Flexible and Synchronous

Flexible scheduling might be a high-profile online college startup’s key innovation. Also, a people strategy for the AI economy from RAISE US and new federal training grants, an update on apprenticeship funding, externships from an online high school provider, and an essay on how to improve workforce tech. (Subscribe here.)

Class-Time Availability Zones

The online two-year college Campus has gotten attention for its investment clout, with $100M raised and high-profile backers. It also touts a governing board of higher ed veterans. But the startup’s potential secret sauce is more mundane: flexible scheduling for students.

Campus was launched in 2023 by Tade Oyerinde, who previously founded an online teaching platform for universities. The for-profit offers associate degrees in business, healthcare, and IT, as well as a smattering of certificates and courses. Its roughly 3,200 students are taught by 100+ faculty members recruited from the ranks of adjunct instructors at highly selective universities.

Students can use federal Pell Grants at Campus, which originally gained accreditation through the acquisition of the Sacramento-based MTI College. That enables a big part of the draw—debt-free degrees through a tuition rate capped at the maximum Pell award of $7,395 per academic year.

Oyerinde says the North Star for Campus is graduating Pell-eligible students and topping a completion rate of 50%, which is well above the community college sector’s national average of 27% for completion within three years. The current rate for full-time, first-time students at Campus is 70%.

To make that happen, the college offers wraparound student supports based on the research-backed success of the City University of New York’s ASAP program, which a growing number of two-year colleges are emulating.

“It requires a huge upfront investment,” says Oyerinde, including a success coach for every 60 students. But he says high-quality support for students generates a virtuous cycle of stronger retention and revenue. “Over time it pays for itself.”

Campus also relies on live classes. Without synchronous online learning, Oyerinde says students lack the cohort-based learning, relationships, and personal attention they need to thrive.

That’s where the flexible scheduling kicks in. Campus originally offered only evening classes. But that proved challenging for students when their work schedule changed or they got a new job. So Campus moved to four daily class-time availability zones, and now allows students to switch classes deep into a term.

Making that change wasn’t easy. Grades and completed assignments have to move with students. And Campus needs to slot students into new classes while maintaining its average class size of roughly 70. Grading also had to be somewhat standardized across the institution, while also preserving autonomy for instructors.

“It’s a complex puzzle,” Oyerinde says, which AI has helped to solve.

The strategy of combining synchronous online learning with scheduling flexibility in the two-year degree space is intriguing, says Susan Bickerstaff, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Historically, the value of online learning for the typical working learner is linked to the flexibility of asynchronous courses—think of commercials touting self-paced courses a student can log on to after the kids go to bed. But engagement also can be a challenge in online learning, says Bickerstaff, an expert on teaching and learning.

“The relationship with the faculty member is really important,” she says. Those personal connections, and those with other students, are the “kind of thing that helps people come back to class.”

If Campus can thread that needle with flexible cohort-based learning and a personal success coach who sticks with the student through scheduling changes, it could be a potent model, one Bickerstaff says would be interesting to research.

Oyerinde has acknowledged that previous attempts to create an online community college include big failures. But the upward enrollment trajectory at Campus is a good sign. And he points to retention gains driven by the move to flexible scheduling, including a 4-5% bump in graduation rates.

“We have data that supports a lot of this work,” says Oyerinde.

People Strategy for the AI Economy

As the backlash to artificial intelligence rolls on in this country, a growing number of experts and commentators are pushing back on the tech’s business model and its potential to transform the labor market.

For example, The New York Times in recent days published op-eds arguing that AI can’t do the vast majority of human jobs and that accused some AI lab leaders of doom trolling or doommaxxing to hype their products while crowding out the rest of the economy. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have pulled back predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse.

The yo-yo discourse can be overwhelming, and another reason to be wary of hot takes and tidy narratives on AI. Yet despite the uncertainty, one of the most widely cited proponents of the AI bubble theory, investor Paul Kedrosky, argues that the U.S. should prepare by developing a better safety net.

Two notable steps in this direction emerged during the past week with the launch of RAISE US and a modest twist on training grants from the Trump administration.

RAISE US is a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to build America’s people strategy for the AI economy. A long list of big companies and philanthropies have signed on to the project and contributed $500M+ to the group’s goal of $1B in multiyear commitments. Anchor partners Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation will help to “build the workforce response to AI.”

The CEO is Gina Raimondo, a Democrat and former commerce secretary and Rhode Island governor. Eric Holcomb, a former Republican governor of Indiana, co-chairs the board with Raimondo.

The group’s rollout last week generated a blitz of news coverage, including interviews with Raimondo. RAISE US seeks to back and connect with other efforts rather than duplicate them. That work will stretch across an employer coalition, a policy lab, and education and training partners. Initial state partnerships will be with Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah.

“RAISE US will design and pilot new corporate incentives to retrain and redeploy workers, new approaches to support people through job transitions, and new training models tied to changing employer demand,” said a statement from the Rockefeller Foundation, a partner philanthropy.

