Colleges Struggle to Serve Millions of Dropouts. Have These Men Cracked the Code?

Dennis Littky, college president, picks up the gray-and-white letter jacket that hangs from an unused bike desk in his office and slips it on.

“This is how you know we’re a real college,” he says, plopping down in a chair. “And this,” he says, opening the jacket to reveal a T-shirt that reads, “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop,” “is the T-shirt that got me through accreditation” — or at least through the first, hardest part of it.

The bike desk is the relic of a short-lived experiment — an attempt to squeeze exercise into an 80- to 100-hour workweek. The jacket, with its green block “CU,” for College Unbound, is a symbol of a longer and far more ambitious effort: to remake higher education for the millions of Americans with some college credit but no degree.

Littky, 75, isn’t your typical college president. He speaks informally, using words like “ain’t” and “man,” and swears often — “it helps me show my passion,” he explains. The walls of his office are covered not with honoraria but with headwear: a coonskin cap, a Bob Marley-style wig with a crocheted Rasta beanie, and a Viking helmet with blond braids, among others. He shuns suits and polished dress shoes in favor of jeans and colorful sneakers, and his trademark is a kofia — the brimless, cylindrical hat worn by men in East Africa.

“I’m old. I can wear whatever I want,” he says.

If Littky isn’t tethered to tradition, College Unbound isn’t either. It offers just one degree: a bachelor of arts in organizational leadership and change. Students design their own programs and work to solve problems they’ve encountered firsthand. The faculty structure looks nothing like mainstream higher ed either, and is evolving collaboratively with faculty members.

And the experiment seems to be sticking. Ten years after Littky and his business partner, Adam Bush, 39, started College Unbound in a Providence triple-decker, the college has grown to 120 students from just 10. Though it caters to students with some of the highest dropout rates — low-income, minority, working adults — it graduates 83 percent of them, typically in two and a half years or less. And it is now recognized by the state of Rhode Island, eligible to award Pell Grants, and well on its way to accreditation. One might even call it a “real college.”

Getting to this point hasn’t been easy. College Unbound’s trip through the triad of state, federal, and peer review has taken half a decade and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But if its journey toward legitimacy underscores the challenges that innovative institutions face in a system set up for traditional colleges, it also offers evidence that the gatekeepers of American higher education are becoming more open to experimentation.

Littky and Bush’s next move could test that openness further. They hope to grow the enrollment to 500 students by 2022 and then, once accredited, to take their model nationwide. “College Unbound was never just about doing a boutique school in Rhode Island,” Littky says.

Those ambitions make even some of College Unbound’s staunchest supporters nervous. They see financial and regulatory risks in scaling up too quickly and worry that something could be lost in the expansion to other cities.

For now, though, College Unbound remains a small operation, with offices in a rented building on the campus of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center, a project-based high school, known as the Met, that Littky started 23 years ago and went on to replicate globally.

It was here that Littky, wearing mismatched LeBron 14 high-tops (he owns 80 pairs of sneakers), and Bush, looking like a rumpled academic in a worn blazer and slacks, sat down over Chinese takeout recently to talk about their goals — and the educational philosophy that has governed Littky’s work for decades.

“Students have got to be in control” of their learning, says Littky, between bites of stir fry. “The reason our students don’t drop out is because they’re doing something they care about.”

Surveys show that consumers judge the quality of higher education on the basis of its relevance to their work and lives. Yet only a quarter of adults in the U.S. with college experience strongly agree that their coursework met that standard, according to a 2018 survey by Strada and Gallup.

College Unbound is not just student-centered but student-driven. Students work with faculty members and mentors to craft a personal learning plan and complete an “action-research project,” which is focused on a real-world problem. An inmate might work to improve prisoner re-entry programs, for example, while an immigrant might work to involve her community in local decision-making.

Littky and Bush also believe in accommodating students’ real lives. So College Unbound works around the obstacles — like work and family obligations — that can prevent adult students from being successful. The core class is held one night a week, after typical working hours. Dinner is served, and babysitting is available.

“Rather than expecting students to be college-ready, colleges should be student-ready,” says Littky, repeating a favorite refrain.

He cracks open a fortune cookie and reads his fortune aloud: “If you want the rainbow, you have to tolerate the rain.”

“Well,” says Littky, with a laugh, “we’ve done that!”

