Employer-paid tuition programs continue to expand, but who reaps the benefits?
A year ago, I wrote a mea culpa for my pessimistic take on the fate of employer-paid tuition benefits. Recent conversations — including one with the general manager of EdAssist, a giant tuition-benefits manager — continue to confirm how wrong I was. Rather than pulling back on tuition benefits, many employers have been doubling down on those offerings.
In today’s “job seeker’s labor market,” employers are looking to tuition benefits to help them attract and retain personnel. In fact, the EdAssist executive told me, this year 100 of its employer partners plan to offer workers ways to attend college with no out-of-pocket costs at all, up from 66 last year. And employee retention is one of the chief reasons Amazon announced a major expansion of its tuition-benefits program in March.
However, I don’t think my caution was necessarily misplaced. As off-base as I was on employers’ continuing commitment to tuition benefits, I still think it’s fair to question how much such programs will help colleges with their enrollment woes, or at least most colleges.
As I and other Chronicle reporters have been documenting, the trends are not in colleges’ favor. Even colleges specifically designed to serve working adults report challenges in attracting students. As Merodie Hancock, president of Thomas Edison State University, put it last week, “employees don’t necessarily think they need school right now.”
(For the record, Hancock thinks that’s a mistake: “The time to invest in education,” she says, ”is when you don’t have to.”)
I’m also hearing cautions from other observers, among them Haley Glover, the new director of UpSkill America. Even as interest in employer-supported education programs seems to be on the rise, Glover told me that she doubts they can offset the broader enrollment declines, especially among community colleges. Mainly, she said, that’s because many employers — and especially the largest companies — tend to team up with national colleges and universities with strong online programs, a practice that can make it harder for local colleges to attract those students.
But Glover, who previously oversaw research on working learners as strategy director at the Lumina Foundation, and is just coming off a stint managing Amazon’s coaching for its college-benefits offerings, said she still hopes that well-designed programs can move the needle. “They won’t ‘reverse the trend’ by themselves,” she wrote me, “but they are absolutely generating new interest for adult learners who are new or returning to postsecondary.”
How much interest? I wish I could tell you. As Glover noted to me, data are hard to come by on how many employees have taken advantage of the recently added employer-supported education programs. (And yes, the absence of good data seems to be a theme of late.) Glover said she hopes employers start collecting data more regularly — on participation, completion, and advancement outcomes — and sharing it with the public. Same goes for me.
Even absent information on participation trends, what does work?
Both because employers are showing more interest and because their employees may still be hesitant, I spoke with Jill Buban at EdAssist to hear what it has found most successful for students in employer-paid tuition programs.
Those lessons could prove helpful to colleges even if they’re outside EdAssist’s network, which now includes 230 education providers.
EdAssist, a 12-year-old division of Bright Horizons, which may be better known for its child-care centers, is a dominant player in the field. It manages more than $1 billion in tuition benefits a year for some 400,000 students. (If it were a single college, it would be among the biggest in the country.) It has 225 employer partners, 41 percent of which are in health care. For comparison’s sake, Guild Education, the darling of the venture-capital set, reports about 80 employers and 100 education providers in its network. Unlike Guild, whose business model relies heavily on sharing tuition revenue, EdAssist is paid primarily by employers.
Not surprisingly, Buban said that programs designed to be free for employees tend to draw the highest participation rates, especially if employers pay the tuition directly rather than requiring students to front the money and seek reimbursement later.
Having coaching and other wrap-around support available is also important, she said, because many adult students who’ve previously enrolled in college didn’t have good experiences the first time around.
Communication matters, too, Buban noted. Some employers offer a tuition benefit, but it remains “hidden,” she said, because they don’t publicize it well. In those cases, she said, participation suffers. Recently, though, she’s noticed that more employers are deliberately promoting educational offerings to employees, as part of a broader push to create career pathways, particularly as the organizations look to help people in entry-level positions gain the training they need for more in-demand skilled positions.
EdAssist is also high on colleges that will offer students credit for prior learning, credit by examination, and subdegree credentials that stack toward a degree.
To further encourage those practices, Buban said EdAssist will soon formally announce an expansion of its “vigorously vetted” Workforce Education Network, a group of eight education providers that it considers exemplars of practices for working learners. (The new members — Thomas Edison, the American Public University System, Colorado Technical University, Southern New Hampshire University, the University of Maryland Global Campus, and Noode, an online program manager — will be joining Western Governors University and the Alamo Colleges District.) EdAssist plans to highlight those colleges to employers. The providers also satisfied EdAssist criteria on affordability and graduation rates. “I can sleep well at night sending employees there,” Buban said.
The network, which plans to report periodically on research and practices that assist working learners, will cap its membership at 15.
I’m eager to see what the network produces. I also wonder if this move might exacerbate the very enrollment patterns that may already be deterring employer-paid enrollments at many regional colleges around the country — not to mention alienate some of EdAssist’s other educational partners. But Buban said EdAssist believes it’s important to elevate institutions and organizations that can meet employers’ and employees’ needs, particularly in accommodating large cohorts of students. Having “scale is really important,” she said.
No doubt that’s true, and not just at EdAssist. It’s also what could make it that much harder for many smaller institutions to make notable inroads into the employer-paid tuition market.
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