“College Unbound” from the Traditional Model

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College Unbound

Transcript

Jeff Selingo:

I'm Jeff Selingo.

Michael Horn:

And I'm Michael Horn.

Sponsor:

This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

Jeff Selingo:

As many of our listeners know, the majority of today's college students are what we used to call non-traditional, and many of them are working adults. Some of these individuals never went to college after high school. Many of them attempted college but never finished. More than 39 million American adults have some college credit and no degree, a number that has been on the rise in recent years. More than a decade ago, some of these adults started to be attracted to a program that was started in 2009 called College Unbound. College Unbound was an innovative learning program that included a student-driven curriculum, learning communities, project-based learning and hybrid classes, and here's Adam Bush, one of College Unbound's co-founders and now it's second president.

Adam Bush:

We started College Unbound as an institutional agitator. We didn't seek to be a college at that time in 2009. We wanted to be a higher education partner with a theory of change that recognized the potential of networked knowledge to grow and sustain change and intervention in higher ed. So we had a founding belief then that like, that college could be moved from within. In that model, CU supported, recruited and supported students into cohorts within Roger Williams University, Southern New Hampshire University, Charter Oak State College, and sought to similar, maybe even to the Posse program like push for ways for folks to navigate those institutions and for us to change those institutions.

Jeff Selingo:

Changing legacy institutions, even those with innovation in their DNA is difficult however, especially if you want to be innovative at scale. And so College Unbound decided to do something that is probably even more difficult in a highly regulated industry like higher ed, to become its own accredited institution. In 2020, College Unbound became the 13th accredited college in Rhode Island, but it's really like no other. For one, it offers just one degree, a Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Leadership and Change that qualifies graduates for a variety of occupations.

Adam Bush:

There's a deep theory and practice to that major and there's three curricular components that students can currently access, navigating that degree. One is they're all a part of a semester long, what we call the World & Workplace Lab, a three credit cohort seminar that's a mix between high school homeroom meets undergraduate academic advising meets your dissertation committee, meets a town hall meeting, meets your kitchen table. There's always food there, there's always childcare there. It's a space to gather and workshop projects. There's a deep curriculum to it and you're a part of it every semester with the same group of students as you're navigating your degree. Now there's a prescribed curriculum in the first semester you're stepping into, but then your lab faculty, as we call it, and your group of students know one another better than anyone else. And so really co-design the curriculum for any future semester that comes out of that.

Jeff Selingo:

One reason College Unbound's model is attractive to adults is that it really maximizes the amounts of credits students can transfer from other institutions and it also leans into giving its students college credit through its assessments of their prior learning. The result, their average time to a bachelor's degree is about two and a half years. Anything that doesn't last four years isn't residential, isn't full-time, isn't all in person seems odd to many in higher ed and not always real to prospective students. That's why accreditation was so critical to College Unbound and in a peer review process where your accreditors are other institutions with those traditional models, it's hard for new players to break through.

Adam Bush:

It's meant to be hard. You're meant to get your act in gear to be an accredited college. It's a peer review process too. And so we found deep care from the staff of NECHE, but also deep understanding from representatives from peer institutions that have come to learn about us, make sure that what we're writing about the program matches what's happening on the ground. It also, it's worked. I mean there are times for sure where I've cursed the heavens of things that were really hard to do and figure out, but we become a better, stronger college. Absolutely, 100%.

Jeff Selingo:

But Adam also talked to us about other partners that have been involved in the accreditation process beyond its regional accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education or NECHE, he calls it NECHE Plus.

Adam Bush:

It's really, really important that we think about other community-based organizations, our students as our community of partners in this work, our alumni in it, our municipalities in which we're deeply embedded within. When we think about those sectors of public health or public education or public libraries that we're working across the country within and cross cohorts and cities, how do we make sure leaders in those spaces are helping us make sure our program's doing what it should be doing in the world?

Jeff Selingo:

In recent years, College Unbound has sought to also serve individuals who are in prisons and in the last couple of years they've graduated the first students who were incarcerated in Rhode Island since the US government once again allowed Pell Grants for prisoners.

