learning to assess what students know. The
approach allows students to make progress at their own
pace instead of following the traditional academic calendar.

Competency-based learning may be able to achieve all three

goals, say its supporters. And, they add, it is quality that matters
most. Its potential is for a much higher level of quality and
a greater attention to rigor, says Alison Kadlec, senior vice
president of Public Agenda, a nonprofit organization that is
playing a leading role in the growth of this model.
The worst possible outcome, she said, would be that
competency-based education becomes a subprime form of
learning.

Late 1990s
The governors of 11 states agree, in 1997, to create a virtual
college to help students acquire training for in-demand
jobs like information technology, teaching, and nursing.
Western Governors University reaches 71 students in
1999, its first year in operation. By 2015, it enrolls more
than 62,000 students. Its scale is enabled by online tools, a
competency-based method, and the separation of faculty
roles into those who assess learning and those who provide
academic coaching.

Ms. Kadlec and others see historical parallels to past efforts that
have hit snags. Online education comes up often as a cautionary
tale. In its early days, its full potential, to connect students and
make their learning visible, often remained unfulfilled; instead,
many instructors simply replicated their lectures online.
That account was echoed by Linda M. Harasim, a professor of
communications at Simon Fraser University, who was an early
adopter of online teaching and has chronicled its evolution. She
initially hoped that online teaching would enable students to
collaborate and network with one another, and make education
more effective.

Now
Southern New Hampshire University, in 2013, becomes
the first institution approved to award federal financial aid
based on students demonstrated progress instead of the
credit hour. That same year, the University of Wisconsin
begins offering its own competency-based program,
signaling mainstream acceptance of the idea. A year later,
the Competency-Based Education Network forms. The
coalition of 17 institutions and two state systems seeks to
share information on this method of learning, guide its
development, and stake out principles for high-quality
programs. Now nearly 600 institutions are now seriously
exploring competency-based education.

Instead, she says, administrators saw online learning as a way to

cut costs, particularly in its early years. Online was simply more
efficient, Ms. Harasim says. They didnt think about it being
more effective.
The trajectory of community colleges decades ago also suggests
parallels to competency-based learning today. Community
colleges dwelt for decades on the margins until their moment
arrived, in the 1960s, with an average of one new community
college opening nearly each week.

CONTINUES

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The goal of increased access inspired much of the growth, says

John E. Roueche, president of the Roueche Graduate Center
at National American University and an emeritus professor
of community-college leadership at the University of Texas at
Austin. So many colleges got committed to notions of equity,
access, and opportunity, and Come on in the waters fine, he
says. But they paid too little attention, he argues, to ensuring
that students succeeded once they got there. Quality suffered.

The tweak was one item among a slew of regulatory decisions

made about accreditation. But it forced people to think through
how a pure competency-based approach fits in the context of
traditional regulations.
It was, says Michael J. Offerman, a former president of Capella
University who advised the Education Department on the new
rules, the first time any of us had to wrestle with what direct
assessment meant. No groundswell of interest followed the
change. Western Governors even declined to use it; the credit
hour was still the common currency, and the government had
yet to issue guidance to help colleges makes sense of the new
language.

The results of that were just pitiful, he says. Atrocious

attrition.
For years, access and affordability continued to be the chief
goals for competency-based-education providers. They inspired
the founding, in 1997, of Western Governors University, when
the governors of 11 states signed on to a virtual college that
would allow students, chiefly in remote areas, to acquire skills
for in-demand jobs in fields like information technology,
teaching, and nursing. People could gain inexpensive access to
a practically focused education at a time of decreasing public
spending. The model called for technology-enabled, self-paced
learning using the competency-based approach.

Seven years later, Southern New Hampshire University became

the first institution to apply for consideration as a directassessment provider. It was approved the following year, and
just a few others have followed. But what ultimately mattered
most was the broader signal that the Education Department was
receptive to innovation. Momentum has clearly accelerated since
then.
In 2013, the University of Wisconsin started offering a
homegrown version of the competency-based model, called the
Flexible Option. It allows students to earn competency-based
versions of an associate degree in arts and science, and bachelors
degrees in nursing, biomedical sciences diagnostic imaging, and
information science and technology. Nearly 500 have enrolled.

The idea took a little while to gain traction. Enrollment didnt

crack 1,000 for four years, but then it took off.
A decade later, Western Governors had more than 40,000
students. This year, enrollment topped 62,000.
Western Governors has become the colossus of the field, and it
has spawned, in unforeseen ways, much of the recent interest in
competency-based learning.

For many observers, Wisconsins foray into competency-based

learning marked that models entry into higher educations
mainstream. For months, administrators in Wisconsins
extension program fielded multiple calls each day from other
colleges seeking advice.

A decade ago, during debate over the reauthorization of the

Higher Education Act, Western Governors pressed the federal
government to tweak regulations so that financial aid could
be awarded to students in competency-based programs that
werent tied closely to the credit hour. Instead, money could be
made available for something called direct assessment. It meant
that a college could measure what a student knows and can do,
and allow the student to proceed and receive aid accordingly.
Mastery of skills or content could be demonstrated by things
like projects, papers, examinations, presentations, performances,
and portfolios.

Other public institutions, including Purdue University and the

University of Michigans medical school in Ann Arbor, have
since adopted competency-based approaches in interdisciplinary
and health programs, respectively. Last year, the University of
Maine at Presque Isle made this approach the standard for all of
its programs.
Meanwhile, state and federal politicians have been trumpeting
competency-based learnings promise.

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President Obama has highlighted it. In a major policy speech

in Buffalo in 2013, he laid out his agenda for higher education.
His ideas for rating colleges and tying students loan repayment
to their earnings dominated the headlines, but the president
also made a point of encouraging colleges to innovate. His first
example was competency-based learning, referring specifically
to what Southern New Hampshire and Wisconsin were doing.

In contrast to many past efforts to spark change, Luminas

motivation to support competency-based learning grew out of
concerns about educational quality, says Kevin M. Corcoran,
Luminas strategy director. That mode of education emerged
as a natural outgrowth of Luminas work in recent years to
champion two efforts, the Degree Qualifications Profile, which
sets out the skills and knowledge that students should achieve
during their pursuit of different degrees, and Tuning, which
seeks to determine the core material and skills for particular
disciplines. About 600 colleges nationally have adopted these
two efforts, and faculty members have been at their core,
defining and assessing what matters in student learning.

The idea would be if youre learning the material faster, you can
finish faster, which means you pay less and you save money, he
said, to applause.
Southern New Hampshire and Wisconsin belong to a
network of providers that are working together to lead the
competency-based models growth. Instead of being isolated
actors doing their own thing, says Amy Laitinen, director for
higher education at New America, a think tank, institutions
are working together. They want to affiliate and grow the
movement and the field, she says.

Lumina and Public Agenda have modeled their work on

health-care reform. Each quarter, they bring together academic
leaders, usually at the Hilton at OHare airport, to kick off
recurring 90-day cycles in which they design experiments,
analyze the results, and report on findings. The group has
focused on big questions: How can it identify good program
design or assessment? How do colleges processes and business
practices need to change? What evidence base do they need to
demonstrate educational quality?

Ms. Laitinens 2012 paper, Cracking the Credit Hour, has

been widely credited with crystallizing the shortcomings of
the existing system and the need for an alternative (she also
seized on Walter Jessups and the Carnegie foundations early
recognition of the credit hours failings).

Some basic principles of quality and rigor have emerged, says

Charla S. Long, a higher-education consultant working with
Public Agenda. Among them: careful planning of courses and
programs, with faculty members roles designed to take full
advantage of their time and talents. Assessments, she added,
should be reliable and tied to what matters to each discipline.
They should be administered frequently, informally, and
summatively, not as a single, high-stakes exam. One test isnt
quality, she says.

Persuasion alone wont spark the growth of competency-based

education. Its advocates have come to believe that it also needs
a firm push. It could play out organically, Ms. Laitinen says,
but we want it to happen intentionally.

Theres a real danger in being

seduced by innovation without
making sure the quality piece
has been paid attention to.

While these principles have been guiding many programs,

the people who run them recognize that solid evidence is still
needed. We havent had enough players to substantiate data,
says Ms. Long.
But that is starting to change.

The Lumina Foundation has been a major player in this bid

for intentionality, donating $13 million over the past two years,
chiefly to support efforts to bring together institutions and
policy makers to share ideas about how to spread programs and
remove regulatory barriers.

New programs keep emerging. A pair of participants in the

Lumina-funded network started offering a degree together in
organizational leadership last year, to stave off an anticipated
shortfall of middle managers in the Rio Grande Valley. The

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partnership of South Texas College and Texas A&M University

at Commerce has experienced unexpectedly strong demand,
and some friction with faculty, both of which illustrate the
models promise and the lingering barriers to change.

Mr. Peek described a typical exchange of messages he has with

students. You might be talking today about banking. A little
later youre discussing imports and exports. With another,
its supply and demand, he said. You have 10 or 11 students
asking you different things at different times.

Students can pursue the degree on either campus. South Texass

program began last year with 40 students, and 22 of them
graduated. Administrators projected that enrollment this year
would double, to 80. Instead, it hit 181.

It may not be the kind of professorial work he originally

envisioned doing, but he sees its benefits for students. The
instructor ends up being a facilitator more than a traditional
teacher, he said. The program, he added, is a logical, organic
extension of how education is evolving.

Faculty members at both colleges worked together to develop

curriculum, determining what students should be able to do at
the end of their courses and then working backward to identify
the learning outcomes for general-education requirements and
for specialized subjects like organizational behavior and change
management. Pearson, the publishing company, is responsible
for providing the assessments and assignments for each
competency.

Rebecca Olympia Millan, an associate professor of English at

South Texas, can see its value, too, as well as its shortcomings.
The model works, she says, for some students the
self-motivated, and those who already know the material or
can teach themselves. There are those whose progress would be
derailed if stretched out over time, says Ms. Millan, who has
seen that happen plenty of times. Many students, she says, could
have plowed through the material if given the option.