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

On the windowsill in Littky’s office sits a copy of a New England Monthly from the 1980s with a younger Littky on the cover. The headline reads, “He’s the best educator in New England and he’s just been fired.”

Littky held on to that job, as the unorthodox principal of Thayer Junior/Senior High School in New Hampshire, but he did get a lot of publicity from the near miss. The story of how he turned around Thayer, reducing its 20-percent dropout rate to 1 percent and raising its college-going rate to 50 percent from 10, was made into a book and then a 1992 made-for-TV movie, A Town Torn Apart.

BY THE NUMBERS

What College Unbound’s Students Look Like

• 69% female; 31% male
• 69% ages 25-45
• 79% students of color
• 80% parents
• 100% earning their first degree
• 38% attended two colleges before CU
• 80% employed full time
• 78% Pell-eligible; 62% full Pell
• 23% earn less than $25,000 per year
• 31% earn $25,000 to $34,999 per year
• 31% earn $35,000 to $45,000 per year

SOURCE: Chronicle reporting and American Council on Education

A few years later, Littky left Thayer to form the nonprofit Big Picture Learning with the assistant principal, Elliot Washor. They wanted to transform American high schools, and they got their chance when Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education invited them to design a new school in Providence: the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center.

With the freedom to start from scratch, Littky and Washor shunned convention and built a competency-based school that catered to students’ interests and skills. The first class finished in 2000, with a 96-percent graduation rate and a 98-percent college-going rate.

That caught the attention of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which named the Met its favorite high school in America in 2001 and provided a grant to take its approach nationwide. From 2000 to 2009, Gates awarded close to $25 million to Big Picture.

Today there are 75 Big Picture network schools in the United States and 70 more in other countries, including Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, Belize, India, and Canada. With graduation rates ranging from 80 to 95 percent, and 80 to 95 percent of graduates going on to college, Big Picture’s student-centered approach has been cited as a model by education researchers.

But Littky, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as a “radical educator,” wasn’t satisfied. It troubled him that the types of kids who were succeeding in his schools — low-income students without a family tradition of higher education — still weren’t doing well in college.

“There were all these great high schools, but colleges weren’t changing,” says Littky. “Everyone thought colleges were doing fine.”

When he started talking about reinventing college, the way he’d reinvented high schools, people warned, “No one will listen to you. You’re a K-12 educator.”

But at least one person shared his vision: Bush, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnic studies and jazz history who happened to be the nephew of Littky’s sister’s best friend. The men met over matzo brei in 2004.

Bush was studying the movement to bring jazz into public schools and was looking for examples of “schools who reflected who their students were.” He had just spent two years traveling the country in his grandma’s Cadillac interviewing jazz musicians, and Littky suggested that he take students from the Met on a jazz-history tour. Bush got a bus license, Littky lent a bus, and Bush and the high schoolers hit the road, conducting oral-history interviews in New York, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago.

By 2006, though, Bush had grown disenchanted with American higher education. He didn’t want his dissertation to end up on a dusty shelf in some academic library; he wanted it to be a mandate for change.

“I was struggling with what belonged to the university, what counted as scholarship, and how to translate my research into public scholarship,” he says.

So the pair “started scheming” about a new kind of college, Bush says.

Littky and Bush imagined a place that would not only support students but empower them, giving them control over their learning. They designed the curriculum, and Roger Williams University agreed to award the degrees.

They started in 2009 with traditional-age students — 10 graduates of Met schools across the country. They lodged them in a three-story house across the street from the Met in Providence and held classes in the living room.

But serving 18- and 19-year-olds came with challenges: specifically, that they acted like typical college students.

“They wanted to play Frisbee on the lawn and ditch class,” recalls Bush.

“We didn’t set this up to provide dances and sports teams,” says Littky.

When older students started asking to be admitted, Littky put a notice on Facebook inviting adults with some college credit to an informational meeting. Close to 80 people showed up, and 25 enrolled for the fall semester. Bush and Littky had found their market — and it was a large one.

There are 36 million Americans with some college and no degree, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. That population will be key to meeting the nation’s postsecondary goals and work-force needs, particularly as the number of high-school graduates declines. Yet adult students have not been well-served by higher education. In one longitudinal study by the U.S. Education Department, less than a third of adults older than 30 who started a program in 2003-4 had earned a credential within six years. That’s compared with nearly 60 percent of traditional-age students.

