This Is How You Serve Those Who Serve

The College of Southern Maryland's Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) program is a model worth studying and replicating. CSM evaluates learning gained outside the traditional classroom, including military service, and converts it to academic credit when it aligns with course outcomes. For veterans and currently serving students, that means finishing an associate degree in a single year instead of two, and saving thousands of dollars.

This isn't a novel concept, but it's important to celebrate when implemented successfully by progressive colleges and universities. What CSM is doing differently is operationalizing CPL for military technical training and PME by deploying a defined program, staffing it, promoting it to incoming military-connected students, and awarding meaningful credit at scale. This distinction matters, because it's replicable. There's nothing about CSM's approach that requires expensive infrastructure, AI bots or a massive infusion of capital. What is does require is curricula crosswalks between ACE recommendations and existing courses, dedicated staff to run the evaluations, and institutional directives to award the credit.

This is exactly what mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities should be doing because they have the most to gain by replicating CSM's model at scale. So many of these universities market themselves as "military friendly" or claim to be a top choice for veteran and active-duty students, which is simply an egregious play for GI Bill and tuition-assistance dollars. Their stale and insulting marketing has nothing to do with being more accessible to this population of non-traditional students. Recruiting and admissions claims ring hollow if a returning service member has to start their degree from scratch. A real CPL pathway is a competitive advantage because it shortens time-to-degree, lowers cost, and gives an institution something concrete to point to instead of a stock photo of someone in uniform on the admissions page. Build that program and you can justly defend any claim to be a best or better place for those who serve.

I applaud CSM for doing the hard work of proving the model's efficacy. There's no reason what they're doing can't evolve into standard practice at any university where veterans are being recruited.

Yeah, That's A Stupid Question

"Why do we need a school or college of professional & continuing studies?" It's a question that visionless senior academic leaders are asking (yes, people in senior positions are actually asking this) as they flounder through the existential enrollment and budget crises battering private universities.

Traditional-age enrollment has been shrinking for years and the "enrollment cliff" has arrived. Mid-tier tuition-dependent privates that rely entirely on 18-year-old freshmen are competing for a shrinking pool of students against better-resourced flagships and lower-cost regional options. Expanding the pool of students and learners is what these privates should be doing, and this is exactly what schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies are built to do. These are the units creating low-cost, high-demand entry points into the university for working adults, career-changers, veterans, and students pursuing stackable credentials.

The truth is that asking the question in 2026 signals a leader who is looking at their institution's enrollment projections and budget deficits, and finding themselves immobilized by a rigor mortis-like inability to lead during crisis. Falling back on elitist tropes and uninspiring disciplinary territorialism demonstrates a striking lack of vision and woeful ignorance of the modern learner. But more troubling to me (and the universities at which the question is being asked) is that underneath the query is a boorish assumption that a school or college of professional & continuing studies isn't a "real" college. In the visionless leader's outdated mental hierarchy, colleges earn legitimacy through research output, doctoral programs, and faculty lines dedicated to scholarship. A unit built around working adults, alternative career-relevant credentials, and professional market-sensitive degrees doesn't fit that mold, so it gets foolishly filed under "not academic" rather than "differently academic."

This myopic and unfortunate framing has and continues to do real damage to the universities that allow it to persist. It ignores that schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies aren't designed or missioned to replicate a research school; they solve the more challenging problems of access, flexibility, and relevance for the learners traditional schools can't serve. Judging schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies by a research-intensive yardstick is utterly inane and disastrously disappointing.

And then, of course, there's the tiresome but significantly detrimental territorial instinct at play behind the question. This is the dim and senseless idea that professional degree programs rightfully belong to traditional schools and colleges, and that schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies offering these credentials are encroaching on someone else's turf. The ignorance embedded in this claim is shocking. Again, the traditional schools with fixed calendars, residential expectations, and research-driven faculty incentives are structurally unable to serve learners who need accessible, flexible and accelerated alternative credentials and market-applicable degrees. When a school or college of professional & continuing studies builds a professional master's or non-credit alternative credential for non-traditional students, it's serving a market segment that the School of Aspirational Networking was never designed to reach.

Mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities can't afford leadership that suddenly treat their schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies as unnecessary or irrelevant because they're now scrambling to fund a hack back-office administrative unit, led by consultants and unimaginative transactional robots, to market the university's online programs with trite and stale (and comically expensive) digital ads. These are the universities that no longer have the luxury of asking stupid questions and accepting uninformed answers. Be bold. Be smart. Suspend your elitist and biased opinions of professional & continuing education and do the better thing.

Pathways and Profit Centers

This Inside Higher Ed article on "redesigning the path to a degree" covers transfer consortiums, apprenticeship-to-credit programs, and colleges rethinking how trades and degrees fit together. In fairness, it's a forward-thinking compilation of tactics, but it's worth noting that versions of this pathway building have existed for years in schools and colleges of of continuing & professional studies.

Private universities (particularly mid-tier tuition-dependent privates) have generally been slow to see the opportunity here, but there are impressive exceptions. These are the privates that lead with their selectivity and their residential experience while supporting the units on their campuses that are built for non-traditional part-time students; providing flexibility, access, and meeting students where they are. A few examples to take note of are Northeastern University's College of Professional Studies, Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies, and Boston University's Metropolitan College.

There are a lot of mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities watching from the sidelines. The playbook isn't a secret and it's not new. Institutions like Northeastern, Georgetown, and Boston built durable PCE/O units and deliberately diversified their revenue streams by treating continuing and professional education as a core strategic asset rather than an afterthought. For mid-tier tuition-dependent privates facing enrollment pressure, thinner margins, and budget deficits, the smart move is not to deconstruct their PCE/O units because of institutional ignorance and myopic vision. Now is the critical moment for these privates to look closely at their peers and invest in their schools and colleges of professional and continuing education while there's still space in the market.

An Actual Growth Strategy

A few years back, the School of Social Work at Michigan built a cheap, six-course online certificate to serve as a low-stakes option for working adults to try graduate-level coursework without formally applying to a degree program. The unintended result was that almost seventy percent of the students who finished the certificate went on to enroll in the master's degree, on an accelerated timeline. Online enrollment went from ten students to more than a quarter of the entire program.

I'm intrigued by this story because it's a bit of an outlier. Successful examples of "freemium" models and certificate-to-degree pathways are exceedingly rare. The operating assumption with these strategies is that providing a low-cost entry point of entry that lets students try before committing leads to better academic performance and heightened interest in full degree programs. 

I think some mid-tier private universities could build something like this, but I suspect the effort would wind up with the wrong team running it. The instinct I've noted time and again at these universities is to ask the academic departments to build and run alternative pathways to the programs in their schools and colleges. But traditional academic departments aren't equipped for this kind of work. Curriculum changes move slowly through faculty committees. There's always some misguided concern that a market-priced credential will be seen as cheapening the full degree. And nobody in a tenure-track role is evaluated on teaching workforce-ready courses. So the certificate gets built, a web page gets launched, and the pathway grows over in a year or two.

What will work for these universities is putting an initiative like the one at UM in the hands of their professional and continuing education unit. That team knows how to set up to price offerings competitively, market to working adults, and treat a certificate as a legitimate product rather than a lesser version of a degree. Give that team one or two programs with strong job-market demand, let them build a real, credit-bearing certificate priced well below the full degree, and let strong performance in it factor directly into the admissions decision.

This isn't complicated. It really isn't.

When Continuing Ed Becomes Your Strategy

Modern Campus is an exceptional source of perspective and data. This post on lifelong learning could be prep reading for every private university leader who thinks they understand what continuing education is.