Not all faculty members have bought into the idea. Five of the
approximately 30 instructors who initially committed to the
program have dropped out, says Kevin M. Peek, an economics
professor and chair of the bachelors program at South Texas.
Even more problematic, he continued, were the several
others who were unwilling to even consider the possibility of
collaborating with us.

They know this stuff, she says. A lot of times, they

dont need me.
She also worries about when competency-based learning
is not carried out effectively. When programs are too
compartmentalized, they become examples of what she calls
the McDonaldization of education, where the instructor does
little more than check off a box affirming that a student knows
the material. That approach doesnt work for a lot of students.

Rosemond A. Moore, chair of the accounting, economics, and

business-administration program at South Texas, often visited
other departments to promote the partnership. Some of her
colleagues loved the notion of competency-based learning,
she said, and wanted to expand it beyond the joint effort with
A&M. At other meetings, she says, Id go and literally take a
pounding. Id come out beaten and bruised.

I see a dichotomous picture play out, Ms. Millan says.

Either they succeed or they dont.
Many more competency-based programs are sure to come.

Professors asked her if the program was rigorous or of

high-enough quality. It also seemed to unsettle their sense of
their roles. Because it was so different, she says, they felt like
the power was being taken away from them.

Hundreds of faculty members and administrators gathered

in Phoenix this fall for what was billed as the first meeting
of its kind, of a broad swath of competency-based providers.
It was organized by Public Agenda and supported by higher
educations rising powers and old guard: Lumina, the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Educause, the American
Council on Education, and the Association of American
Colleges and Universities.

The pacing of the program is individualized, with students

proceeding through the syllabus according to their own
timeline, focusing on curricular areas they choose and as it fits
their schedule.

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Nearly 600 institutions are seriously exploring this mode of

learning, a huge jump from three years ago, when about 20
colleges were offering it, according to Mr. Offerman, who
has studied the models growth and development. Seven
colleges have won approval from the Education Department
to award financial aid for students who earn credits on the
basis of demonstrated learning instead of time. Another three
institutions are being considered. Four state systems of
higher education are taking a close look at adopting the
mode of learning.

than a process of checking off boxes attesting that students

learned, on their own, at some point.
His business is not to check knowledge, they wrote,
describing the job of a professor. Instead it is to put matters
in true perspective, to explain less obvious connections
and relationships, to open up fresh insights, and to trace
unsuspected applications that will cause ideas to put down
permanent roots.
His purpose, they continued, should be to lead the way from
knowledge to wisdom.

The conference seemed to fill a need; a majority of attendees

were there as newcomers, hoping to connect to others and
looking for help in building a program. For many longtime
observers of competency-based learning, the conference marked
an exciting and fraught moment. The meeting signaled energy
and progress, and also risk. Theres a real danger, Ms. Laitinen
said, in being seduced by innovation without making sure the
quality piece has been paid attention to.

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and

educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to
him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.

Perhaps, in a decade or two, every degree program will use the

language of competency, and students will be working in a new
currency of learning, one in which they are able to substantiate
what they know and can do.
Short of that, some like Mr. Offerman hope, the legacy
could be simpler, providing a model for greater experimentation
with financial aid and more flexibility and innovation permitted
by regulators.
But many government officials remain cautious, even as the
Education Department has shown its willingness to experiment.
An audit by the departments Office of Inspector General in
September raised concerns about the role of faculty members
and about the frequency and nature of the contact between
instructors and students. Similarly, some critics of
competency-based learning fear its broader implications
for education; while they concede that this approach may
encourage faculty to set clear standards about what students
know thereby establishing a floor of quality assurance it
can also place a low ceiling on expectations.
Writing 78 years ago, Mr. Jessups colleagues at the Carnegie
foundation emphasized how much teaching matters. It is more

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College, on Your Own

Competency-based education can help motivated students. But critics say its no panacea.
DAN BERRETT

JULY 14, 2014

Nichele L. Pollock felt like she was moving through college

in slow motion. In seven years, she had gotten about halfway
through her bachelors degree.

Although massive open online courses have generated far more

public fascination, competency-based learning may transform
higher education more. For a century, degrees have been built
on how much time people spend sitting in class. Competency
shifts that. It redefines academic progress according to the
learning that students demonstrate. It also puts them at the
center of the educational experience, placing much of the
burden of learning on them. In the process, it takes faculty
members out of their role as teachers, turning them into
coaches, curators, and graders. Colleges risk becoming little
more than credential-stampers.

But recently shes been racing forward, racking up 50 credits in

just eight months at Northern Arizona University, more than
most full-time students earn in three semesters. Shes done it
while holding down a full-time job coordinating clinical trials
at a medical-research facility in Tucson. She has no classmates,
no classroom, no lectures, and no professor-led discussions with
fellow students.
And shes the model for how competency-based learning could
transform higher education.

Many professors prize their relationships with students and see

education as a shared journey. Competency programs can make
these things feel obsolete. After all, if Ms. Pollock can finish as
much of a bachelors degree as quickly as she has, and mostly
on her own, what does that say about the value of exchanging
ideas with professors and other students, or the role of time
in fostering intellectual growth? Are these parts of a college
education as vital as we thought they were?

For decades, competency programs have served a niche market

of adults seeking credentials to help them advance in their
careers. Now, they are attracting broad interest and making
forays into the liberal arts. Competency programs are going
mainstream.
The approach has emerged as the educational disruption of
the moment because it appears to solve many of the challenges
facing higher education. Colleges core market of
traditional-aged students is declining, costs keep rising, a
national campaign is pushing for increasing the number of
graduates, and the value of a degree and what students are
learning are under growing scrutiny.

Ms. Pollock enrolled in Northern Arizona Universitys

competency-based program in the liberal arts after doing a
Google search for online programs in her state. A grant to that
program from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation persuaded
her that it was legit. The program would more quickly get her
where she wanted to go.

The buzz among policy makers, think tanks, and foundations

is spreading to colleges, which see competency programs as
a way to tap, at lower cost and with greater efficiency, into a
growing market of adult students whose lives dont follow rigid
semesters.

She expects to earn her degree in August, to pursue a graduate

program in psychology, and, eventually, to work as a child
psychologist or play therapist.
I didnt feel like Id have to start all over again, says Ms.
Pollock, 25, who transferred to Northern Arizona 50 of the 90

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credits she had earned from Pima Community College and the
University of Arizona. I could apply my past education and see
the immediate rewards.

A Lesson From Competency-Based Learning

Students in Northern Arizona Universitys competencybased baccalaureate program in the liberal arts might
complete the following assignment for a theoriesof-humanities lesson. It asks students to apply their
interdisciplinary learning across several courses to an
artistic experience they have had.

Northern Arizona started its liberal-arts program with people

like her in mind. It is one of three competency-based offerings
there, and it has about 70 active students.
The competency-based program is an outgrowth of Northern
Arizonas distance-learning program and the public universitys
mission of making an affordable education accessible in even
the farthest reaches of the state. The liberal-arts program was
designed to span disciplines and serve as a vehicle for students
to capitalize on the significant numbers of credits they may
have earned from other institutions.

Assignment:
Attend a live performance and write a reflection
After attending a play or musical, write a 750-word paper
that explores your own subjectivity, personal identity, and
human nature in light of the selected performance.

Northern Arizonas program began in June 2013. Other

competency-based programs with a liberal-arts emphasis have
also sprouted.

Students can draw on readings, podcasts, videos, and

lecture presentations that deal with identity, subjectivity,
and human nature. Sources might include William
Shakespeares King Lear, Virginia Woolf s To the
Lighthouse, and George Orwells Animal Farm, as well
as works describing the theories of Karl Marx, Abraham
Maslow, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson.

The University of Wisconsins extension program began in

January to offer competency-based degrees that include an
associate in arts and science.
Brandman University, a private, nonprofit institution that offers
classes online and on more than 25 campuses in California and
Washington, will begin in August to offer a competency-based
bachelors in business administration. It will include
general-education competencies in creative and critical
thinking; oral, written, and interpersonal communications; and
quantitative reasoning.

competency-based versions of the colleges existing humanities,

social-science, and natural- and physical-science courses.
Competency-based education covers a wide swath of
approaches, a factor that some experts say comes from a lack
of conceptual agreement about what competencies really
mean. The mode of learning can be delivered online or in
person. Its principles can be used in conventional classes led by
professors over a semester, or competencies can entirely replace
a traditional course, requiring students to demonstrate at their
own pace their mastery of a list of skills and content. Some
forms also award credit for what students have learned already,
in the military or workplace. The programs have been offered
for decades by a few specialized institutions like Charter Oak
State, Empire State, and Excelsior Colleges.

Students in DePaul Universitys competency-based programs in

business, computers, and education have to complete about half
of their credits in the liberal arts.
The number of institutions developing competency-based
programs in general has grown markedly since the fall, says
Michael J. Offerman, a higher-education consultant who is
monitoring interest in this mode of learning on behalf of the
Lumina Foundation, which is advocating for its use.
The most surprising development, he says, is the growing
curiosity about it among liberal-arts colleges. For example,
at Westminster College, a residential college in Salt Lake
City, the president has encouraged faculty members to create

New liberal-arts programs like Northern Arizonas mark a

significant development. Historically, competency programs

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have been heavily tilted toward practical and applied fields,

many of which are guided by standards set out by industry or
state licensing boards. Such a focus fits well with the models
approach, which relies on clearly defined outcomes students
must demonstrate through assessments.

competency-based learnings skeptics. But the model overlooks

key ingredients that make an education worthwhile, like the
intellectual maturation that comes with the passage of time and
the mind-enhancing experience of grappling with the diverse
perspectives of students in a classroom.

The emphasis also reflects the interests of the students whom

the model has served. Adult students often have little time to
attend class and want to earn a credential to quickly improve
their job prospects. Many policy makers, like those who
founded Western Governors University, which is perhaps the
best-known provider of competency-based education, see it as
an effective way to meet work-force needs.