Jose:

We did graduate the first person with a bachelor's degree last year. This year we added an additional six. This year going forward, we're going to probably add another five to six so that that population of folks who are coming or going to enter society again at some point now with a bachelor's. What I can say about that being in that space and folks needing something to do, I think it came out of that. That's the reason that College Unbound took the initiative to be within that space because the need was there and folks wanted it.

Jeff Selingo:

That was Jose Rodriguez, he's the assistant vice president for community and belonging at College Unbound, where he previously served as their director of admissions and recruitment. Among the programs he oversees is college Unbound's prison education program and he says they've worked hard to make sure that the program for prisoners isn't different from that for any other student.

Jose:

It doesn't differ just because of location. So just because you're a student at the Adult Correctional Institution here in Rhode Island doesn't mean that your experience should be any different than a person who say walked in from out of the street and applied to become a student. So trying to really mirror those experiences from the simplest things to the application process to how we interview folks to make sure that they're college ready and really start to map out that plan of so you get a degree, what's next?

Jeff Selingo:

And the early returns from that decision appear positive as students are getting to work on projects that are meaningful to them and then see the direct impact from that work.

Jose:

I think that students are passionate about what they want to pursue and that instantly comes out in their ideas. And I think that it begins with a conversation like, Hey, is this a project that I could take on? And we actually have some real examples of folks who started a project on the inside, which just written down, piece of paper and then were released and actually started to do their project and created a 501(c)(3) and are actually putting in the work in the same way that they wrote it out for that initial project. The one challenge that I always try to raise is that we want to have folks feel liberated by their decision to take on any particular project, but we also have to be mindful about not putting them in danger to get, say a booking or get themselves in trouble within the carceral system because they made a decision or they talked about a particular aspect of something that may not necessarily favor the Department of Corrections.

Jeff Selingo:

The way College Unbound works with its students who are in prisons also reflects perhaps a broader change in how society thinks about the educations of these individuals and what skills they should learn.

Jose:

I think the biggest takeaway for me and for most of the students that are coming back into society from corrections is that they are more than just a convicted felon. There was a really big push between the 90s and now to get people into technical type and give folks technical type skills, almost erasing their ability to be intellectuals. So this is a really strong way to push back on that just because I'm a convicted felon does not mean that I no longer can use my mind. So I think that colleges also need to recognize that, that although an individual may be incarcerated, doesn't take away from their intelligence. And I think that often, at least my experience has been that people see you as being formally incarcerated or currently incarcerated and diminish your ability to use intellect.

Adam Bush:

When we take seriously our students as colleagues, wherever they are and students as learners taking part in daily knowledge making, we need to lift that up and not just value that experience, but the collective work of knowledge making together of study together.

Jeff Selingo:

One of the questions we were curious about was scale, not just for those it serves in prisons, but more broadly, how big can or should College Unbound get? Because its design is far different from the online programs of the mega universities for example.

Adam Bush:

We're not looking to buy buildings. We're looking to recognize learning where it happens in spaces like public libraries, in conference rooms and public parks across folks' kitchen tables, and how do we as a college have the infrastructure to bring people together to have that be an accredited path towards a bachelor's degree? Learning's been happening long, long before there were institutions of learning, and so it's we who have to adapt to make sure that we are recognizing that and helping it happen differently in ways that are both honoring and supportive. I used the language of place and purpose a little bit earlier in this conversation. I think about those as dual pads or place, purpose, and partnership is like three tracks of how we want to think about growing the college. We want to step into certainly cities so that there's a critical mass of cohorts that are tackling change and sustainability and care in a city like what we're doing in Philadelphia or in Providence, Rhode Island right now. In Philadelphia, there's 11 cohorts that are taking part in Providence. It's 35.

Jose:

35 or so yeah.

Adam Bush:

35. I want to think about purpose as these national threads where we have seven cohorts in Philadelphia as an example of teacher assistants working with the Philadelphia Public School District to move into get their bachelor's and get certification to be classroom-based teachers, but we also have those TA to BA programs in Providence, and so connecting those means you're doing also national movement building. We had a cohort of employees of housing authorities in Chicago and Philadelphia who were in a cohort together and they were talking about very local stuff. They were also talking about the need for there to be a deep commitment to the public and housing as a human right. One of those graduates who graduate in the Philly Housing Authority cohort then got a promotion and a job in the Wilmington Housing Authority in Delaware and started a College [inaudible 00:11:57] cohort there. There's a organic community organizing vision of what this growth is.