To be admitted to College Unbound, students must have at least nine credits from a prior institution; more than a third of the current students have attended at least two colleges in the past.

“They’ve targeted a cohort of learners that most of higher education has given up on, or doesn’t want to take a chance on, and given them an opportunity to create success,” says Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, one of College Unbound’s first funders.

They’re students like Jose Rodriguez, who spent much of his youth and early adulthood in prison. He tried community college after his release, in 2010, but struggled in an oral-communication class and was advised by the professor to become “a laborer.”

“I almost gave up on life at that moment,” recalls Rodriguez, who is now a recruiter for College Unbound. “I had always wanted more.”

When he enrolled in College Unbound seven years ago, “the difference was clear.”

“There was a feeling of being accepted for who I am, versus being forced into a cookie cutter,” he says.

He earned his associate degree in 2014 and was working toward a bachelor’s when he got involved in a fight that landed him back in prison. Bush checked in on him after the fight, and later wrote to him in prison to let him know they were starting a program there.

“He came to my home in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Providence,” Rodriguez recalls. “I could go to the most prestigious college in the United States, and I don’t think anyone would do that.”

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

Finding colleges willing to take a risk on students like Rodriguez and cede some control over the curriculum was challenging. More than one potential partnership fell apart at the last minute, including an agreement with Northeastern University. Bush says he has a closetful of unused “CU at” shirts with the names of almost-partners.

That’s because College Unbound didn’t want to “just tinker around the edges of student services,” Bush says. It intended to fundamentally change the way students are taught.

That meant getting rid of many of the structures of traditional higher education: the nine-month academic calendar, the immutable campus, the fixed curriculum. Classes would meet year-round, in multiple locations, and courses would vary by semester, based on the projects that students were pursuing. Students would be assessed not just by their professors but also by their professional mentors and peers, too.

Eventually, CU found an ally in Southern New Hampshire University, another nontraditional college serving adult learners. Littky and Bush tested their program at SNHU, then moved College Unbound entirely to Rhode Island, where they joined forces with Charter Oak State College, an online public college based in Connecticut.

Their goals were ambitious: “We wanted to have a College Unbound in every college,” Littky recalls.

But Littky and Bush also yearned for autonomy. They worried that aligning with mainstream colleges left College Unbound vulnerable to shifting priorities and budget cuts.

“For a long time, we thought we’d be an embedded partner — make change from within,” says Bush. “But being a partner means you’re what’s for dinner. You’re the lowest priority.”

In the summer of 2014, they visited Ted Mitchell, a longtime friend of Littky’s who was then President Barack Obama’s under secretary of education, in his D.C. office. He urged the pair to go it alone — to “dare the establishment to deny the education you are trying to provide students they have left behind,” as he wrote in the foreword to a recent case study by the American Council on Education.

Mitchell, who is now president of the council, warned Littky that College Unbound would be “nibbled to death by partners who felt that they had to preserve their more-traditional structures to maintain their own accreditation.” He’d seen it happen before, when he was CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, supporting innovative teacher-prep programs that were collaborating with traditional colleges.

Littky had been “strident and clear” about the autonomy he needed for College Unbound to succeed, Mitchell says in an interview. Still, he worried about the future, and the long-term costs for his friend of standing firm.

“That also takes a toll,” he says. “In the long run, the transaction costs involved with going through accreditation were better than the transaction costs of dealing day-to-day with university partners.”

But first, CU would have to convince higher education’s gatekeepers that it could stand on its own.

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

In March 2015, Littky and Bush submitted a 1,200-page application for state recognition and started meeting with all eight members of the Rhode Island Council on Postsecondary Education. They held biweekly check-ins with the postsecondary commissioner, assembled a high-powered board, and convinced the governor to support their candidacy, according to the ACE report. They got 75 students to show up for the council’s hearing. Finally, in May 2015, the board voted unanimously to approve College Unbound as the 13th college in Rhode Island.

The next hurdle was accreditation. Littky and Bush had planned to continue to partner with Charter Oak until College Unbound became eligible to award federal student aid. But the regional accreditor, the New England Council of Higher Education (then known as Neasc) told them they’d need to operate independently before the college could be considered for accreditation. This meant it could no longer use Charter Oak’s systems for admissions, registration, advising, and online-course delivery — it had to build its own. It also had to raise $15,000 per student to keep the program tuition-free while it was awaiting student aid.