The purpose of liberal educationunlike vocational

educationis not to train but to change people, and this takes
seat time, wrote Johann N. Neem, an associate professor
of history at Western Washington University, in his essay,
Experience Matters: Why Competency-Based Education
Will Not Replace Seat Time. It was published in Liberal
Education in the fall by the Association of American Colleges
and Universities.

That legacy has led some professors to argue that competency

programs are a poor fit for the often contested and ambiguous
nature of the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular. You
cant stamp a certification on the suppleness of ones intellect.
Many faculty members would also prefer to evaluate students in
more-nuanced ways, on the basis of class discussions and openended assignments.

Mastering a competency, he said in an interview, is like acing a

drivers test. Becoming a driver and passing a drivers test are
quite different.
That analogy raises questions about the function colleges should
serve in a competency-based model. Should they play the role
of the Department of Motor Vehicles, certifying a set of skills?
Is the goal to be driving instructors that prepare students for
their test? Or should they be more like the parent of a student
with a learners permit, coaching her in the passengers seat as
they log hours together on roads in all kinds of weather?

Such criticism is familiar to Corrine J. Gordon, the lead faculty

member in the Personalized Learning program in the liberal
arts at Northern Arizona. Her program seeks to demonstrate
its rigor. Each lesson has a pretest to gauge students level of
familiarity with the topic and allow them to advance to the next
lesson if they have already mastered it. Few do, she says.

For Mr. Neem, the role that colleges play should serve
the goal of a truly liberal education, which is often
idiosyncratic, reflective of the people involved, and resistant to
standardization.

Pretests, assignments, and the post-lesson test all involve

writing, in part because it is the best form of communication for
faculty members and far-flung students. A lesson might have
five writing assignments, each of which is an essay of between
500 and 1,000 words. It is more writing, she contends, than
most traditional courses require.

If ultimately you cant tell me what the value-added is of

the liberal arts, you dont know if its made any difference in
students intellectual abilities.
To advocates of competency programs, such arguments can
seem squishy. You can turn that on its head, says Clara M.
Lovett, a historian, president emerita of Northern Arizona,
and founding trustee of Western Governors University. If
ultimately you cant tell me what the value-added is of the
liberal arts, you dont know if its made any difference in
students intellectual abilities.

I dont necessarily think the microscope is pointed at

traditional education as much as it should be.
We know the deck is stacked against us, said Ms. Gordon. I
dont necessarily think the microscope is pointed at traditional
education as much as it should be.
Distilling an education to a set of demonstrable outcomes
that students master on their own can have value, say some of

Ms. Pollock says she has been changed by her experience as a

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student at Northern Arizona. The best example, she says, came

in a course called Ethical Obligation. Her assignment was to
read Plato and Socrates and write a 500-word essay applying
the philosophers ideas to a news clip or to faculty-selected
excerpts from documentaries. She wrote about morality and
illegal immigration.

of several programs say they are basing their work on Liberal

Education and Americas Promise, the associations effort to
stake out a common set of learning objectives and methods of
assessment. The association is also working with the University
of Wisconsin to develop its competency-based program for
students across the states system of two-year colleges.

Growing up in the South and now living near the U.S. border
with Mexico, Ms. Pollock said, she used to see the issue only
as it affected her; it was a costly burden to rescue immigrants
in the desert and treat them in local hospitals. After thinking
about morality in its individual, social, and national contexts
as informed by Plato, her mind changed. While still frustrated
by the cost, she also recognizes immigrations benefits to the
country, and the motives of those who come here.

The vision of higher education as a vigorous meeting of minds

with different views is an ideal that is not always realized,
says Ms. Gordon, of Northern Arizona. She recalled what she
described as a spectacular residential experience at Indiana
University at Bloomington, where she spent time after class
in coffee shops talking with her fellow students about what
they were learning. Not everyone did, though. She had plenty
of neighbors in her dormitory who failed to even show up for
lectures.

It really made me think about what is ethical, she said, and it

opened my mind to whats moral for a nation as a whole rather
than just myself.

There are some ways that we talk about higher education that
are a little bit utopian, Ms. Gordon says.

Making sure that competency-based learning serves broader

civic purposes instead of chiefly students career aspirations
is one of its main challenges, says Carol Geary Schneider,
president of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities, which advocates for liberal education.

She acknowledges that utopia, in the form of a residential

experience that unfolds over four years or more, may in fact be
better for the traditional-age student. But adults may not need it.
Im a different student than I was at 18, she says. A more
mature student is able to retain and conceptualize information
differently.

The goal is to provide students with opportunities to tackle

problems with people whose experience and views are different
from their own, she says. If the entire experience is privatized,
something fundamental to liberal education is being lost.

Professors offering competency-based courses sometimes find

the experience disconcerting because they can have little contact
with students.

The association has been keeping close tabs on competencybased learning, describing it as less heralded but more
consequential than other innovations, like MOOCs.

The faculty roles in many competency-based systems are

divided. Regular interactions with students happen with an
academic coach, who checks in through email and phone calls,
and makes sure students stay on track. Many times, these
advisers have earned masters degrees in the subject matter.

...opened my mind to whats

moral for a nation as a whole
rather than just myself.

The other faculty job is a subject-matter expert, who often holds

a doctorate. In traditional courses, such faculty members would
spend hours preparing for and teaching classes. Freed from that
work in the competency-based model, they create the curriculum,
assignments, and assessments, and evaluate students work.

Ms. Schneiders group has also been seeking to influence the

development of competency-based models to make sure they
align with the traditional values of the liberal arts. The creators

Theres a part of me that feels like its going against what I love
and value and why I went into teaching.

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Jennifer Heinert, an associate professor of English at

Wisconsins campus in West Bend, says her new work as a
subject-matter expert is a big adjustment from what she had
come to appreciate about being a faculty member. Theres a
part of me that feels like its going against what I love and value
and why I went into teaching, she says. If I did this with my
usual students, I wouldnt feel that I was doing my job.

members are persuaded that the competency version is as

rigorous. They worry, though, about the stakes for students.
Since financial aid is still rarely available to students in
competency-based programs, those in Wisconsins are on the
hook for the full cost.
Administrators in Wisconsin say they are screening applicants
for those who are likely to succeed in the largely self-guided
model of learning: students who are highly motivated, selfdisciplined, and mature. Wisconsin is also starting slowly by
design, accepting 10 new enrollees each month in each of its
five programs. Students can take the equivalent of one course at
a time, or they can pay $2,250 for a kind of educational buffet
in which they can tackle as many competencies as they want
during a three-month period.

Other faculty members have had a different experience. Ms.

Gordon, in Northern Arizona, says students in her programs
receive in-depth feedback, often pages of it, on their writing
assignmentsfar more than they would get from rubrics of the
sort Wisconsins competency program uses, in which students
work is evaluated according to a grid or checklist. She adds that
her interactions with students tend to be more substantial than
those she has had with a classroom full of students, when she
truly connects with only a few.

Still, some professors in Wisconsin wonder whether theres

really a big market of people who can benefit from the
competency-based model. How many autodidacts are there who
can read Simone de Beauvoirs Second Sex and think about it
from different perspectives without listening to other students
or engaging in give-and-take with a professor?

The process of developing competency-based versions of courses at

Wisconsin enriched the traditional curriculum, says Ms. Heinert.
She and her colleagues translated learning outcomes from their
existing courses into competencies. For example, a traditional
English 102 course might require students to write research papers,
tailoring them for specific audiences and purposes.

Most people need teachers, says Holly J. Hassel, a professor

of English and womens studies at the campus in Marathon
County. Thats just reality.

Translating learning goals into competencies means accounting

for the absence of a professor, and the tasks become more clearly
spelled out. To demonstrate competency, students must create
multipage texts that use sources. The papers must be sufficiently
complex and provide context that is appropriate to various types
of writing. Students will also have to make the right choices
about form and structure as they relate to different disciplines
and readers, and use language that fits various writing situations.

Even if they are not in a classroom or moderating a class chat,

some professors in Wisconsin see themselves as present in
the educational process. Were still there, says Kim Kostka,
a chemistry professor on Wisconsins Rock County campus
and coordinator of the competency-based program in arts and
science. Weve baked ourselves into the curriculum.
Whether or not that role suits her as a professor is beside the
point, she says. Were here to make sure the students have a
good experience, she says. If her job in this program means she
needs to grade papers and provide feedback by checking boxes
in a rubric, so be it.

At first, Wisconsins faculty members were supposed to develop

enough competency-based courses to allow students to satisfy
general-education requirements for the baccalaureate degrees
offered in the competency program. Professors did more than that,
and administrators realized they could offer an entire associate
degree in arts and science through the competency-based model.

Its not the same, but do students learn this way? she says.
Thats what we really want to find out.

The experiment has produced both pride and ambivalence.

Who, exactly, those students are and how many of them can
learn a liberal-arts curriculum in a competency-based model
remains to be seen.

Wisconsins program is being marketed as equal to its

traditional in-person or online offerings, and many faculty

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Ms. Pollock, for example, is something of an anomaly at

Northern Arizona. Most of the students have earned about the
same number of credits in six months in the competency-based
program as they would attending a traditional program part
time. Wisconsins experience has been similar.

Competency-Based Educations Big Tent

The mode of learning covers a wide swath of program types and modes of
delivery, some of which overlap and use the same terms in different ways.

There may not be many students who can complete a liberalarts curriculum by essentially teaching it to themselves. But
they deserve a shot at earning a diploma, say advocates of
competency-based learning.

Western Governors U.
Business, education, health,
information technology (online)
Northern Arizona U.
Information technology, liberal arts,
small-business administration (Online)

This group of students, however small, may also represent a new

market for competency-based learning. If so, it could mark an
important moment in the process of disruption.

Southern New Hampshire U.s

College for America.
Associate degree in general studies;
bachelors in communications and health-care
management

That word gets thrown around a lot in higher-educations

leadership circles, and it tends to provoke eye-rolling among
faculty, whose roles promise to be disrupted more than anyone
elses. Some professors, like Mr. Neem, of Western Washington,
dont believe competency-based learning will turn out to be a
disruptive innovation. It may remain one mode of education
among many, a prospect he favors.