Jeff Selingo:

And one of the other ways College Unbound will scale over time is in the impact it has had on family members of its graduates, whether those members are in prison or not.

Jose:

I think that's also highlighted in our graduation when the family members of the individuals who graduated on the inside actually came to graduation to receive the degree, and it's such a remarkable thing to see them be part of the community and almost instantly also want to join CU like, Hey, my partner, my brother, my aunt, my uncle did this. Maybe it's time for me to do it too. So it actually works both ways and that folks on the inside are motivating folks on the outside to pursue education and vice versa.

Jeff Selingo:

And we'll be right back on Future U. This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low-income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. Ascendium believes that system level change and a student-centric approach are important for our nation's efforts to boost post-secondary education and workforce training opportunities. That's why their philanthropy aims to remove systemic barriers faced by these learners, specifically first-generation students, incarcerated adults, veterans, students of color, adult learners, and rural community members. For more information, visit ascendiumphilanthropy.org

And welcome back to Future U. So Michael, I want to start our discussion with the model of College Unbound because as Adam told us, it's one degree, one major. The curriculum is really designed to help adults do what they want to do in the world as he described it with some scaffolding around it. And I find it an interesting model to serve adult students because it truly is unbound from the traditional model. So I wonder why other legacy schools that are really trying to reach adult students don't try to replicate parts of it.

I recall when Future U was at The Chronicle of Higher Education Festival in 2022, the adult student who joined our panel from Morgan State University, she talked about the importance of the university having an entire division devoted to adult learners. And if adults are the siren song of higher ed, as I always call them, right? This segment of students that so many institutions think will save their enrollment troubles, yet they remain chronically underserved in a market where there are thousands of institutions. So I just keep coming back to this. Why aren't more copying parts of this College Unbound model, whether it's prior learning or cohort learning with these wraparound services? Why not?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, it's a puzzling question, Jeff. And look, every place has its own reasons I'm sure, but I guess the two things that occur to me are, one, I think the departmental structure within higher ed really gets in the way of this. And what I mean is we tend to think of universities is very proprietary. We do everything and therefore we can rethink anything sorts of places. But as you know, departments are actually very modular sort of fixed units within a campus that are largely designed for the purpose of the faculty inside of those departments for them to publish on the things that they're interested in, for them to get tenure, for them to converse with other scholars at their areas, on and on and on. And the older an institution is, right, the more calcified or stuck in place, if you will, those departments are, and when you look at what College Unbound has done, it basically doesn't have any departments. By just having one major and everything built around the student, it isn't optimized for the faculty. It's optimized literally for what the student wants to do.

That's a total flip in orientation structure, intent of a faculty even joining a university. And so my guess is, Jeff, that that's a big flip. That's a little bit too far for most institutions. Even you might say, well, why can't a business school do this? Right. They're just offering a business degree. But even within business schools, they have org behavior and leadership, they have marketing, they have technical operations management, they have all these departments that calcify what they're able to rethink about the fundamental operation itself. And I think it goes to the second thing, which is universities are very faculty focused around the purpose. It's what Lyn Casudo told us on a past episode, I teach you about my book that I'm about to write or that I wrote a few years ago. And what College Unbound again does is flip that narrative around one of your favorite topics, purpose, and they center a student's purpose right in the course design and the program itself.

So this isn't, I think a lot of times when universities think about purpose and belonging, they're like, okay, we're going to stand up a student success team, right, that thinks about this, but this is actually interwoven into the faculty design itself and everything emanates from that point. And I guess I just wonder, maybe it's a bridge too far for a college or university to start with that really blank slate structure that is so built around the student at College Unbound. But I guess you asked the question, so I'm curious, which parts of the model are most interesting to you and which parts would you love to see replicated?