Littky and Bush managed all that. Then the council asked them to prove themselves again, with a second stand-alone cohort.

“It’s safe to say they were surprised,” says Barbara Brittingham, president of the council. “The commission is looking for an institution that can keep doing it. That’s a heavy lift. It takes a lot to get an institution off the ground.”

Because neither Littky nor Bush had a background in higher ed administration, they faced early doubts about their qualifications to lead a college. Hoping to allay those doubts, they hired two establishment figures: Robert Carothers, a former president of the University of Rhode Island, as executive vice president, and Robert Weygand, a former president of the New England Board of Higher Education, as vice president for finance and administration. “The Bobs,” as they became known, brought gravitas and an understanding of the approval process.

“Dennis is a pretty good salesman — and he has a record of success. But he hadn’t done college,” says Carothers. “He needed our credibility to come in here.”

Carothers says College Unbound embodies “everything I ever wanted to do” but wasn’t able to accomplish at traditional colleges: starting with students’ interests; learning by doing; establishing a passionate, committed board.

“Here, you can start anything, and you don’t have to fight through the bureaucracy to get things done,” says Weygand.

But that flexibility has presented some challenges in the regional accreditation process, which “looks for forms similar to those that they’ve already approved,” says Louis Soares, co-author of the ACE report and formerly Rhode Island’s director of business/work-force development.

“College Unbound just looks so different,” he says.

For one thing, College Unbound isn’t preoccupied with the Ph.D. If a candidate for the faculty — which is composed entirely of part-time adjuncts — has experience working with adults, or is an expert in a given field, Littky and Bush don’t insist on the credential. In fact, only five of the 35 faculty members and mentors who worked at College Unbound in the fall of 2019 had completed a doctoral degree, though most did have some graduate training.

College Unbound lacks a formal faculty-governance structure. Members of the accreditation-review team wanted to know whether the faculty had enough say in how College Unbound operates. They concluded, based on interviews, that faculty members had “many opportunities and channels to contribute their input and experience,” according to the report.

“We are building a faculty culture from scratch with our faculty a part of that building — just as we do with our student culture,” says Bush. Professors are either “instructional” or “lab” faculty; the latter are paid at a higher rate, do more advising, and connect students with social services. Either can apply to be “core” faculty members, who are asked (and compensated) to sit on committees and participate in assessment, and are eligible for multiyear contracts. The college holds quarterly all-college meetings and has a faculty representative on the board.

Another of the accreditation council’s concerns was that the learning outcomes expected for each class were not clear. College Unbound started with a “Big 10”: All students had to demonstrate mastery of 10 “leadership and change” competencies, including accountability, intercultural engagement, and resilience. The accrediting council required the college to add outcomes for general education and the major to that list, and started working with it to eliminate duplication and make the pathways clearer.

In September 2018, College Unbound finally earned candidacy for accreditation. Six months later, the Education Department approved College Unbound to participate in the federal student-aid program.

For supporters of new models of higher education, the fact that College Unbound has made it this far is cause for optimism.

But tension remains between the push for more innovation in higher education and the public and policy maker’s demands for more accountability from colleges — and there is “no easy formula for balancing the two,” says Jamienne Studley, president of WASC Senior College and University Commission.

To encourage innovation while minimizing the risk to students and taxpayers, WASC has developed an “incubation” policy that allows unaccredited organizations to partner with accredited ones en route to becoming stand-alone institutions. Another compromise, endorsed by the accreditor’s Brittingham, would be for the government to grant institutions provisional eligibility to award student aid during the initial phases of accreditation, offering them a stress test of sorts.

The goal, says Debra Humphreys, who oversees accreditation issues at Lumina, is to make College Unbound “less of an outlier and more of a norm.”

“Ultimately, we have to get to a point where we’re dispensing aid based on outcomes and learning, as opposed to a bean-counting of credits,” she says. “That’s the arc of change we’re on.”

Still, the arc is long, and she doubts that higher ed will reach the end anytime soon.

In the meantime, there are lessons even the most traditional colleges can take from College Unbound’s student-centered philosophy says Mitchell, president of ACE.

