Degree Completion: The New Center

Thirty-seven years ago, Charter Oak State College was created to help adults return to college and finish their degrees. The founding idea of the College was that a degree represented a set of learning outcomes and abilities—like being able to write an argumentative essay or to analyze a set of data—and there are a variety of ways to demonstrate those competencies. So the College validated learning using formal tests, portfolios, courses from other accredited colleges and even learning that occurred at work.

Colleges like Charter Oak that specialized in degree completion -- and there were only three such institutions at the time -- were called college credit aggregators.

Today, America is at the threshold of a post-secondary education revolution. It is becoming clear that the global economy requires its workforce to attain skills and learning beyond high school. That is true for the plumber, the computer programmer, the financial analyst. It is true for everyone. If America wants to keep up with its competitor nations, it must produce one million more adults with bachelor's degrees each year for the next 20 years. In other words, Charter Oak would be required to increase its graduate output by about 1600%. Clearly, that is not likely.

So the Lumina Foundation -- an organization dedicated to helping people achieve their potential through success in education beyond high school -- has funded a series of proposals across the higher education landscape that will try to move degree completion from a singular challenge involving one student and one special institution to an assembly line. One funded initiative involves the state of Minnesota which maintains a database of 150,000 Minnesota residents with some college credit but no degree. The initiative was funded by Lumina to move as many of these people as possible into the degreed column.

I tell you all this as a way of pointing out that Charter Oak is no longer an outlier with an unusual or esoteric mission. Adult degree completion has become the new center. It is an absolutely critical part of the higher education landscape as America works to develop all of its intellectual talent. In effect, we have to find ways to support everyone's learning. We cannot afford to waste a single human talent set.

So it will not surprise you that Charter Oak is growing. We just passed our all-time, highest enrollment, and we show no signs of slowing down. Nor should you be surprised that we are working diligently to improve our efficiencies so we can do our part in converting more "adults with some credits" into "adults with degrees."

What may surprise you is that we are not alone. All across the country, there is a new focus on serving adults who have earned college credits but not their degrees. We are proud to be an institution that has worked on this challenge every day in all of our 37 year history.

New Programming for the Nation's Workforce

As the economy continues to struggle, we are focusing more than ever on our new Vision statement, particularly one line of that goal:

Charter Oak State College: A community of online learners advancing the nation's workforce one graduate at a time.

We see our new master's degree in Organizational Effectiveness as an important part of meeting current workforce need. If the College is any indicator of what other businesses are doing, then improving organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and measures of that effectiveness are more important than ever. The content of this online master's degree, as well as its method of delivery, will provide exactly the preparation required for today's business leaders. We hope to launch our program in the Fall of 2011.

But there is more we are doing to advance the nation's workforce. We are also undertaking a substantive research effort to identify the skills and knowledge that the new economy will require in order to develop academic programs that will help working adults meet those emerging needs. As I have mentioned before, this recession is not just temporarily displacing workers, it is also permanently displacing workers. That means that new employment opportunities will require both new knowledge and new skills. We have collected data on where the emerging jobs will be, and we are now working to identify which of these possibilities will work for our adult, online students and which skills we should emphasize in our programs.

We will certainly build on the strong foundation that already exists, as we have growing programs in public safety, early childhood education, and healthcare administration. We will also develop programs that are module in nature. While the College's primary goal is degree attainment for adult learners, as we design new programs, beginning with the master's degree, we will build these in such a way that pieces of them can be used to build specific content and/or skill sets that are particularly relevant in the emerging workplace. For example, our master's degree will have a non-profit focus, and that group of courses could be taken as a unit to enrich individuals looking to improve their understanding of the non-profit sector.

We understand that the American workforce is challenged to improve itself to stay relevant in the post-recession workplace, and we are actively working to create programs that provide degrees and skills relevant to that economy. Not only are we seeking to provide flexible approaches to those new skills, but in the process we are participating in growing and sustaining a new economic workforce in America.