Jeff Selingo:

So Michael, I really like this idea of the Workplace & World Lab in which students enroll every semester right from the beginning. It's the in-person piece of the hybrid model of College Unbound, and it's where faculty weave together the academic integration and personalized learning with each student. And as Adam described it, it's where a high school homeroom meets undergraduate academic advising meets your dissertation committee, meets a town hall meeting, meets the kitchen table, and as he said, critical for adults, there's always food there, there's always childcare there. And the reason I like this is that I think for adult students who don't have a residential experience like a traditional undergrad where there are daily routines and academic schedule of classes, the dining hall, the dorm room, meeting with clubs, et cetera, and adult students have so many other things going on in their life, and this gives them an anchor.

It's something not only to look forward to, but another reason I like it is that it integrates their learning. I find so much of the traditional college experience for students to be really disconnected. They don't know what they're learning and why they're learning it in the moment. They don't know how something they learned in the second semester of college connects to something they learned in the fourth semester. They go on internships or study abroad, but they don't consider beforehand what they want out of the experience or they don't reflect much on it after they return. And as we know, learning happens everywhere. It just doesn't happen in a college classroom. And I think what College Unbound is doing is it's recognizing that. I think it's really tough to wrap our head around this from the outside. So in some ways, I was surprised that after years of partnering with accredited institutions, College Unbound decided to seek accreditation itself.

And Michael, what was interesting is for the second time this season, we heard from one of our guests in an earlier episode, it was Mallory at Reach U and now it's Adam at College Unbound. These were both non-traditional models that got accredited, and both of them described it as a positive process. Now maybe it's because they came out on the other end with a positive outcome, but as you know, new institutions usually don't speak about how good the process is to become accredited. Now, Adam talked about this accreditation plus model, and I'm wondering, I was kind of interested in that and what might that look like to you?

Michael Horn:

Yeah, I was interested in it as well, Jeff. And what I think he was saying obviously was it's a series of other community organizations that may not be accreditors themselves giving some sort of seal of approval or stamp, right, to what the college or university says it does. And I guess I have two thoughts out of that. In some ways that vision is not too different from what maybe a decade ago Udacity was thinking of doing, which was to have businesses come together, and I think the Chamber of Commerce had a short-lived proposal around this as well, having businesses to come together and effectively accredit a program as providing the right skills for what a particular industry needed at the time.

The other way I thought about it though, Jeff was as you know, I've had this pet project forever of audited standards for the value that a college claims it gives its graduates. And in that, I guess I could see that being very overlapping or complimentary to what Adam just described because it would be a way of saying, Hey, this is the value. This is what we purport to do for students. A liberal arts college can make it about something other than job placement for example. A college like College Unbound could make it around the purpose and fulfillment of that and the change maybe that its graduates make in the world. And then there would be an auditor on the other side that along some accepted standards would say, Hey, do the students fulfill that purpose when they in fact graduate and just give more data, more transparency to students so that they can find the experience that they're looking for and have confidence that it's going to actually result in the outcome that they want. And so that sort of an accreditation plus model is really interesting to me as well.

That said, I want to pivot Jeff, because you and I both knew of College Unbound before this episode, but one reason we were drawn to feature them now at this point at Future U is because as we talked about last season, the Pell Grant was reinstated in July for learners who've been incarcerated. And College Unbound graduated its first group of students who were incarcerated last May. Six students got their bachelor's degree. And although the reinstatement of Pell toward that end was an important step, as we outlined in that episode last year, more than 750,000 people in state and federal prisons in the United States are likely eligible now to apply for federal funds. So there's a long way to go when you see it from that perspective.

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, that's right, Michael. And since last season's episode, I've been kind of curious about what supports are needed at colleges and universities and then how those supports can be scaled. And a big one I found is housing. Traditional housing for formerly incarcerated people tends to be in neighborhoods that aren't close to campuses, and they sometimes come with restrictions that basically make it impossible to get to class. Or maybe for example, they can't use electronic devices, which they would need for online classes. And the colleges that run education programs in prisons, they tend to use graduate student housing or they find landlords that are willing to take these students. But this is a really tough problem to solve if you're an institution that wants to serve this population.