Competency
frameworks

Western Governors U.
Associate of arts and science;
bachelors in nursing, diagnostic
imaging, and information
technology; certificate in business
and technical communications
(Online)
Westminster College (Utah)
Business, nursing, strategic
communications (Online and
in-person)

Capella U.
Business, information technology, psychology (Online)
DePaul U. School for New Learning
Business, computing, early-childhood education, and
individualized programs (Online and in-person)
Excelsior College School of Nursing
Nursing (Online)

The disruption of higher education has long been under way, says
Michelle R. Weise, a senior research fellow who studies higher
education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive
Innovation. The process began in the late 1980s with the
founding of large online colleges like the University of Phoenix.

Prior
Learning

Alverno College
Nursing, psychology, and English (In-person)
Brandman U.
Business administration (Online and in-person)

Disruption often begins simply, with programs or products that

are a bit clunky, proponents of the theory say. But those products
are good enough to appeal to people whose alternative is nothing
at all. A key moment is when the good-enough product starts to
improve and appeal to people with more choices.

U. of Maryland University College

Masters in business administration (online)

Coursebased

Competency-based liberal-arts programs may eventually be

able to compete with expensive private colleges that have
little brand-name cachet, Ms. Weise says. Students seeking an
affordable liberal-arts option will be among the first to grasp
competency-based learnings possibilities.
Itll start with the nontraditional students, Ms. Weise says.
It cant compete directly with traditional students, but it can
create something that works around the margins. I do see great
potential here.

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and

educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to
him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.

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An Online Kingdom Come

How Liberty U. became an unexpected model for the future of higher education
JACK STRIPLING

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

The little experiment that Mr. Falwell started in his hometown

is a pretty big deal now, and the residential campus here
does not begin to tell the story. Libertys online program
boasts nearly 65,000 students, more than any other nonprofit
college in the United States, according to federal data. Only
the University of Phoenix, the for-profit behemoth with an
enrollment of 207,000, trumps Liberty.

Maybe Jerry Falwell was right.

The late evangelist always figured that most people would
dismiss anything that started in this little city, where he
founded Liberty University.
They think of my hometown as a rather primitive Blue Ridge
Mountain village, a backwater on the James River, he wrote in
his autobiography, Strength for the Journey.

At most colleges, the question about online education is no

longer so much about whether it will play a role, but rather how
big a role and how soon. Nearly three-quarters of academic
leaders describe online education as crucial to their institutions
long-term strategies, a recent national survey found. Yet the
traditional classroom experience still dominates. Professors,
concerned that face-to-face instruction is pedagogically
imperative, can be particularly dubious about scaling up an
educational operation to reach a mass audience online.

More than four decades after Libertys founding, in 1971,

few in higher education would count the Rev. Falwell among
academes historic visionaries. But college leaders, grappling
with how to position their institutions for the future, might
want to take a closer look at the legacy of Mr. Falwell, who
is often better remembered for his divisive reputation as a
firebrand conservative.

LIBERTY: A GIANT ONLINE

From 2004-5 to 2013-14, Liberty University increased the number of its online students by more than 740 percent, with double-digit growth in eight of the past nine years.
100,000

80,000

60,000

40,000

20,000

0
2005-6

2006-7

2007-8

2008-9

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

2012-13

2013-14

Note: Liberty counts students who enroll at any point during a 12-month academic period. The Department of Education counts only those students enrolled in the fall. The 2013-14 academic year
is the latest year for which data are available.
Source: Liberty U.

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In contrast, Libertys growth feels like a natural extension of

Mr. Falwells television ministry, which at its zenith broadcast
church services to millions of viewers.

which sells the university lists of prospective students who have

expressed an interest in the institution. Once on the phone with
a prospect, recruiters aim to keep their calls to an average of
seven to 10 minutes, a former Liberty official explains.

To be sure, any lesson the Christian university offers about

the future of higher education may be a mixed one. Libertys
aggressive marketing approach, which feeds a voracious appetite
for worldwide online expansion, might strike some as the
corporatization of academe run amok. But there is no denying
that the university has carved out a distinct online identity
in a relatively new market and created an Internet education
machine that generates revenues any college would welcome.

We have to answer the question, move them through the

funnel, and get to the next person, says Phillip Milakovic,
who spent five years working in Libertys call center,
including as an associate director of admissions. He is now
digital-media manager at the Tribeca Marketing Group, where
he advises colleges.
Federal rules bar colleges from paying recruiters solely for the
number of students they enroll, because such incentives have
led to deceptive marketing practices. But Liberty crunches
plenty of data to see whether agents are getting students in the
door. How long did a call take? How many times was a person
put on hold? Why? All of those data points, rigorously tracked
by Liberty, are KPIs, Mr. Milakovic says, using a corporate
initialism for Key Performance Indicators.

Their success may be that they are not trying to be like

everybody else, says Michael B. Horn, co-founder and
executive director for education at the Christensen Institute for
Disruptive Innovation. Higher education is ignoring it at its
own risk.
Libertys campus has the feel of a summer camp, sprawled
across 7,000 acres on Candlers Mountain. Here the almost
14,000 students in residence can snowboard year-round on
synthetic snow, practice archery on a range of animal likenesses,
or just walk the grounds in contemplation, listening to soft
choral music that emanates from speakers on lampposts. These
are the scenes that permeate Libertys marketing materials.

The most-experienced agents, he says, are adept at

re-engaging with a prospective student who seems to have lost
interest in Liberty. You never want a person to say, Take me
off your list. I never want to be contacted again. Then you did
something wrong.

But much of the real business of Liberty University takes place

a short drive from the campus, in a setting that is decidedly less
bucolic. Tucked inside the River Ridge Mall, in what used to
be a Sears, is Libertys vast enrollment-management division.
More than 800 employees work here, crammed together in row
upon row of cubicles. This is the frontline of Libertys onlinerecruitment operation.

The fruits of all those labors are celebrated nearby. In the

call centers main lobby, plaques on a wall chart Libertys
online enrollment over the past eight years: 13,000, 14,000,
26,000, 55,000 Engraved at the top are the words,
God has blessed us.
Since Mr. Falwells death, in 2007, Liberty has been under
the leadership of his son, Jerry L. Falwell Jr. Slender and
soft-spoken, he bears little resemblance to his father. He accepts
the ambassadorial duties of the college presidency, but rather
begrudgingly. He describes public speaking, which his father
relished, as terrifying.

The room could easily be confused for a corporate call center.

Employees, donning headsets, leave their desks only after
providing clearly stated reasons. Scattered among the cubicles
are small printed signs that read Personal Break, Lunch, and
Off the Clock.

It is clear, though, that Mr. Falwell took some lessons

from his old man. As an evangelist, Jerry Falwell exploited a
relatively new medium to extend the church experience to a
mass audience. That formula continues to inform Libertys
business model.

Agents here have one primary focus: Move prospective

students, as quickly as possible, through Libertys admissions
funnel. That process often begins when Liberty purchases a lead
from an online search site, such as guidetoonlineschools.com,

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Again, were using technology to take it to the next levels,

Mr. Falwell Jr. says.

By 2005, when everybody started getting high-speed Internet

in their homes, we were just poised in the perfect position to
serve that huge market of adults, Mr. Falwell says.

It was not always this way. At several points during Libertys

relatively short history, the university appeared on the verge of
collapse. In its early days, it relied on revenues from the Old
Time Gospel Hour, the Falwell television ministry. But donors
closed their wallets after a series of scandals involving religious
broadcasters, notably Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

The words roll easily from Mr. Falwells mouth: Market.

Customers. Compared with the marketing approaches of a lot
of colleges, Libertys may seem brash. The university says it has
declined to join several major college associations because some
national groups set limits on how many T-shirts, water bottles,
and other goodies can be handed out at recruitment fairs.

As those ministers fell, all televangelists were judged

guilty by association, Mr. Falwell Sr.s wife, Macel, wrote in
Jerry Falwell: His Life and Legacy. Almost overnight,
Liberty lost millions of dollars in financial support.

Libertys corporate culture would not suit every college, but

the university does do a few things that would work anywhere.
For one, Liberty knows its audience. The typical online
student, its surveys show, is 36 years old, has some previous
college experience, and wants an education with a touch of
Christian values. So Liberty has built its programs to serve that
demographic, offering courses in eight-week sessions, which
its data show students prefer over longer traditional semesters.
A standard syllabus, even in a course with no obvious religious
connection, encourages students to pray in online forums.

Before the ink was dry on the tabloids, she continued,

we were $82-million deep in short-term debt.
The picture looks far different today. Moodys Investors Service,
which has a grim view of the financial prospects of many
liberal-arts colleges, has described Liberty as a true outlier for
its enviable market position. From 2008 to 2012, when most
colleges were reeling from the recession, Libertys operating
revenues grew by 630 percent, Moodys reported.

Indeed, Libertys online-enrollment boom and its evangelical

mission are inextricably tied. Administrators describe the
universitys work as a sophisticated soul-saving endeavor. They
are Training Champions for Christ, Libertys ubiquitous
motto proclaims.

The university maintains $1.1-billion in reserves, which function

like an endowment. That nest egg is on par with the endowments
at major research universities, such as Baylor and Tulane.
We were so broke for so long, Mr. Falwell says, we got really
good at managing debt. Managing money was new to us.

Shayne L. Lee, a co-author of Holy Mavericks: Evangelical

Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace, says the universitys
mission makes ambition more palatable.

Liberty offered its first online course in 2004, but its experience
in distance education dates back to 1985. In those days,
just a few years after it became regionally accredited by the
Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission
on Colleges, the university mailed videotaped lectures and test
packets to students. Turn your living room into a college, an
advertisement proclaimed.

They want to be powerful; they want to be good, says Mr. Lee,

an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston.
And that success can always be couched as bringing more souls
to the Gospel.
That is precisely what Elmer L. Towns says Liberty is doing.
Mr. Towns, Libertys co-founder, keeps an office in the
universitys mall outpost. On a recent Friday afternoon, he is
downright giddy as he navigates the maze of cubicles.

