Last summer the state of Indiana opened its eighth public university without constructing a student union, a dormitory, or a single academic building. Western Governors University Indiana, which operates entirely online, doesn’t even have traditional courses.
At the time, Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. emphasized the need for more adults to attend college at a price that both they and the state could afford. But instead of building that opportunity within existing public colleges, the governor, a Republican, took the unusual step of chartering WGU Indiana as a state institution. Less than a year later, the university has nearly 1,200 students. It will hold its second graduation in August.
The approach is one that at least five other states are considering to deal with one of higher education’s most vexing problems: how to get working adults to come back to college and complete degrees even if they dropped out years, sometimes decades, earlier. In Indiana, where 30 percent of the population has bachelor’s degrees or higher, nearly 700,000 people started college but never finished.
Without luring those adults back into the classroom, there’s no chance the state can meet its goal of having 60 percent of its residents with college credentials by 2025, especially as the number of high-school graduates is expected to decline over the next decade.
It’s not good enough just to send students to college if they don’t finish, Mr. Daniels said. “I used to have the wishful notion that students who are at college for a couple years but don’t complete still learn something.”
The governor didn’t start from scratch. Western Governors University, which was founded as a multistate, nonprofit institution by the Western Governors’ Association, began enrolling students in 1999. Since then it has grown into a fully accredited university, offering more than 50 bachelor’s- and master’s-degree programs in business, health, information technology, and teacher education. Nationally it has about 20,000 students.
Western Governors University Indiana has tailored its approach to working adults who have some college experience and want to finish their degrees in a short time at relatively low cost. Students pay $6,000 a year for as many credits as they can complete, compared with an average in-state tuition of $7,600 at Indiana’s other public four-year institutions. And since WGU is a state institution, students can use state financial aid to pay for tuition.
Instead of traditional courses, Western Governors uses “competency-based learning,” which allows students to work at their own pace through a set of suggested study materials, most of them available online. Students demonstrate that they have mastered the material by completing a standardized examination.
The approach seems to work well for James Desormeaux of Fort Wayne, Ind., who graduated from high school in 1987, attended community college off and on for several years, and eventually earned an associate degree. In a recent semester at Western Governors, Mr. Desormeaux completed the equivalent of 24 credits toward a bachelor’s degree in business management while working full time as an automotive-parts salesman and helping to raise his two children.
Instead of a traditional instructor, Mr. Desormeaux has a mentor in Richard E. Davis, who has an M.B.A. from Butler University and worked as an accountant for an education-supplies manufacturing company until he was laid off last year. In his job at Western Governors, he calls Mr. Desormeaux and 79 other students individually each week to discuss their progress and goals, and to keep track of their work online.
Mr. Desormeaux heard about Western Governors through an advertisement featuring Governor Daniels. “I respect our governor in Indiana, and he was broadcasting like crazy about WGU,” says Mr. Desormeaux, who noticed that the university was tailored for professionals. “It was one of those things, you see it so much you want to give it a shot.”
The governor’s role as cheerleader has led to questions about why he would turn to an outside entity to educate the state’s citizens rather than promote efforts at Indiana’s existing institutions.
One answer is that traditional higher education hasn’t focused on adult learners and can’t transform itself quickly enough to make a difference in the short term, says Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation for Education, a philanthropy that backs efforts, such as WGU Indiana, that aim to improve college completion.
Governor Daniels, who said in an interview with The Chronicle that he would like to see other colleges in Indiana develop similar approaches, has a more direct answer: “Higher education is highly resistant to change.”
Broad Impact?
Nearly every state in the country faces challenges similar to Indiana’s: large numbers of adults who need college degrees to improve their job prospects, limited capacity to add enrollment at existing colleges, and few state dollars to create more space or hire faculty.
In 2008, neighboring Kentucky began a 12-year effort to double its number of working adults with college degrees. The state started with an intensive recruiting campaign to persuade some 11,000 people who had already earned at least 90 credits before dropping out that they should give college another try.
More recently, the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Institute for Higher Education Policy introduced a $1.3-million program to find formerly enrolled college students whose academic records qualify them to receive associate degrees retroactively. The three-year effort, called Project Win-Win, also plans to identify former students who fell short of associate degrees by nine or fewer credits, and re-enroll them.
The project, which is supported by Lumina, will help 35 community colleges and four-year universities that offer associate degrees in six states—Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin—to audit their records in search of those former students.
Other states are also looking at the WGU Indiana model. In Washington State, State Sen. James Kastama, a Democrat, has introduced a bill to create a partnership with Western Governors University similar to Indiana’s.
The advantage of forming a new partnership rather than creating a similar program with existing institutions is that it adds capacity to serve more students at no extra cost to the state, Mr. Kastama says. The demand for higher education is so great in Washington that the state will need an additional 48,000 slots for college students by 2018, and it can’t afford to educate those students at other institutions.
Policy makers in Arizona, California, Louisiana, and Texas have had discussions about teaming up with Western Governors, although no legislation has been filed.
Some traditional public colleges may see such partnerships as an encroachment, says Bruce N. Chaloux, who directs the Electronic Campus initiative of the 16-state Southern Regional Education Board. Indiana has, in essence, created a new competitor for the other public colleges, he says.
In fact, Washington State legislators have amended Senator Kastama’s bill to ensure that students at Western Governors would not receive state financial aid unless it was approved by the state’s Higher Education Coordinating Board. There was a concern that WGU would sap resources from other colleges, he says.
So far Indiana’s other public colleges have not openly protested the state’s new online institution, though some leaders have wondered why Governor Daniels is appearing in ads for the online institution rather than for their own campuses.
Some public colleges are cooperating with the newcomer. The statewide Ivy Tech Community College system has signed an articulation agreement allowing its course credits to be accepted at Western Governors, and more than 19 percent of WGU’s current students are transfers from the community-college system.
Even with cooperation from Indiana’s other state colleges, it will be a while before Western Governors can substantially increase the number of adults with degrees in the state.
Allison Barber, chancellor of WGU Indiana, expects to have 2,000 students within the next year. By comparison, Ivy Tech enrolls more than 34,000 students in its online courses.
Ms. Barber says her institution has a sense of urgency but isn’t in a hurry to “grow a university of 100,000" because it wants to ensure that it is enrolling only those students who can make the commitment to finish their programs.
Mr. Merisotis, of the Lumina Foundation, says the new venture doesn’t have to solve the state’s problem all on its own.
Indiana needs about a 6-percent annual increase in college graduates over what it is now producing, Mr. Merisotis says, and Western Governors could realistically contribute at least a third of that amount.
“There’s no one way, no magic bullet, no simple solution,” he says. “That’s why WGU Indiana, on its own, isn’t going to solve America’s college-attainment problem.”