Dislocated Workers: The U.S. Department of Labor last week announced the availability of $50M in training grants focused on AI-driven economic transformation, with the money drawn from a reserve under the WIOA program.

The awards, ranging from $2M to $8M, will be aimed at innovative models for the rapid reskilling and reemployment of dislocated workers. They also will seek to help fill talent gaps in manufacturing, aerospace, energy production, and construction.

The new allocation of reserve funds is a drop in the bucket. But the move is noteworthy in part because the Labor Department dropped its typical requirement that the qualifying event be a documented mass layoff or facility closure, instead designating AI-driven transformation itself as the triggering event.

The White House generally has dismissed the risk of AI-driven job displacement. But the department’s guidance says the qualifying event for these awards “is the broad and accelerating economic transformation driven by AI and the immediate needs related to America’s economic resurgence.”

More Federal Funding News

This week, the federal grants database published the awards to the five organizations that will manage $145M in new pay-for-performance funding for apprenticeship:

• Florida Department of Commerce at $40M

• Wireless Infrastructure Association at $30M

• Clark University at $27M

• ASE Education Foundation at $25M

• Jobs for the Future at $23M

The vast majority of the money must be passed through to employers and other direct sponsors of apprenticeship programs. The awardees were first reported by Nick Beadle in his newsletter, and the Labor Department has not yet made a public announcement with more details. 

Also this week, the department posted $85M in grants to 47 states and territories for apprenticeship expansion, or SAEF grants. Not every state applies for the grants, and this year, Alabama, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Washington did not receive funding.

Experiential Learning in High School

The U.S. faces a deep shortage of work-based learning opportunities. While 8.2M college students and recent grads wanted an internship in a recent year, just 3.6M completed one, according to an analysis by the Business–Higher Education Forum.

That gap is even bigger in K–12. One survey found that while 79% of high school students were interested in trying a work experience, only 2% completed an internship.

Brandon Busteed, CEO of Edconic, has been beating the drum on the internship gap. He argues that if U.S. employers offered five internships for every 100 jobs—they currently offer 2.2—there would be an internship for every student who wants one.

Stride’s K12 recently decided to walk the walk. The company, which provides tuition-free online public K–12 programs, began offering externships to its students. Participants got to learn what jobs look like inside the company while earning local school credits.

“We can plug in to students all over the country,” says Teri Cady, executive director of K12’s Destinations Career Academy of Colorado. “They are working on real work for the company.”

This academic year, more than 60 students participated in the work-based learning program. Stride plans to double those numbers.

Zander Leivestad, a K–12 student who lives in Inwood, West Virginia, had an externship with Stride. While he was nervous at first, Leivestad dived into the work and developed a tour guide tool.

The Kicker: “They showed my project to the CEO,” he says. “These types of opportunities matter for students now.”

Open Tabs

Testing Consolidation
ETS announced this week that it is acquiring the ACT, a move that comes as the testing organizations have increasingly focused on career readiness, modern talent systems, and growing their portfolios of skills-based assessments. Both ETS and ACT have seen the number of people taking their signature standardized tests, including the GRE General Test and the ACT, drop significantly over the past decade.

Accountability Rule
The U.S. Department of Education finalized a new wage test for higher education that requires a majority of completers of undergraduate programs to earn more than a typical high school graduate in that state. The final regs include tweaks relating to income from tips and to allow failing programs to remain eligible for Pell Grants if they drop federal loans. Programs in cosmetology and allied health had appeared most likely to struggle to meet the wage threshold.

AI and Jobs
The new California AI-Unemployment Tracker provides early signs of possible AI-induced job loss. The tool from the California Policy Lab, which was developed with the California Employment Development Department, analyzes unemployment insurance claims combined with measures of occupational AI exposure. The near-real-time data will be updated monthly and includes detailed breakdowns by age, education, industry, and other characteristics.

Industry Hub
Dallas College has unveiled plans and selected a developer for its $500M downtown campus expansion, reports Milla Surjadi for The Dallas Morning News. The 800K-square-foot project, which is backed by a $1.1B bond approved by voters in 2019, will include an industry hub focused on connections to high-demand careers. The college says the campus will anchor a connected urban corridor linking culture, commerce, transit, and education.

Apprenticeship Intermediaries
Virginia launched a statewide apprenticeship intermediary network with backing from Strada Education Foundation. The network seeks to strengthen and grow intermediary organizations—community colleges, training providers, industry associations, and workforce boards—that recruit employers, stand up programs, and guide apprentices through training. Matching intermediaries with employers will be part of the network’s focus.

Job Moves
Keith Sonderling has been nominated by President Trump to be the U.S. labor secretary. Sonderling has been in the role in an acting capacity since April, when Lori Chavez-DeRemer stepped down amid a misconduct probe. Sonderling was commissioner of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2020 until 2024.

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