Lifetime Learning

Two very different university powerhouses make big bets on working learners—Georgia Tech with a new College of Lifetime Learning, and Western Governors University with apprenticeship degrees as part of a broader push on work-based learning. Also, a podcast episode on measuring AI’s impacts.

Competing Against Nothing

Higher education has struggled to adequately reach working learners—people with jobs and family responsibilities who don’t have time or money to earn a four-year degree. But the industry is resilient, and it usually figures out how to better serve students and to tap big markets.

During the last week, two trendsetter universities made big bets on this group of potential students:

• Georgia Institute of Technology rolled out the College of Lifetime Learning as the cornerstone of its goal to double the number of degrees granted and nondegree learners reached by 2030. The research powerhouse cited shifting workforce demands in creating its first new college since the launch of the College of Computing in 1990.

• Western Governors University acquired Craft Education to power an ambitious move into apprenticeship degrees. The mega-university created a new academic unit as it expands into work-based learning, and it will tap the Craft platform to link on-the-job training with its competency-based degrees.

The forays by two very different institutions send a clear signal that four-year universities are getting more serious about the many millions of U.S. workers who lack a bachelor’s degree but are interested in pursuing more education and training.

“This market is enormous,” says Courtney Hills McBeth, WGU’s chief academic officer and provost. “No one institution can meet the demand.”

Rather than being a threat to higher education, promising alternatives to traditional college are likely to be absorbed by colleges and universities.

Arizona State University has consistently set the bar for what’s possible. The research university has become a player in dual enrollment and preparing technicians for the semiconductor industry, among many other successful moves to open its doors to a broader range of students. 

ASU increasingly is joined by other nimble universities, including Northeastern University, with its expanding global system and best-in-class co-op program. Promising recent moves range from Missouri State University’s apprenticeship push to experiments with microcredentials by the University of Texas System and lifelong learning at the University of Virginia.

Western Governors University built its huge online enrollment with low-cost programs that fit the lives of working learners, as did the enormously successful Southern New Hampshire University. WGU also has been deliberative and strategic with its bets. It took a pass on an aggressive form of competency-based learning and has been cautious with microcredentials while sticking to a narrow range of career-aligned degree programs in teaching, healthcare, business, and IT.

Apprenticeship degrees will be part of the next chapter of the 27-year-old WGU, McBeth says. “This is the model of the future.”

Complacency isn’t a choice, she says, pointing to the “rising tsunami of indifference” among Americans who increasingly question the value of college. “We have to be doing this because there are a lot of people opting out,” says McBeth. “We’re competing against nothing.”

Game Changer for Continuing Ed: Georgia Tech’s endorsement of lifetime learning is unusually deep—the creation of a new college with a distinct identity that can hire tenured faculty members and issue degrees. Over the last five years, enrollment in the institute’s nondegree programs has jumped to 71K students, up from 29K. The College of Lifetime Learning seeks to propel that growth further, with a goal of serving 114K learners by 2030.

The new college is a game changer for Georgia Tech and for continuing and extended education more broadly, says Rovy Branon, vice provost for the University of Washington’s Continuum College.

“It’s part of the central strategic plan of the institution,” Branon says. “This is not a fly-by-night institution trying to scale. This is Georgia Tech.”

The research component of the new college will be particularly valuable for continuing education, which Branon says deserves its own academic field, in part to study applications of technology. Likewise, he’s confident that Georgia Tech will be able to reach substantial numbers of underserved students with affordable, high-quality learning options.

“We cannot have people spending $40K three times across their careers to retool,” says Branon, who has overseen substantial growth at Continuum.

MOOC Breakthrough: Georgia Tech has been moving in this direction for a long time.

The university’s launch of a $7K online master’s degree in computer science a decade ago, during the early MOOC craze, was hailed as a breakthrough for online learning and expanding access to name-brand universities. A few years later, Georgia Tech laid out an expansive vision for its future scope as an institution of lifetime learning.

“The forces reshaping the increasingly automated and diverse world of the current industrial revolution require bold thinking the Georgia Tech of today,” concluded the 2018 report.

That vision has come into focus with the new college, which aims to serve students in K-12 schools as well as career changers and traditional-aged college students. Lilah Burke, with reporting for Work Shift, digs into what the College of Lifetime Learning means for Georgia Tech, and for higher education more broadly. 

Kemi Jona, UVa.’s vice provost for online learning and digital innovation, told Burke that the move legitimizes the idea of a lifetime learner as a student of higher education. 

The Kicker: “This is not just a hobby,” he says.

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Clearing Barriers to Apprenticeship Degrees

Craft Education is a data science platform co-founded by the creators of Reach University, an upstart nonprofit that has made rapid strides in introducing the concept of apprenticeship degrees in this country.