Modern Campus refers to the "Modern Learner" as someone who discovers, plans, engages and evolves across a 40-year relationship with an institution. I like the moniker because it harkens back to the "60 year curriculum" model and students PCE/O units have worked with for decades. Professional & continuing education has never had the luxury of a captive 18-year-old showing up every fall. It's always had operate outside the agrarian calendar, 16-week semesters and two 90 minutes in-person classes every week. 

The Modern Campus post identifies an uncomfortable reality for many mid-tier private universities that are considering or are actively deconstructing their PCE/O units under a naive (maybe ignorant) assumption that the unit's programs, services and operating culture can be subsumed and run out of a traditional school/college or some administrative back office. The traditional 18-to-22 pipeline isn't coming back. But increasing numbers of non-traditional learners ("modern learners") need accessible, stackable and immediately applicable training and credentials. The mid-tier privates that survive the next decade will be the universities that invest in and release for scale the PCE/O unit on their campus that's been doing this work, unglamorously and underfunded, for decades.

Another Reason To Love OER

For the 25+ years I've spent in higher education, open educational resources (OERs) have been presented as cost savers for students. There's an excellent AAC&U study that suggests in addition to saving money, students using OERs are persisting and succeeding at higher rates than other students.

What's most interesting about the study is it's suggestion that simply adopting OERs for courses doesn't result in persistence and success gains. The notable impact comes from the shifts in teaching practice, course design, and professional identity that accompany adoption. Faculty customizing materials to their specific course and students; tailoring content, rebuilding assessments, and aligning objectives rather than adopting an off-the-shelf open text. 

PCE/O units have quietly led OER work for years. They've run the infrastructure the AAC&U study says is required to launch comprehensive OER implementations. Their student populations are the most cost-sensitive, so affordability and completion metrics have never been separate goals. And many state and grant-funded OER initiatives are run through continuing-ed divisions simply because those units already have the coordination capacity to manage them across departments.

The AAC&U report lays out what it takes to replicate this success elsewhere: faculty need a seat at the table in selecting and building materials, compensation for the extra labor, realistic timelines (time was the least commonly reported form of support faculty received), and hands-on help from librarians and instructional designers to meet learning objectives and accessibility standards.

I'd love to see the OER research extended to include more institution-types, particularly mid-tier privates that lag woefully behind in OER adoption. Maybe include quasi-experimental designs in a future study, since faculty who adopt OER may simply be more motivated to begin with. And of course, it would be great to have some longitudinal data on how OER gains hold up after graduation and whether the faculty workload required to sustain them is realistic at scale.

The Humanities Need a Business Model, Not A Sales Pitch

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece again identifies the long-recognized gap between what a humanities major actually teaches and what students and parents think it leads to. It's the same important argument the humanities have had with the market for decades.

What continues to amaze me is how predictably and naively private universities respond to this issue each time it raises to a level requiring institutional attention. Faced with declining enrollments in humanities programs, most private universities (particularly tuition-dependent privates that stake their identity on a liberal arts mission) reach for the same failed corrective actions and pronounce to the world their commitment to protecting the canon, hoping their liberal arts degree requirements will smuggle enough students into humanities courses. 

I'm not aware of any private university where this strategy has ever worked, and I suspect it will be catastrophic under current enrollment and fiscal conditions. Doubling down on legacy majors while traditional enrollment and net tuition revenue collapse simply burns through valuable time and money private universities don't have. A better and more sustainable path is structural. Stop treating the major as the only unit of value and start building stackable, workforce-facing credentials out of humanities coursework. Consider:

Literature / English:

• Narrative & UX Writing Certificate — pulls from literary analysis and creative writing courses, aimed at tech, marketing, and product teams that need people who can write clear microcopy and user-facing content.
• Grant & Proposal Writing Credential — built from composition/rhetoric courses, targeted at nonprofit, arts-admin, and public-sector careers.
• Editorial & Publishing Certificate — drawing on literature and writing courses, oriented toward small presses, content agencies, and corporate communications.

History

• Archives & Cultural Heritage Management Certificate — pairs historical methods courses with practical training in digitization, metadata, and records management for museums, libraries, and corporate archives.
• Policy & Public History Credential — for students headed into local government, historical preservation boards, or think tanks; teaches how to translate historical research into policy briefs.