The program appealed to adult learners, setting the stage for

Liberty to compete with for-profit colleges, which make much
of their money from the same demographic group. Liberty,
along with Southern New Hampshire University, stands out
among nonprofit institutions for its success in enrolling these
students online.

Youve got to see this, he says, ducking into an expansive room

of recruiters.
Mr. Towns, 82, is a legend at Liberty. He has been here from

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the start, serving first as executive vice president and then as

dean of the School of Religion and the seminary. As he paces
the halls, sporting a blazer over his pale-blue-and-yellow argyle
sweater, young employees stop what theyre doing and smile
reverently at him.

Compared with the rest of its operations, the work force of

Libertys bilingual program is paltry. But no space gets Mr.
Towns more excited than this nook, which he sees as the entry
point for thousands of future students from South America.
Libertys worldwide outreach is no trivial matter for Mr. Towns,
who says he believes that Jesus Christ will return to earth only
when the Gospel is shared with all people. If Liberty succeeds,
he says, the end times will come.

I see 100,000 people being reached for Christ, Mr. Towns

says, staring with wonder across the room. (By its own
enrollment calculation, the university has more than 95,000
students. That figure, which includes students who enroll
throughout the year, is significantly higher than federal
numbers, which are based on a fall head count).

HOW LIBERTY RANKS

Liberty University has the second-largest number of online-only students,

and the most among nonprofit institutions.

Mr. Towns never expected this little project to become a highereducation juggernaut. But his good friend Jerry Falwell Sr. did
everything big. Mr. Falwell wanted the biggest church, the biggest
college, and the biggest political force, which he marshaled through
the Moral Majority, a coalition of Christian conservatives.

COLLEGE

U. of Phoenix
Liberty U.
Ashford U.
American Public U.
Kaplan U. at Davenport (Iowa)
Walden U.
Western Governors U.
Grand Canyon U.
Excelsior College
Capella U.

How much of this universitys trajectory, from the beginning, was

about Jerry Falwell, the man, having to have the biggest college
in the country? And how much of it was about Jerry Falwell, the
evangelical, driven by some higher sense of spiritual purpose?
Separating the two, Mr. Towns suggests, misses the point.
The Bible says we have this treasure in earthen vessels, Mr.
Towns says. Were all human. We all have an ego. I have an
ego, you have an ego, Jerry had an ego. God can use an ego for
his glory, and I think God used Jerrys ego.

ONLINE-ONLY STUDENTS

207,060
64,503
57,235
55,422
52,131
51,016
46,733
45,496
39,897
34,007

Note: Figures are based on information reported to the Department of Education,

which asks colleges to provide the number of students each fall taking exclusively
online classes. This snapshot can exclude students who enroll at other times of the
year. The numbers are from 2013, the latest year for which data are available.
Source: U.S. Department of Education

Mr. Falwell was a practitioner of saturation evangelism, which

Mr. Towns describes as using every available method to reach
every available person at every available time.

Thats my passion, he says. To see Liberty carry out the

Gospel to the whole world.

Mr. Towns turns another corner and walks under a sign that
reads LU En Espanol.

When Liberty went full-bore into online education, there was

some pushback from professors. As on any campus, there were
concerns about whether the universitys high-touch residential
experience, which promises spiritual growth along with
educational attainment, could be translated online.

Using every available method

to reach every available
person at every available time.

But Liberty went ahead anyway.

That fact alone is one reason that higher-education
traditionalists may dismiss its success. The university is nimble,

Buenos das, he says to a handful of women speaking Spanish

on their headsets.

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Mr. Falwell says, largely because professors do not have tenure

and therefore do not have much say in management decisions.
That sort of talk might get a college president in trouble on a
campus with a more powerful faculty.

university because it is different. Religious bigotry, he says,

obscures the things Liberty has done right, and arguably better
than most.
Yes, Liberty holds a Christian worldview.

The online program, Im not sure that a university with tenure

could implement something like that, Mr. Falwell says. Even
our faculty was against it, because its new, its not traditional,
its not what theyre used to. But eventually they embraced it.
(Libertys law school has tenured positions, but only because
accreditation requires it.)

Yes, Liberty aggressively pursues students.

Yes, Liberty is consumer-driven.
And yes, Liberty has grown faster than just about any other
nonprofit college in the country.
Weve always sort of been the cowboy, Mr. Falwell says. We
do it our own way.

There are nearly 600 professors on Libertys residential campus,

and they are responsible for developing the curriculum. But an
army of nearly 2,300 instructors teaches those courses across
the virtual world.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and

governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling,
or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.

Translating a residential-college experience into an online

program can be a tricky piece of business for any college, but
the challenge is particularly stark at Liberty. The university is
known forand sometimes criticized fora stringent set of
rules that govern the conduct of students.
The Liberty Way, as it is known, is a 20-page document
that bars residential students from drinking, smoking, using
profanity, involvement with witchcraft, and viewing R-rated
movies. (Exceptions have been granted for that last rule because
administrators have decided that some films, like American
Sniper and Braveheart, are worthy viewing).
Libertys rules would be impossible to enforce with students
across the world, and officials say they are not necessary for
the largely adult population taking courses online. But online
students do sign an honor code, which goes beyond issues of
academic dishonesty and into the touchy area of bedroom
behavior. An online student at Liberty swears off nonmarital
sexual relations and morally inappropriate sexual misconduct.
The president is particularly sensitive about discussing the
universitys conduct code, which he says has been unfairly
characterized as overbearing. He sees criticism of the rules as
just one more example of the outside world dismissing the

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Online Venture Energizes Vulnerable College

But some faculty at Southern N.H. fear for future of bricks-and-mortar campu

MARC PARRY

AUGUST 28, 2011

If you sketched a portrait of a college in a dicey economic spot,

it might look like Southern New Hampshire University.

campuses? How will it break apart the role of traditional professors?

The private nonprofit university is little known nationally, not

selective, and depends on tuition. It sits in a state whose population of public high-school graduates is projected to decline for
years.

Theyre one of the first private nonprofit institutions, with a

traditional campus and traditional student body, that has really
committed to scaling online, says Richard Garrett, managing
director at the consulting company Eduventures.

But rather than limping along, this obscure institution is becoming a regional powerhouseonline.

Southern New Hampshires Web-learning wager hinges on

marrying elements of for-profit and nonprofit education.

With 7,000 online students, the university has grown into the
second-largest online education provider in college-saturated
New England, aiming to blow the University of Massachusetts
out of the top spot. It recently began testing TV advertisements
in national markets like Milwaukee and Oklahoma City, too,
sensing that scandals tarring for-profit colleges have opened an
opportunity for nonprofit competitors.

In a former textile mill in downtown Manchester, the universitys president, Paul J. LeBlanc, has installed a team of for-profit
veterans who help run a highly autonomous online outfit that
caters to older students, with classes taught mostly by low-paid
adjuncts. Their online operation is the institutions economic
engine, subsidizing its money-losing undergraduate campus,
known as University College, whose 2,350 students enjoy a new
dining hall, Olympic-size pool, and small classes taught largely
by full-time professors.

Academe is abuzz with talk of disruptive innovationthe

idea, described by Harvards Clayton M. Christensen, that the
prestige-chasing, tuition-raising business model of higher education is broken, and that something new and cheaper, rooted in
online learning, promises to displace it.

The traditional campus, in some ways, now has the resources

to be even more traditional, Mr. LeBlanc says in his office on
the suburban main campus, four miles from the online college.
And the nontraditional, with this split, has the ability to be
even more nontraditional.

Southern New Hampshire, which is showcased in Mr. Christensens new book, The Innovative University, offers a case study
of what happens when a college leader adopts some of the
Harvard Business School professors strategies for managing
disruptive change. Southern New Hampshires deep dive into
Web teaching raises many questions facing colleges migrating
online: How big will e-learning get? What will that mean for

But even as that nontraditional college rakes in money, the

president plans to hire an innovation team with an unusual
charge in online learning: Work out the business model that
puts our current model out of business.
That idea was embraced by Mr. Christensen, who serves on

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Southern New Hampshires Board of Trustees. (The president

and the professor are friends who first met 30 years ago, when
Mr. LeBlanc was doing a masters in English at Boston College
and Mr. Christensen was in the M.B.A. program at Harvard;
the relationship sprang from a mutual love of basketball.)

firms, focused on selling better products to mainstream customers, were crushed by low-end innovations that opened new
markets for simpler goods that got better over time.
A similar force is at work in academe, Mr. Christensen argues
in The Innovative University, co-written with Henry J. Eyring,
and in an earlier report, Disrupting College. As universities
strain budgets, emulating elite research institutions, a disruptive
innovation is rising in part from bottom-feeding, for-profit
colleges: online learning.

With so much online growth in the past five years, the changes
have chafed some professors. There has been friction over control of faculty hiring and content in Web-based courses, as well
as over which programs get put online. Some full-time professors have felt disconnected from the online operation, known as
the College of Online and Continuing Education, or COCE.
Some have worried about the quality of online courses, which
are meant to mirror campus counterparts. And some professors
worry about the future of their traditional campus, even as Mr.
LeBlanc has made clear that it wont close.

The threat isnt to top-brand universities, Mr. Christensen

says in an interview. He likens those exclusive places to Gucci
handbags, whose purpose isnt the functionality as much as it is
the prestige.
But the ones that I think are in real danger are the public
universities, like the University of Iowa and so on, he says.
Because what happens in their world is exactly what happened
to General Motors.

People see COCE as the big bloband its going to take over,
says Pamela B. Cohen, an associate professor of mathematics
and a 28-year veteran, who supports the Web push but has expressed concern about the quality of some online classes. And
whats going to happen to University College? Are we going to
go away?

General Motors cut deals with unions to pay all of their health
care and pension costs. As costs mounted, he says, the company
lost its flexibility to invest in the future. The result: It got disrupted by Toyota. And they fell off the cliff, he says.