Reach has focused on teacher education, with job-embedded apprenticeships aimed at K-12 school employees who aren’t teachers. Reach recently created the National Center for the Apprenticeship Degree to share its playbook. The center now works with universities, community colleges, and organizations like CommonSpirit Health and Michigan’s Talent Together.

The strategy is about turning the workplace into a campus, says Joe Edelheit Ross, who co-founded Reach and Craft. Ross was in England, where the center and the National Conference of State Legislatures were hosting a group of Maryland lawmakers to help them get an in-depth look at British and German apprenticeship degree models.

“We are seeing a market transition,” Ross says. (Click over to Work Shift to read more from Ross on apprenticeship degrees.)

Craft is now a stand-alone nonprofit under the WGU umbrella. The platform will continue its work with 20 university partners as well as the nonprofit mega-university.

“They are one of our partners, just like all the others,” says Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, a labor economist and former teacher who co-founded Craft and helped lead Reach before moving over to WGU.

Apprenticeship degrees have bipartisan backers and approval for use in teaching programs across 40 states. Yet apprentices have signed on in just 10 or so states. The primary barrier, Dwinal-Palisch says, is high-stakes data reporting requirements for federally registered apprenticeships and for accrediting agencies in higher education—two systems that are difficult to navigate in isolation, let alone jointly.

“Everyone gets stuck right here,” she says. “The data complexity is so challenging.”

The acquisition of Craft by WGU reflects increasing traction for the apprenticeship degree model, says John Colborn, executive director of Apprenticeships for America. As well as teacher education, the approach can work across occupations as diverse as business services, healthcare, and engineering, he says. Its attractions include a more relevant curriculum, employer support, and an earn-and-learn path for students.

“These arrangements require schools to rethink their roles,” Colborn says. “But we are optimistic that there is a lot of growth potential here.”

Craft will continue to offer its services to ed-tech companies, workforce boards, and apprenticeship intermediaries, as well as to universities, says WGU’s McBeth. The university’s strategy with apprenticeship degrees will begin with teachers, with plans to expand into healthcare as well as tech and IT.

“WGU already has massive scale with clinical placements in healthcare and education,” McBeth says. “We’ve got one of the best starts in scaling work-based pathways.”

The addition of Craft’s capabilities with data and technology turbocharges the university’s potential with apprenticeships, she says, predicting that more people will seek out these opportunities and the clear sight line they offer to a good job. And the university—which issued 50K degrees last year—is thinking big in its next phase, which McBeth dubs WGU 2.0.

The university anticipates that it will impact 1M learners during the next decade, she says, “directly through our student enrollment and indirectly through Craft Education advancing work-based models in the broader higher-ed ecosystem.”

Open Tabs

Experiential Learning
An estimated 8.2M U.S. learners wanted to intern in 2023, but only 3.6M completed an undergraduate internship, according to the Business–Higher Education Forum. Just 2.5M of those learners had a quality internship marked by clarity, oversight, and skill development. This market gap is problematic for both the equitable access to internships for learners and for employers that need entry-level talent with skills and experience.

AI and Jobs
A quarter of firms in the New York/New Jersey service sector reported using AI to help produce goods or services in the past six months, as did 16% of manufacturers, according to surveys from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Widely cited uses were marketing or advertising, business analytics, and customer service. Most firms that expect to use the technology plan to retrain their workforces, with few expecting head-count reductions.

Healthcare Shortages
Just 13 states are expected to meet their projected demand for nursing assistants over the next four years amid a national shortage of 73K nursing assistants, according to Mercer, a consulting company. Mercer also projected a nationwide shortage of nurse practitioners, with acute shortfalls for California, New York, and Texas. However, the report found strong pipelines of registered nurses and home health and personal care aides.

Cyber Sprint
In an attempt to help fill roughly 500K open U.S. cyber jobs, the White House rolled out a recruiting, hiring, and engagement sprint to connect Americans with good-paying, meaningful jobs in cyber, tech, and AI. The strategy includes working to remove unnecessary degree requirements and to move toward a skills-based approach, as well as expanded work-based learning opportunities, including registered apprenticeships.

Trauma and Workforce Development
Roughly 80% of people served by workforce development programs are survivors of trauma, according to a report from InsideTrack and the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce. The nonprofits argue that recognizing the prevalence of trauma, its root causes, and its downstream effects helps the building of supportive systems in workforce development and education systems. The paper features a framework for a trauma-informed approach.

Job Moves
Daniel Greenstein, who in October will step down as chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, will join the higher education practice of Baker Tilly, an advisory, tax, and assurance firm.

Alison Griffin has been named the inaugural senior fellow of Colorado Mountain College’s Isaacson School for Communication, Arts, and Media. Griffin is a senior advisor for Whiteboard Advisors, where she recently was a senior vice president.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what I missed? —PF