Adult learners are a growing share of the overall student population in the United States, and states and institutions alike are looking for new and better ways to serve them. For this particular population, who are more likely to have jobs or a family to care for, affordability and access are two of the most important considerations.
Over the past 20 years, one institution has focused on adults, with increasingly successful results. Western Governors University (WGU), a nonprofit online school that now serves 84,000 students, got its start in a somewhat futuristic vision of what education could be.
In the mid-1990s, 19 western governors gathered to discuss possible solutions to what were then some of the main challenges in higher education. Presciently, the governors had a sense of where the tech landscape could head and saw a need for education that would be able to serve residents of western states who live in remote, rural areas, far from public colleges and universities.
WGU differs from traditional schools in two key areas: degrees are acquired on the basis of students’ existing competencies and work experiences, and it subtracts traditional brick and mortar schools from the equation altogether. The institution delivers its education entirely online, meaning that it can cut costs to the bone. Its non-traditional status, however, also has led to a disputed finding by the Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General that WGU should return nearly $713 million to the department because 69 of its courses failed to provide “regular and substantive interaction between students and their instructors,” as required by federal law.
At the time of its founding in 1997, in an era before smartphones and the internet became ubiquitous, WGU sounded like a far-out idea.
“It started at a time when it was really impractical to think of online education in the way that we think about it today,” says Dr. Kevin Kinser, professor of education at the Penn State College of Education. “It was really started as an institution that was looking to the future — saying, ‘What if we could do it this way?’”
As with many experiments, WGU took some time to gain traction.