Outside skeptics argue that Mr. Christensen misses the mark

in diagnosing universities ills through the prism of business-school theories geared toward corporations. Another
criticism is that some of the supposedly cutting-edge colleges
highlighted in his book fall short of the broader rethinking
of education that may be possible with technology. Low-paid
adjuncts? Online replicas of existing curricula?

Similarly, states and cities face rising health-care costs. There

just is not going to be money for things like higher education,
Mr. Christensen says.
But can a mainstream organization harness a disruptive innovation? With few exceptions, he writes in The Innovators Dilemma, that approach has succeeded only when managers set
up an autonomous organization charged with building a new
and independent business around the disruptive technology.

It doesnt seem to me to be the disruptive innovation thats

going to transform things, says Richard Arum, a professor of
sociology and education at New York University and one of the
authors of Academically Adrift, a harsh critique of undergraduate learning. It seems to me like just business as usual.

Which is largely what Mr. LeBlanc has done in New Hampshire.

The Disrupted University

The Next General Motors?

Southern New Hampshires online business feels nothing like the

traditional undergraduate campus up the road. Physically, its office
is a quirky mix of high tech and retro, with an open layout, scuffed
wooden floors, and vintage neon signs advertising products like

Mr. Christensen, dubbed one of the most influential business

theorists of the last 50 years by Forbes, gained fame with The
Innovators Dilemma. The 1997 best seller showed how mighty

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radios, refrigerators, and beer. Culturally, a visitor from conventional academe might be jarred by the sense that its staff members are
selling beverages, at least judging by the office jargon: Professors
are procured. Programs are flavored with concentrations like
social media. The education is called a good product.

members to teach Web-based courses. At Southern New Hampshire, front-line instructors tend to be folks like Tony Baldasaro,
an adjunct who teaches a graduate-level education course. It
doesnt pay muchjust $2,300and he performs the job in addition to his full-time gig as an administrator for an online high
school. His course came ready-built with readings, assignments,
and assessments. The rest is up to him: responding to e-mails,
participating in the discussion board, and evaluating assignments.

A lucrative one, too. With 7,000 online students, up from 1,700

four years ago, the College of Online and Continuing Education
is on track to generate $73-million in revenues this year and more
than $100-million next year. It posted a 41-percent profit margin in the 2011 fiscal year. The university plows the surplus into
new buildings, employee salaries, financial aid at the traditional
campus, and improvements in the online program.

The skeleton is there, he says. I just go in there and put meat

on the bones. What I can do is really focus on the relationship
that I have with the students.
Mr. LeBlanc negotiated a governance structure that gives the
online outfit elbow room in its operations. The default is that
any face-to-face program can be offered online. Faculty may
object, but there is a deadline by which they must do so.

Stephen Hodownes, senior vice president for marketing and

student recruiting, is one reason why the product has sold so
well. The marketing pro used to run Embanet, a company that
helps start online education programs. Working from the inside
at Southern New Hampshire, he manages an admissions shop
that has become more urgent and data-driven.

When those objections come upand Mr. LeBlanc provided

a handful of examples, ranging from game design to writingonline-college officials typically slow down, deal with the
concerns, and move forward. But a couple of programs did not
proceed online: a proposed M.F.A. in fiction and nonfiction
writing, and a B.S. in sports management, which had triggered
objections about specialized accreditation and internships. In
one case, forensic accounting, no objections were raised, but
enrollments shifted from face-to-face to online, and now the
classroom program will no longer be offered.

In the past, a prospective students expression of interest might

have yielded a packet of information in the mail a week later.
Then the university would hope for a phone call. Now it has
an in-house call center. A would-be applicant might get a call
from an admissions rep within minutes. The university strives to
provide a financial-aid estimate within 24 hours.
To bring in more students, Mr. Hodownes pushed to give the
M.B.A. program a makeover, with a slightly shorter core and
lots of concentrations. When a prospective student Googles
M.B.A., he reasons, little Southern New Hampshire wont
pop up in the results. But now, if they search for, say, M.B.A.
social media, it might.

We ensured substantial faculty voice, but we removed faculty

veto power, Mr. LeBlanc says. At other institutions, he adds,
when faculty raise their voices vociferously, the initiative stops.
And here, it cant stop. It cant be bogged down.
Marketing pressures? Standardized courses? Removing faculty
power? Many professors praise the responsiveness of the online
officials, but as youd expect, some have reservations about the
changes.

A more fundamental change is how the universitys model splits

upand displacesthe role of traditional full-time professors.
Start with courses. As online grows, classes are becoming
standardized. Their developers, called course authors, arent
necessarily the same people who teach them.

J. Stephanie Collins, a professor in the universitys School of

Business and a former president of the Faculty Senate, says she
would like more control over the content and delivery of Webbased courses. I would like to know more about what happens
in online, she says.

Some institutions, like the University of Central Florida, have

chosen to integrate online learning by relying on full-time faculty

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Ms. Cohen, the math professor, has felt that some online courses failed to match those offered face to face. She is in a unique
position to judge, as a full-time professor who teaches both in
classrooms and online, and who also serves on the Web colleges
curriculum committee. Visiting online classes in past years, she
found personal interaction with students lacking. Online faculty
were teaching without any tests, only assignments and discussion. Thats not teaching a math course, she says.

main campus has taken a spot. A continuing debate has been how
much to open the online enrollment to traditional undergrads.
Its a little threatening, Mr. LeBlanc says, because classroom
professors might find that their face-to-face students prefer to
study online. You could find yourself overstaffed in your traditional program.
Nationally, undergraduates complement their educations with
online classes, but little evidence exists that students under 23
are actively pursuing all or the majority of their study online,
says Mr. Garrett, of Eduventures. Yet Mr. Christensens writing, as the Eduventures analyst interprets it, suggests that the
United States will see an online majority of all courses over the
next few years.

But Ms. Cohen is much more comfortable now that several

associate deans have been hired to improve quality and provide
academic oversight. As these courses are being standardized,
the full-time faculty are losing their skepticism, she says.
Theyre understanding that there is this meaningful, sincere
commitment to mirroring the content.

Mr. Garrett isnt so sure: Right now I dont see online as having
enough internal innovation around student experience and
student outcomes to push that kind of projected growth.

Standardized courses might put off some professors accustomed

to more freedom, but theyre useful for busy adult students who
dont want the hassle of figuring out how to navigate new structures in each class. A typical example: Dan Fiore, who works
in sales for a wood-products company while studying toward a
bachelors in business and raising a 9-month-old son.

Others attack the framework that Mr. Christensen uses to

reach his predictions. His core misunderstanding is the idea of
a business model, argues Siva Vaidhyanathan, chair of the department of media studies at University of Virginia and author
of a recent book about Google. Mr. Christensen says universities meld fundamentally different and incompatible business
models involving research, teaching, and preparing students for
life. From a business-school perspective, these models seem to
conflict or compete, Mr. Vaidhyanathan says. What he doesnt
understand is that colleges and universities dont have business
models. They have missions. These missions complement, rather
than conflict with, each other.

The 34-year-old was nervous as heck going back to college.

So much had changed in the 16 years he had been away from
education. He didnt know the lingo. But he manages in large
part thanks to his adviser, who suggests classes, registers him,
sends him encouraging notes, reminds him of exams, and calms
his anxiety. She has just been like my guardian angel, he says,
praising her customer service.
He hopes that the degree will open doors, but its also personal:
If I could just tell my son that Dad went to college, that means
the world to me.

Remembermost businesses fail, Mr. Vaidhyanathan adds.

Mr. Christensen is unruffled by the skepticism. He points out
another pattern. In every industry where disruption occurred, he
says, the incumbents thought they were different.

Will It Draw 18-Year-olds?

Online programs have soared among older students like Mr.
Fiore. But one question is how big this disruptive force will
get. How much will it draw 18- to 22-year-olds?

Marc Parry is a senior reporter at The Chronicle, covering research

in the humanities and social sciences. He writes about people and
debates shaping the world of ideas.

At Southern New Hampshire, the registration system gives

undergraduates the last seats on the airplane when it comes to
online classes, Mr. LeBlanc says. The university doesnt want to see
an adult learner closed out of a section because a sophomore on the

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Advising Gets Personal With

New Coaching Services
KATHERINE MANGAN

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

With a test coming up in his toughest subject, economics,

Keaton Knight was verging on panic. The Indiana State
University student considered himself a lousy test-taker in the
best of circumstances, so it was time for a strategy session with
his academic coachwho lives in Nashville.

Academic advising tends to focus on curricular issueswhat

students need to progress toward a career in a particular major,
says Ms. Hunter, whose center is based at the University of
South Carolina at Columbia. Coaching includes skills like
understanding how to communicate with a professor or how to
manage your time or study effectively.

At their appointed time, Jason Broyles, whose employer, a coaching

company called InsideTrack, has a contract with Indiana State,
called Mr. Knight. He advised the student to breathe deeply, not
linger too long over tough questions, and read the prompts slowly
and thoroughly. They discussed Mr. Knights approach of carving
out study time in the library to avoid distractions and scheduling
his job, in a hardware store, so it didnt interfere with classes. After
a rough start during the last academic year, Mr. Knights grades
improved, and he passed the course.

Ideally, academic counselors are covering some of the same

bases. But instead of working with 300 students, a coach might
have 80, allowing more time to get to know students personally.
The dominant player in the academic-coaching industry, which
also includes groups like LifeBound and individual tutoring
services like Tutor.com, InsideTrack began in San Francisco
in 2001. Since then, it has worked with more than 800,000
students on around 100 campuses, according to company
officials. In the last three to four years, we have moved from
operating with a headwind to operating with a tailwind, says
Dave Jarrat, the companys vice president for marketing. The
big difference is the shift in focus in higher education from
exclusively looking at access to looking at access and success.

My relationship with Jason was awesome, Mr. Knight, now

a 20-year-old sophomore, says of his twice-monthly sessions.
Lots of times, I would have been lost without him.
The growing number of colleges that hire private coaching
companies, or provide coaching on their own, are counting
on such personal relationships to improve retention and
completion rates. The push for measurable results is intensifying
around the country as some state lawmakers tie part of their
college allocations to completion rates and foundations pour
more money into finding solutions to the nations dropout crisis.