Philosophy:

• Applied Ethics & Compliance Certificate — distinct from a single gen-ed ethics course, this stacks logic, ethics, and decision-theory coursework for students entering health care, finance, or tech (AI ethics, data governance).
• Critical Reasoning & Argumentation Credential — marketed toward pre-law, consulting, and policy-adjacent students who need to demonstrate structured analytical thinking to employers.

Languages (French, Spanish, etc.):

• Medical/Legal Interpreting Certificate — language courses combined with domain-specific vocabulary and interpreting practicum, aimed directly at health-care and legal-services job markets.
• International Trade & Localization Credential — for language majors pairing coursework with business, aimed at import/export, logistics, or global marketing roles.

Religious Studies / Ethnic Studies:

• Cross-Cultural Competency Certificate — repackages coursework in religion, ethnic studies, and anthropology for HR, corporate training, and nonprofit sectors increasingly required to demonstrate cultural-competency training.
• Community & Faith-Based Organizing Credential — aimed at students heading into nonprofit management, social work, or public health outreach roles.

Sociology / Anthropology:

• User Research & Ethnographic Methods Certificate — trains students in qualitative research methods for UX research, market research, and product teams.
• Community Needs Assessment Credential — for students entering public health, social services, or urban planning.

Communication / Rhetoric:

• Crisis & Risk Communication Certificate — pulls from rhetoric and media studies courses, aimed at PR, public affairs, and corporate communications roles.
• Public Speaking & Executive Presence Credential — a short, stackable non-credit certificate that's easy to market to working adults through continuing-ed channels.

These are recommendations that have been made for years from schools and colleges of professional & continuing studies (I've made many of them myself). The most significant barrier I've found to implementing such an obvious strategy is that these workforce-ready credentials aren't understood by myopic provosts, doughy academic affairs departments, or the traditional humanities departments that grant the majors. As employer- and industry-informed alternative credentials, they of course need to reside in PCE/O units because they are the only units within the university built to assign real market value to credentials, issue them quickly, and market them correctly and strategically to employers and adult learners. Housing these credentials in a PCE/O unit assigns them a necessarily distinct ethos, separate from but in addition to the humanities degree, without asking the traditional department to become something it isn't.

Yeah, it's that simple.

Program Closures Never Work

Higher Ed Dive's assessment of program cost and revenue metrics is an informative and objective analysis of the efficacy of program closure initiatives. Put plainly, most programs are contribution-positive. When you cut the program you don't shed the cost, you just lose the revenue. 

The traditional program-closure model breaks down miserably for PCE/O units. The model assumes a program is a discrete, bounded line item within a department or a school/college that can be excised. That assumption collapses when applied to inter-curricular programs like Bachelor of Professional Studies degrees. A BPS has a liberal arts core braided with a professional competencies core, taught by faculty who are simultaneously teaching across three or four other programs. There is no clean box to draw around a BPS, the courses, or the faculty that support it. You can't cost it the way you cost a classics department, because its faculty, its common core courses, and its revenue streams are structurally shared across the PCE/O program portfolio (in some cases, to include non-credit courses). So when you apply the blunt program-closure model to a BPS program, you're severing connective tissue that other programs depend on to function.

None of this will change. Most institutions don't have the analytical infrastructure or the will to do curricular-level costing, so they'll keep reaching for the same tired and crude instrument every time the budget cycle turns downward. Identify low-enrollment programs, cut them, declare victory, and repeat in five years.

Improving Transferability

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges is doing what accreditors should do. They've created a prototype Transfer Credit Consortium to serve as a common transfer pathway to increase credit transferability, flexibility and accessibility among colleges and universities.

