Widen the paths to and through higher ed.
Chutes and Ladders is a fun game for kids. It’s also a pretty apt allegory for the ups and downs that adults and other nontraditional students encounter as they try to make their way through college. So when it came time for the folks at Higher Learning Advocates to debut their “Widen the Path” campaign to members of Congress, two specially crafted versions of the game seemed the perfect props.
The chutes-heavy version highlights obstacles — credits that won’t transfer, disruptions in child care, unreliable transportation — that commonly derail older students. The ladder-laden version, meanwhile, offers boosts like credit for prior learning. On a Tuesday late last month, staff members from the bipartisan organization delivered the games to more than 150 congressional offices around the Capitol.
The campaign calling for “more ladders and fewer chutes” wasn’t your typical lobbying effort. Higher Learning Advocates wasn’t pushing specific legislation (at least not yet). Rather, with time running out on this session of Congress, HLA was looking to begin normalizing among policy leaders the idea that “today’s students” (its preferred term) need more support for the varied ways they pursue postsecondary education and training, according to Julie Peller, the group’s executive director. The onus now falls too heavily on students to find their way through, Peller told me. And when they do, that’s often “in spite of policy,” she added, “not because of it.”
To be clear, Widen the Path does come with a policy agenda that HLA will push later. It calls for more federal money for community colleges and training programs, including approaches that allow “braiding” of the funding between the two; better on-ramps to work-based learning and similar educational programs; and removing policy barriers like the Satisfactory Academic Progress rules that disqualify some older students from federal student aid because of poor performance years earlier.
Any advocates these days are staring down a hardened political divide. Even so, Peller is actually a little optimistic that some of that agenda will pass, because of the bipartisan appeal, she said, of “giving people the skills and credentials they need to get back to work.”
For now, she said, she’d be ecstatic if this Congress managed to remove some of the strictures of the academic-progress rule or to enact the JOBS Act, which would authorize the use of Pell Grants for short-term training programs. But she recognizes that “time’s running out.” And on the broader goals, she’s prepared to be patient. The campaign is slated to run for more than two years, by which time she hopes there will be more members of Congress “who can speak this language.”
Leaves of absence for education.
The Graduate! Network, a national nonprofit that directly serves adult students (which I highlighted in my “Adult Student” report), recently featured Peller on a webinar. The brainstorming portion yielded a few ideas worth spotlighting.
First: a law that would make it easier for working people to take short leaves from their jobs to pursue intensive education and training programs. Modeled on the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, it was proposed by Jack MacKenzie, the founder and chief executive of CollegeAPP, a company that helps colleges identify and recruit adult students. He said it could encourage employees’ enrollment in immersive short-term educational programs while guaranteeing their jobs would still be there afterward.
That approach was new to me and to Peller. It occurred to MacKenzie during the webinar, he told me later, as he “was thinking about how challenging it is for working adults to find the time to get a certificate or a degree.” No doubt there are plenty of economic and political challenges to a proposal that could involve millions of workers’ leaving their jobs for a month or two each year. But I think the idea of giving employees time for intensive skill-building also has promise.
What do you think? Are there ways this could work? Or is it impossibly disruptive? Contact me here with your thoughts.
Another idea that surfaced during the webinar also got me thinking: the potential impact of a national grass-roots organization of adult students that could authentically represent their interests to policy makers. The United States Student Association already exists, but such a new group would be more focused on the needs of older students. Of course, adult students are already juggling so much in their lives. But as Peller noted, they make up “a demographic that needs to be heard from more directly.”
About that ‘higher bar for higher ed’ …
The Ad Council’s equity-minded “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign, promoted by Opportunity@Work and a growing number of businesses and organizations — which I previewed before the “tear” came in — debuted last month with ads like this, urging employers to hire job candidates based on their skills, not whether they have a degree.
The campaign is one of several developments that could require colleges to do more to establish their value to students, families, and the public. (I called it “a higher bar for higher ed.”) I’m excited to explore that issue during the 2022 Chronicle Festival in a few weeks, with Byron Auguste, chief executive and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, and Ana Mari Cauce, president of the University of Washington. I hope you’ll join me for that — and the rest of our program. Sign up here.
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