Business Model
Our primary story is about providing students with clear indications of what their paths through higher education look like, what levels of knowledge and skills will qualify them for degree awards, and what their degrees mean. These are road signs that are sorely lacking now. Student success does not mean merely that you have been awarded a degree, but that you have learned something substantial along the way and that the world knows what you have learned, what skills you have mastered, and that you have the momentum to meet the rising knowledge content of the global economy. This public evidence does not derive from administering a test to a sample of students to prove that an institution adds value to something that, at best, is indirectly taught. If your discipline, institution, and system have all established and publicly promulgated clear and discrete criteria for learning and thresholds of performance, that evidence, in itself, creates a powerful endorsement. When backed by a Diploma Supplement, you have a public warrantee.
For U.S. public policymakers, the primary message to students translates into worrying less about how many pieces of paper we pass out, how many credits qualify someone for those pieces of paper, and how long it takes a highly mobile student population to arrive in a graduation line, and more about the knowledge, the application of knowledge, the information identification and retrieval skills, and the degree of learning autonomy students acquire and take with them into economic and community life. That's something for U.S. policy makers and academic leaders of the "get-it-over-with-and-get-it-over-with-fast" school (who then complain about what graduates don't know or can't do, and for whom persisting part-time students are a paradoxical anathema), should think very seriously about.