One of the nation’s largest online universities surprised many of its staff members this month by announcing they would need to work in the office if they wanted to keep their jobs.
In a series of meetings earlier this month, senior administrators at Western Governors University told employees that beginning this fall, 19 of its 26 departments will be “co-located” at the university’s Salt Lake City headquarters, with staff members eventually required to be in the office four days a week. All vice presidents and directors on one team, for example, will need to move to Salt Lake City in the next one to two years, and all new hires will now be based there.The policy does not, however, apply to those with student-facing jobs, including course instructors, evaluators who grade students’ work, and enrollment and financial-aid professionals.
Higher ed has been slow to return to full-time in-office working arrangements since the pandemic, and whether employees are able to work remotely continues to be a sticking point in retention and hiring efforts. But few institutions have taken as strong a stance in favor of face-to-face work as Western Governors, let alone imposed relocation requirements as a condition of continued employment. The move is also notable because one of Western Governors’ selling points to its nearly 237,000 students is its flexibility as an online institution, which some employees say is one of the main benefits of working there. At Western Governors, remote work has long been the norm.
Western Governors said it could not share specific numbers on how many people will be in the office or working remotely. A spokesperson said in a statement that “more than 80 percent of WGU’s employees will continue to be primarily remote, comprised of positions that directly engage and serve our students.”
The institution employed just over 8,100 people in the fiscal year that ended in June 2023, according to its form 990.
The Chronicle spoke with four current Western Governors employees about the policy change, all of whom requested anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. Dozens more have congregated on Reddit to commiserate and compare notes on the specifics of the policy, which they say aren’t clear because administrators have not provided adequate details in writing.
Policy Specifics
Western Governors employees who currently live within a 50-mile radius of Salt Lake City will need to work from the office three days per week beginning on October 1, and four days beginning January 1. According to a presentation leaked on Reddit, on the marketing and external communications team, vice presidents who live outside of Utah must decide by November 1 whether they will move; if they opt to do so, they must arrive in Utah by August 2025. Directors have until July 2025 to make their decisions and August 2026 to move. Those who opt not to relocate will be out of a job, though the presentation notes that “severance support will be available.” (A Western Governors employee confirmed the authenticity of the presentation and provided a copy to The Chronicle.)
Individual contributors, managers, and senior managers on the marketing and external communications teamwho live outside Utah do not need to move, but are only eligible for “in-line” promotions, which the presentation defines as “those that are not posted and represent progression within an individual’s current role.” Any other promotion — or even a lateral move to do the same job within a different department, employees told The Chronicle — would necessitate a move to Utah.
The ranks of employees who must relocate to keep their jobs, and their deadlines for doing so, vary across areas. For example, an academic leader in the business school said they were required to decide by November 1 whether to move. If they opt not to move, they were told, Western Governors would immediately list their position as open, after which they could expect to remain in the job for a couple of months to interview and train their replacement. Of 15 leaders in their part of the business school, they told The Chronicle, 14 live outside Salt Lake City and are being asked to relocate.
According to the presentation, part of the “foundational philosophy” behind the decision is that “direct, in-person engagement facilitates productive reasoning, elevates creativity, increases empathy and understanding, and sparks inventiveness.”
But employees The Chronicle spoke to said they were hired as remote workers and that those arrangements had never presented an obstacle. In a decade at the institution, the business-school leader said, “being remote has never been an impediment for me.” Indeed, they said, they have only been to Salt Lake City three times during their tenure at Western Governors, and approximately 15,000 students are enrolled in the programs they manage. While they’ve had opportunities to work elsewhere, they have stayed “out of loyalty;" about 80 percent of the people they work with, they said, chose Western Governors for its flexibility.
They described the administration’s stance on the new policy as “really cut-and-dry.” To make a decision about relocating in the span of approximately two months would prove “absolutely impractical,” they added, especially since a quick internet search revealed that real-estate prices in the Salt Lake City area are two or three times what their home, more than 1,500 miles away, is worth.
“We understand that implementing this workplace strategy means some employees will have difficult decisions to make,” the university’s statement read in part. “We are committed to providing support for our employees, including taking a phased, multi-year approach to allow time for transition.”
Diversity Concerns
A second employee, in the program-development division, said that while their position is not among those required to relocate, the requirement that employees seeking most forms of promotion must move means their career trajectory has “stagnated.” But the larger issue presented by the policy change, in their opinion, is representation. The employee is Black, and they believe that, for any new positions — which are required to be based in Salt Lake City — “it’s a higher probability that that employee will be white, given the demographic of the Salt Lake City area and the general perception of Salt Lake as a unpalatable place to live for most African-Americans.” (According to Census data, of approximately 200,000 Salt Lake City residents, around 5,800 — or about 3% — are Black.)
In a meeting, the employee said, they asked David Perkinson, the senior vice president for program development, how the policy squares with Western Governors’ goal of being “the world’s most inclusive university,” as the Careers page of its website states. “His only response to it was essentially just reading a prepared statement, that WGU is committed to diversity,” the employee said, adding that others shared their concerns about the policy’s effect on work-force diversity. (The university did not answer a question about this exchange or the policy’s impact.)
That matters particularly in their own division, the employee said, which is responsible for creating curricula and assessments for what they called an “increasingly diverse” student body. (In the fall of 2022, according to federal data, 11 percent of Western Governors students were Black, 12 percent were Hispanic, and 4 percent were Asian. Those figures have all increased over the past decade.
“This policy doesn’t so much just cement that I personally don’t have a future at this university, but it also means that at the point that I decide to leave, more than likely I will be replaced by someone who’s not Black,” the employee said. “If I’m not here to raise these questions and to spot these issues, as soon as I go, the person who replaces me, I’m positive, will not come in with the same level of sensitivity.”
All four employees The Chronicle spoke to said they had not been provided with any written documentation of the policy or with a satisfactory explanation of why it was introduced. In a recording shared with The Chronicle of an August 9 meeting where the policy was introduced to program-development employees, Perkinson, the senior vice president, says: “The intent is to create the conditions that will help us accelerate the pace of innovation and delivery that is required to meet the needs of the university and our students. It is not a downsizing. This is not a deliberate downsizing.”
But a third Western Governors employee, who already lives in Salt Lake City and is not being asked to relocate, said a mass exodus is likely. “There are few remote gigs,” he said, “and soon you won’t be able to throw a rock in the whole state of Utah without hitting” a former WGU employee.