The voluntary, faculty-led initiative has so far brought together more than 160 institutions. The goal is to grow the consortium and begin measuring its impact and efficacy by fall 2027. I'm intrigued and encouraged by this initiative because it's not a stale and tired regional articulation press release. It appears to be a genuine access project. And of course, I believe it's the type of initiative that private universities should locate in their schools and colleges of professional, continuing & online studies. PCE/O units already run the machinery open transfer initiatives like this require. They've been doing transcript evaluation at speed, credit-mapping against multiple curricula and program requirements, prior-learning assessment, and advising for students who arrive mid-stream. 

Tactics like this matter more now because mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities have no choice but to get good at credit transfer. The pool of full-pay 18-year-olds is evaporating and every private in the country is chasing community college and public-university transfers to fill the gap (some doing it better than others). Private tuition runs near $55,000 per year against $12,000 in-state at public four-years, but what students actually pay after aid averages $20,000 at private nonprofits. So the math can actually work for privates who have the courage to suspend their adherence to fading perceptions of their brand. Permit your PCE/O unit to build and scale community college partnerships with broad, progressive and accessible credit transfer. Release the death grip you have on an elitist belief that a course is only as rigorous as the institution that taught it. Stop (PLEASE STOP) touting gaudy institutional prestige as academic quality control. Authorize you PCE/O unit to replace ad hoc, course-by-course faculty gatekeeping with outcomes-based evaluations built to run equivalencies at volume. Shift the burden of proof from the transfer student back onto the university (the one ostensibly "welcoming to all") and turn transfer credit into a defensible, and scalable enrollment strategy.

The "Single Source" Accessibility Fantasy

Somewhere in a compliance meeting on a sleepy private university campus, someone with an important sounding title is proposing that faculty cede the ability to modify their online course content to non-student facing staff working in a back office. Every content change, regardless of complexity, needs to route through the administrative unit. The rationale for the proposal is that it's the only way the university can guarantee compliance to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act by May 2027.

To be clear, it's not the only way and a lot of people know it.

Section 504 states that online content has to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. It says nothing about who must produce and manage the content. If compliance doesn't require an online content gatekeeper, how is the gatekeeper actually helping the university? In theory, a narrower channel is easier to audit and easier to certify. In practice, it's a truly idiotic model that creates severe and unnecessary bottlenecks by placing an access control mechanism between faculty and the content they've created (ask any operations lead with an iota of experience and understanding of how online courses are built, deployed and updated). 

Tuition-dependent mid-tier private universities aren't staffed to have a single back office process every micro-edit across every online course in every online program. So they'll either grow those administrative units into unwieldy cost centers nobody budgeted for (and certainly can't afford amid the current existential budget crisis), or faculty will route around it, emailing updated files directly to students, using personal tools, and posting outside official channels. The result will be a massive compliance risk with no audit trail and no institutional visibility.

What works, and what past HHS Office of Civil Rights resolution agreements consistently point toward, is a hybrid approach in which faculty are trained to author and publish accessible content using the tools and technologies built into the LMS, and then using a small specialized team to handle the genuinely difficult work such as video captioning.

Single-sourcing accessible content is a staffing decision that co-opts a federal deadline to make itself sound necessary. If this is unfolding at your university, ask which administrative operations hack proposed it, and then ask what else they're planning on centralizing and how they plan on paying for it.

No One Wants To Question The Bad Math

Put Gallup's latest confidence numbers next to Lumina's adult learner intent data and an equation emerges that needs to be questioned by every university leader who believes the uninformed babblings of that person with no background in professional, continuing & online education who told you they're going to triple the university's online enrollments by "unlocking the adult learner market."

Start the math with the data that indicate adult public confidence in higher ed has dropped to 38%, down from 42% last year, with cost and weak workforce prep among the top reasons. For the naive and visionless universities that bought into the consultant vomit promising ten thousand adult learner enrollments and hundreds of millions of dollars of gross revenues, the more important number is buried deeper in the data. Interest among adults in fully online learning is down to ~35%. Meanwhile, of the adults who actually intend to enroll somewhere in the next two years, only 48% want a four year institution at all. The other 52% want community college or a vocational/technical program. But more problematic to these universities and their limp online growth plans is that only 27% of adults surveyed have any near-term intent to enroll anywhere in the next two years. The result of the equation is a fraction that doesn't add up to the enrollment and revenue promises on the cheesy PPT slide.