The service has about 300 coaches, all college graduates (half
have advanced degrees), who work remotely or in a handful
of coaching centers around the country. Each coach, who is
typically responsible for at least 80 students, tailors his or
her approach to the needs and preferences of the students.
Traditional-age college students dont like to be pinged in the
morning, while working adults are most reachable early in the
morning or after work. Younger students may not respond to
emails or voice messages.

When coaching is done in-house, its often based in student-

success centers, which are also growing in number, says Mary
Stuart Hunter, executive director of the National Resource
Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in
Transition. Coaches and advisers, at colleges that have both,
assume complementary roles.

For the coaches, the workday is a carefully choreographed

schedule of phone conversations, tweets, Facebook messages,

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and the occasional in-person meeting with as many as 175

students, Mr. Broyless current roster. Hes based at a coaching
center in Tennessee; all of his students are at Indiana State,
where he visits them once in the fall and once in the spring.

that he looked forward to his calls every other Thursday, when

his coach would walk him through problems he was having
juggling his assignments. I knew there would be a lot of work,
but the amount of papers we had to write was mind-blowing,
Mr. Knight recalls.

In a typical day, Mr. Broyles might have 10 meetings over the

phone, lasting around 15 minutes each, on topics that might
include family issues, financial stress, and homesickness. If I
remember that someone had a test that day, I might send a text
saying, Hey, hope things go well, he says. Coaches report back
on trends theyre discovering, like if there are glitches in the
registration process or the financial-aid system that are derailing
students.

His coach, Mr. Broyles, remembered what it was like to be a

struggling freshman. A 29-year-old with a bachelors degree in
psychology, a masters in theological studies, and a background
in teaching English overseas, he recalls that he was drifting
through his first year at Southern Nazarene University when
a professor invited him out for coffee. I was like, Really? He
ended up being one of my biggest supporters, helping me get
into study abroad and take advantage of all of the opportunities
I had, says Mr. Broyles.

First-generation students rarely have anyone in their support

network who knows what the college experience is like, says
Mr. Jarrat. They often come in with doubts about whether
theyre college material.

First-generation students rarely

have anyone in their support
network who knows what the
college experience is like.

The coach might start out congratulating the student on her

acceptance, telling her that college will be hard, that shell
struggle and think shes going to fail, and that thats normal.
The students who persevere, the coach will say, are the ones who
will succeed.
Veterans arrive with their own challenges, says Mr. Jarrat,
like learning to move from an environment of top-down
authority to one in which they must challenge their professors
assumptions and advocate for themselves. And they may
underestimate how their military experiences translate to
the civilian spherenot realizing, for example, how having
managed logistics for a remote base in a war zone could impress
a corporate recruiter.

Sometimes, students need that kind of prodding. For instance,

a recent study by the Center for Community College Student
Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin found that
relatively few students take advantage of strategies that are
most likely to help them succeed. Tutoring times may be
inconvenient, or students may worry about the stigma of
showing up in a tutoring center. Meeting students where
and when its most convenient, and extending coaching to
all students, not just those who are struggling, draw more
participants, says Mr. Jarrat.

Coaching a high-achiever at Columbia or Harvard, two Ivy

League universities that have contracts with InsideTrack, requires
a different approach. Its not going to be about how youre
going to study for that test, but what options are there available
to expand your horizons, which professors should you start
networking with, and should you go abroad, Mr. Jarrat says.

On some campuses, the company offers coaching to

half the freshman class so it can compare outcomes with and
without the extra help. Based on a data analysis of how students
respond, strategies are personalized for, say, low-income and
first-generation students, or for those in health care or
business majors.

For some students, including Mr. Knight of Indiana State, the

benefits of having a coach arent immediately obvious. When
I first got the phone call, I was pretty iffy about whether I
should go through with it, he says. He found, to his surprise,

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But does coaching work? Officials at InsideTrack and Indiana

State studied its effectiveness on retention rates for a segment of
last years freshman class. Half of the 2,000 freshmen received
coaching, half didnt. After a year, it appeared that students in
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, along with
those in the humanities, benefited from the coaching.
On the other hand, there was no noticeable change in
retention rates for students in the social sciences. Officials
are not sure why the responses differed, but plan to investigate
when more data are available.

Libby Sander contributed to this article.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion
efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow
her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.
mangan@chronicle.com.

While students sometimes sign up as individuals, most

contracts are with colleges that typically pay anywhere from a
few hundred thousand dollars to a few million dollars per year.
That can be a steep price at a time of constrained budgets, but
company officials say coaching pays for itself in higher retention
rates. But while InsideTrack officials say business is booming,
Charlie L. Nutt, executive director of the National Academic
Advising Association, says hes seen a shift toward coaching
in-house.
About six years ago, a lot of colleges were hiring groups like
InsideTrack, he says, but when the economy tanked many
started developing their own coaching programs.
Florida State University is among those that began with a
partnership with InsideTrack and later started its own in-house
coaching program, which operates alongside its more traditional
academic-advising system.
We want to empower our students to be proactive and fully
engaged in their education, says Kathleen S. Smith, associate
director of the combined university program, called Advising
First. They should understand the requirements for their major
and have given thought to internships. That way, they come into
an advising session with specific questions.
She says the university has seen retention increases of about
5 percent among students who receive coaching during their
freshman year. Having a coach who stays with them throughout
the year is a plus, she says. Students want someone who knows
their story.

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Spotlight on Retention
Students cant graduate if they dont return
ERIC HOOVER

MARCH 09, 2015

So far nobodys patented a Retain-O-Matic, a surefire, offthe-shelf strategy for increasing the number of students who
stay enrolled. Until that happens, improving your colleges
graduation rate will require campuswide planning and
commitment, the willingness to rethink approaches to an ageold problem.

To that end, Trines robust early-alert system allows faculty,

staff, and coaches to submit online reports about a student who
may need help. Maybe shes missed two classes in a row, or
shes struggling in math, or her mothers just been diagnosed
with cancer. Each alert goes to a student-success team, which
chooses the best person to contact the student, usually within
24 hours.

Attrition is rampant. Nationally, only 58 percent of all first-time

students who started a two- or four-year college in fall 2012
returned to the same institution the following year, according to
the National Student Clearinghouse. And 69 percent returned
to any U.S. college. Thats a ton of missed opportunitiesand
lost tuition revenue.

We cant solve all problems, but we dont want students to

suffer in silence, Mr. Jones says. Thats why a lot of universities
lose studentsthey just arent aware of whos suffering.
By the time problems surface, it can be too late. So Trine started
a mentoring program last year, based on freshmens academic
records or financial burdens, for those who are likely to struggle.
The university assigns each one to a faculty or staff member,
who typically meets with the student once a week for a chat.

Although keeping students on track has always been a

challenge, the stakes are getting higher. Demographic shifts
are bringing more first-generation students, with many needs,
through higher educations gates. Tight budgets and enrollment
shortfalls have stretched many campuses thin. Meanwhile,
accountability measures and performance-based funding are
intensifying concerns about retention rates, which havent
budged for decades.

Mr. Jones believes the program helped nudge fall-to-spring

retention up by two percentage points this year. Theres
nothing wrong with being a little intrusive in a students life,
he says. They expect it.
Middle Tennessee State University started its new Quest for
Student Success initiative to complement Gov. Bill Haslams
goal of significantly increasing the number of Tennesseans with
college credentials by 2025. The university set aside $3-million
to hire 47 new academic advisers, more than doubling their
number. Their charge: to engage students more proactively and
efficiently.

So colleges are adopting more-sophisticated blueprints for

student success. Some are embracing big data, using predictive
models to identify those who are likely to struggle. Many have
beefed up advising and support services. And various campuses
are redesigning key courses in hopes of getting more students to
the finish line.
Trine University, in Indiana, has made customer service a
priority. This is the cellphone-service generationif youre not
happy, switch your provider, says Stuart D. Jones, vice president
for enrollment management. So today its all about meeting
students needs and doing it quickly.

Old-school advising is about who appears in front of youits

very limited, says Richard D. Sluder, vice provost for student
success. New-school advising is using predictive analytics to
target a specific group.

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How? Software from the Education Advisory Board, a research,

technology, and consulting company, has helped the university
identify students who are likely to hit a snag. The system is
built on the finding that grades in specific courses, which vary
from campus to campus, have great value in predicting who will
graduate. (At Middle Tennessee State, for instance, 10 years
worth of historical data revealed that 78 percent of those who
got an A in History 2020 later graduated, compared with just
60 percent of those who got a C.)

As of late February, fall-to-spring persistence rates are up 2.2

percentage points over last year for freshmen, 4.5 points for
transfers, and 1 point for graduate students. That adds up to 459
students, Mr. Sluder says: Were growing enrollment on the
back of retention.
Amid all the discussions of student success, its important to
remember that a retention rate reveals only so much. DePaul
University confronted that fact about 10 years ago after
reaching an important conclusion. A focus on persistence was
blinding us to the importance of degree completion, says David
H. Kalsbeek, senior vice president for enrollment management
and marketing.

Such insights are helping advisers pick out students in the

murky middle, with grade-point averages between 2.0 and
3.0, whose overall performance had not raised any red flags. The
university then runs campaigns, selecting groups of students
and directing them to more-focused advising sessions. Middle
Tennessee State has also used the data to guide the redesign of
its 10 most-predictive courses.

The percentage of students who return for a second year has

long been the standard metric by which colleges measure their
success. Yet when DePaul officials analyzed their enrollment

THE POWER OF PREDICTION

By analyzing 10 years of data on nearly 29,000 students, Middle Tenneesee State University determined the 10 courses that were most predictive of graduation. The findings
have helped the university revamp academic advising and redesign key courses. Below are the graduation rates for students by the grade they earned in the most-predictive
course, Survey of United States History II.