The second one is one that we discussed last season, and that is reentry support services with employers willing to work with students who were formerly incarcerated. And since colleges are increasingly being judged on the employment outcomes of the graduates, then Second Chance Pell needs more career services for them given the hurdles they face. And finally, there's one that relates to the first one, and that's a Pell Grant covers tuition, but you need more to succeed in college than just your tuition being covered. These are students who have a lot of basic housing and food needs as well as other needs from computers to textbooks. But Michael, I also want to bring up one other point because last season after our episode aired on Second Chance Pell, I got some notes from listeners who said that of all the funding issues facing higher ed right now, why is Congress worried about incarcerated individuals? I thought it was a fair point, but research demonstrates that people who obtain their high school equivalencies while in prison increase their earnings by 24 to 29% within the first year of release.

And that's important to go on and get a college degree. And then those who participate in correctional education programs are 13% less likely to recidivate than those who do not. But I also think this brings up a larger theme for me that ties together several episodes over the past year, and I think about the demographic cliff coming for higher ed in the middle of this decade with 18 year olds. And that has been well-documented, right? We've talked a lot about it on this show. We've also talked about the decline in graduate studies, especially for online professional degrees, which have been a cash cow for universities. We've talked about the flat lining of international students at some universities, but again, that doesn't mean there aren't potential students out there. Hell, there's a population of 39 million or so that have some college credit, but no degree. And I'll never forget when we had Fernando Bleichmar on from Academic Partnerships, he told us earlier this season that demand in higher ed is not always aligned with supply.

And so we're oversupplied with traditional residential colleges for 18 year olds while everyone else is begging for education. And this is where the College Unbound model is really interesting here, but like ASU or WGU or Southern New Hampshire online or Reach University, they all just seem like one-offs to me. And in the grand scheme of things, even though each of them are serving pretty large numbers, they're pretty small numbers in the grand scheme of things. And it's interesting when Michael Crow, as you know, I'm a special advisor at Arizona State University, and sometimes the president there, Michael Crow, talks about serving a million students someday and kind of people laugh at him, but that's a small percentage of the 39 million adults just in the US alone who have some college credit and no degree.

And it really seems to me in any other market, this would've been solved by now. If an airline saw that demand for leisure travelers who don't want to pay a lot of money to go to Florida in the winter, if they saw that demand for that market, somebody would fill it. Right. Insurance, cell phones, groceries, dining out, retail, all these markets are segmented. There is somebody or multiple people serving all of those markets because they see market demand. But in higher ed, we have all these segments. We have thousands of institutions serving one of them, and we have very few institutions serving all the other segments which are much larger. Why doesn't higher ed follow these other industries?

Michael Horn:

Great questions. I love the point, Scott, Paul Sypher and Paul Leblanc always say, right, we don't see competition. There's millions of people we are not serving because those, just take Arizona State, Western Governors, and Southern New Hampshire, I think they're serving just a little over 500,000 students. So it's not small. Let's not,-

Jeff Selingo:

Yeah, but it's millions.

Michael Horn:

But it's not the 39 million plus. Right. And so I love the point. I think it raises the question that you may not want to hear but, which is that capital that enables scale is capital that is seeking a return on investment. And that means for-profits. And as we know for-profits have not been loved or welcomed and are being stamped out in higher education. I think not because they're inherently bad, but because we haven't aligned incentives around outcomes, we've aligned incentives around enrollments and got a lot of crummy behavior because that capital, all it cares about Jeff, is growth. Great if you want scale and fill the problem, not great if you actually want outcomes for students. And so we have to line those things up. But I think it's interesting. The reason why all the capital has gone to MOOCs and bootcamps and all these other things is because people do see the opportunity. They just don't see it through traditional higher ed given the way that sector works.

And so that's the challenge I think we're left with. And your observation is correct I think at the end of the day. So I think that's a great place for me to have the last word and for us to continue the conversation as we go forward. But I'm tremendously excited that we got to dig into College Unbound and that Ascendium helped bring them on to raise this conversation once again around the education of students who have been incarcerated in higher education. And as a reminder, if you want to follow more of what's going on with the Future U Podcast, jump on the web at futureupodcast.com or follow us on the social channels at Future U Podcast. Or if you want to send Jeff more emails about this episode, check him out @jselingo on social media, or of course his website, Jeff Selingo, and subscribe to his newsletter next. And I'm on Michael B. Horn on all the various social channels as well. And until then, we look forward to hearing from you and we'll see you next time.