A college for working adults begins to hit its stride
I’ll admit it: I’ve had to pause whenever I’ve been tempted to write something judgy on the flagging enrollment and low completion rates at Calbright College, California’s online community college, created in 2018 to help working adults get a leg up in the job market. I’ve resisted by reminding myself how many times I (and others) weighed in on the slow pace of enrollment at Western Governors University in its early years. Today, with an enrollment of more than 145,000, WGU is spreading its wings in several directions, as I reported a year ago, and is the largest online university in the country.
This will date me — again — but the first of those enrollment stories, in 1998, noted that only 75 people had applied in the first weeks after WGU’s “World-Wide Web site for enrollment” opened.
The parallels are on others’ minds, too. Calbright’s second president and chief executive, Ajita Talwalker Menon, tells me she often compares notes with WGU’s president, Scott Pulsipher, and takes a lot of comfort in that other pioneering online institution’s history. Early on, Menon notes, observers “declared WGU a failure every year.”
Calbright, too, started off slowly, but recently it’s been on a roll. And its latest moves offer some interesting lessons on ways to design colleges around students’ needs.
First, a quick recap: Calbright’s first president departed abruptly in early 2020, one year into her four-year contract. A 2021 state audit then blamed the institution’s rocky start on former executives who had “failed to develop and execute effective strategies for launching the college.”
Menon took the reins as an interim in February 2020 to help get Calbright back on track. Weeks later, Covid hit. The college opened its virtual doors in the summer of 2021 with just under 500 students. Now, in the six programs it offers, the college logs enrollment of nearly five times that. As Cal Matters recently reported, its enrollment is larger than that of four brick-and-mortar community colleges in the state. And while 40 of the 115 other campuses in the system continue to shed students, Calbright is growing by 8 percent a month.
As welcome as the enrollment uptick is, Menon says she considers that “the less exciting part” of the Calbright story at the moment. More important, she says, is who is enrolling: More than 90 percent of students are 25 or older (more than double the rate for the system as a whole), more than one-third are parents or caregivers, and more than 70 percent identify as Black, Indigenous, Latino, or members of other racial or ethnic minority groups.
“We’re reaching the folks who have fallen out of higher ed,” she told me when we met up last month during the American Council on Education’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. “Being really intentional about growth is the next step.”
Calbright is free to all California residents and offers nondegree programs that prepare students for jobs in fields such as IT support and software administration for customer-relationship management. Across six-month terms, the courses are offered in a self-paced model. The programs are designed to be completed in less than a year, assuming students study five hours a week, but as Cal Matters also reported, fewer than 10 percent of students have been hitting that mark so far. Life often interferes with the plans of students like those at Calbright, but still, that needs to improve.
I was particularly eager to talk with Menon — whose résumé includes stints in the Obama White House and in the chancellor’s office for California’s community-college system — because of Calbright’s unusual mission and the difficult circumstances surrounding its launch. Indeed, she still faces many of those, not least that skeptical legislators have sliced $40 million from the initial start-up funding of $100 million over seven years, and reduced the college’s annual appropriation to $15 million from $20 million.
Menon and I covered a lot of ground, but three themes stood out to me from a pair of conversations.
What “student-centered” looks like there. I hear that term a lot from college leaders, but Calbright’s moves sound admirably hands-on, like every-other-week info sessions for prospective students; a landing page to help students prep for the CCC Apply system, which isn’t exactly user-friendly; and tutoring and peer-mentoring programs designed with plenty of input from students themselves. Calbright also uses Slack as a tool to connect students to one another and to the institution, a deliberate choice for a college focused on preparation for jobs. “The modern workplace engages and communicates this way,” Menon says.
Calbright is also investing heavily in research to guide its design of services for students who often juggle work and family obligations alongside their studies. Already a $4.1-million partnership with the School of Education at the University of California at Irvine (and several affiliated scholars) has produced a new model to help students decide how to pace their progress, with other “nudge” strategies expected to follow. (I’ll share more soon, in a future newsletter, about what these UC-Irvine researchers have been up to.)
An IT strategy that borrows from industry. After Calbright’s chief technology officer left in 2022, the college replaced him with a chief product officer. Menon says the new title reflects more than semantics. It’s a different cultural approach to IT than what’s traditionally found at colleges, where the CTO often must span silos and weigh one department’s or division’s needs against another’s. For Calbright, the “product” is the end-to-end student experience, she says, including all the technology that enables teaching, support services, and the data collection that informs those operations. That shift unapologetically mirrors the way companies now prioritize the customer experience.
A market-informed approach to employer relationships. Unlike her predecessor, Heather Hiles, who tried to get big-name employers to pay for partnerships with the college for the opportunity to hire graduates, Menon has been steering Calbright to develop programs that reflect a deep understanding of how adults without degrees enter and then advance in the job market. The shift, Menon says, was a response to those realities. “The barrier to hire for our community of learners,” she told me, “is higher than people like to admit.”
So now, instead of assuming that employers will rush to hire Calbright grads, the college has been collaborating with intermediaries, like local work-force boards and organizations and companies like Opportunity@Work and the apprenticeship provider Bitwise Industries to offer programs that focus on “the fundamental entry points” that will get their grads in the door — and into positions that offer opportunities to advance. Hiring processes in the public sector are another focus right now, along with the different needs of various regions in the state.
Even with these recent developments, Calbright still has a long way to go. Its low completion rates remain problematic, although applying the UCI research could help with that. Until it’s accredited, which it hopes will happen by the end of the year, the college can’t offer students credit for prior learning, which is a key part of its mission. And while criticism from lawmakers (and instructors at other colleges in the system) seems to have lessened, findings from another state audit, scheduled to be published in November, could bring a new wave of scrutiny.
Menon’s enthusiasm for Calbright’s mission remains strong. “We have failed this population in traditional higher ed,” she says. Yet sometimes it seems the criticism of Calbright doesn’t account for the challenges the institution is taking on, she adds, or the challenges of getting things up and running at the height of the pandemic.
The attention can be wearing. “It’s important to be doing this in the public sector,” Menon says. But also, “it is extraordinarily difficult to do because it’s in the public sector.”
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