“The most important thing to copy is this core notion of attending to what students bring to the enterprise — what are their strengths, what are their passions, and what impediments do they have that need to be overcome,” he says.

Chronicle photo by Julia Schmalz

Some of those passions, and those impediments, were evident on a recent Tuesday evening at the Met, where students gathered for the weekly workplace and world lab required of everyone. They shared a meal — “breaking bread together,” as Bush puts it — then handed out awards recognizing one another’s accomplishments.

One of the honorees that evening was Liz Colón, who had just been featured in the Providence Journal for her work to prevent lead poisoning. Colón, whose middle son suffered lead poisoning as a child, says she’s held almost every position at the Childhood Lead Action Project, her longtime employer, but still feels limited by her lack of a degree.

She says she’s sick of not being able to sign off on the work of grad students who are getting academic credit at the project because “I don’t have a degree. It’s a little awkward.”

Colón had her first child at 15, and her third at 25. She tried community college in the early ’90s but “didn’t get very far,” she says. Now, at age 56, she fosters children with serious medical issues. With a 40-hour workweek and five kids at home, “I don’t have time to be in class four days a week,” Colón says.

“This is the one night I can commit,” she says. Her project is to develop a campaign to replace lead service lines in Rhode Island free of charge.

Across from her, Zulen Liz is feeding noodles to her 2-year-old daughter, Zulenis. She could have dropped her daughter at the child-care provider that College Unbound offers, but she prefers to keep her close — and besides, the students love her.

“She’s like our class mascot,” says Colón.

Liz, 27, attended the Community College of Rhode Island for two semesters but dropped out after she got married and had her daughter. She tried returning “so many times,” but “either I couldn’t afford it, or I couldn’t transfer my credits, so I put it off.”

“I’m tired of feeling like I didn’t do anything for myself,” she says. “I want to accomplish it.”

Her action-research project will be a plan for a play group for moms who feel isolated and alone — “a nonjudgmental zone where they can be moms and something else, too.”

Colón and Liz are among the nearly 100 new students who enrolled in College Unbound this year, part of a rapid expansion made possible by Pell Grants. Those, along with institutional scholarships, cover much of the roughly $10,000 it costs to earn a degree.

Up until this fall, most of College Unbound’s revenue came from gifts and grants from foundations like Lumina, Nellie Mae, and ECMC. That dependence had led some funders and regulators to question the long-term viability of the college and its leaders’ ambitious growth plans.

The federal student-aid program — and the Pell Grant in particular — offers College Unbound a much more stable, substantial source of revenue, removing a key constraint on its growth. Leaders project that the college will be 80-percent tuition-funded by the 2022 fiscal year.

Running a high-touch program like College Unbound isn’t cheap, but Littky and Bush have been able to control costs by relying on adjuncts, having faculty members do all the advising, and leasing classroom space from the Met and local nonprofits at night, when it would otherwise sit idle. As they eye expansion to other cities, they plan to continue to make use of underutilized spaces — including the many Met campuses that Littky helped found.

Still, even some of the college’s biggest boosters are wary of growing too big, too soon.

“Just because something works really well in one place doesn’t mean that it’s ready to go every place,” says Haley Glover, director of strategy for the Lumina Foundation.

Some supporters point out that College Unbound doesn’t have the enormous marketing budgets of the for-profit colleges they’re competing with.

“Their marketing is largely word-of-mouth,” says David Bergeron, a senior fellow for postsecondary-education policy at the Center for American Progress, who lives in Rhode Island. “If the quality is not good, that word of mouth changes really quickly.”

Bergeron, who spent much of his career overseeing policy issues at the Department of Education, also worries that Littky and Bush will face resistance as they expand beyond New England, particularly “as they go into states with more-robust community-college systems.”

Likewise, he adds, some regional accreditors might start to grumble if College Unbound gets to the point of having many more students in their regions than in New England.

But the biggest fear is probably that, at a larger scale, College Unbound could lose what makes it special: its founders’ authentic care for adult learners. Will it still be College Unbound without Littky and Bush there to check in on students after a fight, to counsel them through financial and personal crises, to help students see beyond their self-doubt and history of educational trauma?

“That is more than student support — that’s love,” says Glover. “Whether that is scalable, I don’t know.”