78%
71%
60%

45%
36%
22%

A
(6,645 students)

B
(8,747 students)

C
(6,141 students)

D
(2,311 students)

Source: Middle Tennesse State U

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F
(3,079 students)

Withdrew
(1,965 students)

TOC

data, they found that while about four-fifths of incoming

students were returning as sophomores the following fall, only
about half were earning at least a 2.5 grade-point average and
48 credits (on a quarter system).

TAKEAWAY
Retooling for the Retention Age
Colleges are helping academic advisers become more
proactive while doing more to anticipate challenges that
students may face, such as providing some first-year
students with mentors.

Because students who meet those academic thresholds are

much more likely to graduate from DePaul than those who
dont, Mr. Kalsbeek says retention rates were masking the
main determinant of their long-term success. So the university
redefined its goals, emphasizing progress-toward-degree as a
key metric. It also revamped its strategies to better serve the
needs of all students, not just those most likely to struggle.

Instead of concentrating only on students who are most

likely to struggle, colleges are mining their data to identify
those in the murky middle, who might benefit from extra
advising.

In recent years, DePaul has pushed faculty members and

advisers to emphasize the importance of first-year performance.
The university created a degree-audit system that allows
students to track their own progress. It has redesigned gateway
courses in accounting, chemistry, and math, and urged faculty
members to give early assignmentsand feedback. And it
promotes summer sessions as a way to avoid scheduling jams,
retake a course, or tackle an especially challenging subject. Its
four-year completion rate has increased to nearly 60 percent, up
from about 40 percent in 2000.

Knowing your colleges retention rate is important, but

knowing how many students are making progress toward
degreesand whyis essential.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends,

enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal
House, among other issues. Hes on Twitter @erichoov, and his
email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.

In short, retention is not the same as progress toward a degree.

Also, many students who drop out do so after their second year.
No matter what a college does, its retention and completion
rates are unlikely to increase sharply over the short term.
After all, research shows that a colleges defining features
its socioeconomic diversity and market positionlargely
determine a range of student outcomes.
Its crucial to set a realistic goal for your institution, Mr.
Kalsbeek says. Trustees might ask why your completion rate
cant be as high as that of the nearest superselective college, but
such a comparison might set unrealistic expectations.
Theres a fine line, he says, between having a vision and
hallucinating.

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Retention in the Trenches

What can you do in your own classroom to keep students on track?
ROB JENKINS

MAY 18, 2015

Anyone who has worked at a community college for more

than a few years knows that the current emphasis on college
completion is really just a repackaging of an age-old concern:
retention. Essentially, the question before us is: How do we
keep students in our classrooms and on our campuses long
enough for them to either transfer or earn a credential?

So what can you do, in your own classroom, to help?

Be a teacher, not a gatekeeper. When I first started teaching
composition as a part-time instructor at a large research
university the program director made it clear that my job
was not really to teach writing but rather to determine which
students could write well enough to succeed on the campus
and weed out the rest. Thats what I refer to as a gatekeeper
mentality.

Thats a question two-year colleges have been asking for decades.

Whats changed lately is that many states are now factoring
retention or completion rates into their funding formulas,
which raises the stakes for colleges even higher.

I never cared for that approach. I love the craft of writing,

believe anyone smart enough to make it into college can learn
to do it reasonably well, and get a charge out of seeing students
progress as writers. In short, I want to teach, not guard the gate
to some mythical land of the intellectual elite. Thats why I was
attracted to the mission of two-year colleges: meeting students
where they are and helping them get to where they need to be.

Solutions to the retention dilemma have been both varied and

recurrent meaning that, over the past 30 years or so, weve
not only tried a lot of different programs and gimmicks to keep
students on track but have recycled many of them. Ive lost
count, for instance, of the number of times the colleges where
Ive worked have switched from faculty-based student advising
to using professional advisers and then switched back. The
result: Many seasoned faculty members are understandably
dubious not about retaining students but about the latest
administrative retention scheme du jour.

Ive found that if at-risk students perceive their professors as

gatekeepers rather than teachers, those students are more likely
to quit when things get tough. After all, whats the point?
Theyre not going to make it anyway or so they conclude.
But theyre much more likely to stick it out if they see their
professors as partners in the learning process.

Obviously, we havent yet discovered the magic formula, or

else we wouldnt still be talking about this problem, much less
potentially losing money because of it.

Be flexible. One of the keys to stemming student attrition is

to have a modicum of flexibility. At open-access institutions,
our students deal with such a wide array of challenges
problems with their personal lives, health, and finances that
we sometimes have to make allowances. Its either that or else
watch the failure of students who, with a little understanding,
could have succeeded.

The good news is that faculty members can take steps on their
own that might actually have some impact. Studies show that
one of the most important factors affecting students persistence
and success is the quality of their classroom experience, or
what the student-retention expert Sherry Miller Brown calls
academic integration. Thats especially true for students who
are most at risk of falling by the wayside, such as nontraditional
students and those in developmental courses.

Some might argue that those students shouldnt be in college

to begin with, because they clearly havent made it a priority.

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I would disagree, but the point is moot. Those students are in

our classes, whether we like it or not. And we have the same
responsibility to them as to any other students.

But too few of us recognize the importance of being

approachable. That may, in part, be a matter of personality.
People who become college professors tend to be somewhat shy,
even taciturn, which students can mistake for aloofness. It never
occurs to us that we dont seem approachable. We know were
nice, empathetic people who just want to help. Cant students
see that?

This past semester, I had: a student whose father died suddenly

of a heart attack; a student undergoing extensive tests to
determine the cause of her excruciating migraines; one who was
diagnosed with leukemia; one who was hospitalized for two
weeks for an unknown ailment; and one who is going through
a messy divorce. As of this writing, it looks like all of them
will complete my course. Theyre all bright, determined young
people (younger than me, at least), who Im convinced will earn
college degrees. I dont intend to let one difficult semester send
them into an academic tailspin.

Not always. For many students, professors represent imposing

and sometimes intimidating figures. We have to go out of our
way to seem more human, perhaps by chatting occasionally
with students in the hallway or before class, asking them nottoo-probing questions about their lives and sharing not-toointimate details of our own. Otherwise, however accessible we
are, many students are unlikely to come up to us after class or
swing by our office (although they might still email at 2 a.m.).

But dont be a pushover. We all know that some students will

take advantage if the professor is too wishy-washy. Not every
crisis is life-threatening, and many arent even crises at all. Its
vital for professors to have guidelines for student performance
and behavior in the classroom. Its equally vital to stick to those
guidelines, unless there are extenuating circumstances.

Make the material relevant. If theres anything weve learned

from all the student engagement literature, its that a bored
student is a student at risk of failing. And nothing causes
students to disengage faster than feeling like what theyre
studying has no connection or relevance to their lives or future.
Thats why we have to work so hard to demonstrate that what
were talking about is actually important in the bigger scheme of
things especially if were teaching core courses that students
are required to take.

Indeed, many of our most at-risk students crave structure. In

some cases, thats why theyre at-risk to begin with because
theyve never had much structure in their lives, either at home
or at school. They come to us expecting and needing clear
boundaries, and if we dont provide them, that fact alone could
be enough to send some of them reeling into academic limbo.

In my composition classes, I constantly preach about the

importance of writing. Every time I introduce a new strategy
or approach, I explain how it relates to real world writing,
illustrating my point with actual scenarios and relevant
examples. My goal is not to entice them to love writing, as I
do (thats not going to happen, in most cases), but rather to
help them understand that: (1) Its in their own best interests
to learn to do it well, and (2) they can do it if they apply
themselves.

In other words, being too flexible can create just as many

problems as being completely inflexible. Sometimes students
just need a little understanding, and sometimes they need us to
hold their feet to the fire. Erring too much in either direction
could cause us to lose them.
Be accessible and approachable. Most of us know its
important to be available to students. Thats why we dither
around at the front of the room for five minutes after class,
waiting to see if any students need to talk. Thats why we keep
office hours and publish our office phone numbers and email
addresses. Thats why we check email at 10 p.m., after the kids
have gone to bed.

Take some personal responsibility. This is the one Ive struggled

with the most. For much of my career, I felt that whether or not
students succeeded in my classroom was mostly up to them. I
provided the framework for learning, but if they chose not to
attend or turn in their work, well, theyre adults and thats their
decision.

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Its not that I didnt care if they succeeded. I just believed the
onus was on them, not me.

pass individual courses. The retention battle is won one student

at a time, one course at a time. And thats something we as
faculty members do have some control over, whatever the latest
administrative scheme.

I still believe thats mostly true. You cant force students to do

something they absolutely dont want to do. And yet, over the
last few years, Ive begun to step outside my comfort zone and
reach out to students who have multiple absences, who havent
turned in an assignment, or who clearly seem distracted in class
(and not just by their cell phones).

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter

College and author of Building a Career in Americas Community
Colleges. He writes monthly for our community-college column and
blogs for Vitae. The opinions expressed here are his own and not
necessarily those of his employer. You can follow Rob on
Twitter @HigherEdSpeak.

The results have been remarkable. Ive discovered that, in

many of cases, these students really wanted to talk to me but
were afraid, either because they thought they had screwed
up beyond hope of redemption or they found me personally
intimidating. (Apparently I still have some work to do in the
approachability department.) Most have been tremendously
relieved and grateful that I took the first step. And in most
cases, they were able to complete the course. I wonder what
would have happened if I hadnt reached out. I suspect many
of those students would have dropped the course and maybe
left college.
Not all such interventions end happily. Even if we try, we
cant reach every student, and sometimes we dont try as hard
as we should and sometimes they dont respond. But even
my relatively modest efforts in this regard seem to be paying
dividends: Just in the last four years, the completion rate in my
courses has gone up nearly 15 percent.

One of the keys to stemming

student attrition is to have a
modicum of flexibility.
Those students Ive helped represent just a tiny percentage of
the ones who somehow fall off our radar. And helping them
complete a particular course doesnt guarantee that theyll finish
college or get a degree.
But one point that is often overlooked, in all the rhetoric, is
that in order for students to complete college, they first have to

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