The barriers for adult learners don't have anything to do with marketing. The cost of attendance and completion stops 81% of intending adults from doing anything. Time constraints stop 67%. Difficulty navigating enrollment hurdles dissuades others. None of this gets fixed by a bigger marketing budget and tired digital ads on social media. It gets fixed by transparent pricing, progressive credit for prior learning, stackable non-credit and credit credentials, workforce relevant training and preparation, and accessible onramps and offramps.

My recommendation won't surprise anyone. First, throw out the ridiculous and naive multiplier-based growth projections from the consultant. Then build your online enrollment growth with realistic intent rates for your region. Net out modality and credential level preferences against your market-sensitive programs (not your entire portfolio), and apply a yield rate that assumes real competition framed by an honest assessment of your brand. Finally, redirect the marketing budget your consultant convinced someone you need (and the consultant's six-figure salary) toward affordability guarantees and scholarships. For most tuition dependent mid-tier privates, that math will calc out with realistic and achievable yields, not comical triple digit aspirations. That's it. Simple.

Learning From Janus

Raymond Rice's piece on the University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI) names as critical the "dual-identity institution" that universities must acknowledge if they are going to survive the current enrollment and existential budget crisis. 

UMPI is a residential campus and a national competency-based provider, sharing faculty, governance, and standards, across the traditional "main campus" and their CBE and non-traditional programs. It's a duality similar to the one that has existed for decades at most universities. The difference is that UMPI treats their identities as equally necessary and valuable, where many universities (particularly privates) treat their secondary identities as something to be tolerated.  

Schools and colleges of professional, continuing & online education at mid-tier private universities have been presenting a second face of their institutions since adult programs (and later distance and online education) where created with different calendars, different advising models, different students, and sometimes different physical locations than main campus. I've often referred to this hyper learner-focused work as the Janus head of higher education, with one face turned toward the quad and the other toward the part-time non-traditional student. Recall that Janus is the god of thresholds, transitions, and doorways, exactly the business PCE/O units have always been in. (Wink, wink. Nod, nod.)

To say it yet again another way, the challenge is that most private universities can't decide whether to be Janus or just be embarrassed by him. They'll accept the tuition revenues from the PCE/O side and then reorganize it into oblivion in their chaotic and campy responses to enrollment declines on the traditional side. They'll do this partly because most academic leadership is embarrassingly unsuited to operate amid crises. They'll also do this because too many of these universities still believe only one of its faces is recognizable to the market. These are the universities weighed down by brand nostalgia, a fixation on selectivity, sinking rankings, and a campus experience that increasingly serves an evaporating demographic. They'll take the non-traditional learner's tuition and fees without the structural humility of admitting these are the students representing half the current market and growing at pace they're woefully ill-equipped to support.

We Told You So

Inside Higher Ed's recent piece on "the rise of the nontraditional college student" is getting treated like some overdue revelation by hack administrators floundering to present themselves as experts of anything with relevance to the current enrollment and budget crises swallowing universities.

For those of us who have spent careers in professional, continuing, and online education, the piece is a validation of sorts. We've known for decades that roughly one in five college students is parenting or has childcare responsibilities, about a fourth are adult learners, and many are juggling college with full-time jobs. This isn't news to us, because these are our students.

What does deserve more scrutiny is the timing of the scramble by the SVPs of Somethingfancysounding to present this and related data as important enough to demand the university's immediate attention. I'd suggest the greatest amount of critical observation should be at mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities who are watching their traditional age pipeline collapse and their balance sheets bleed red. I'm seeing with some degree of awe the number of these universities that have suddenly discovered adult learners as a mission critical priority. Enrollment cliffs and existential budget crises have a funny way of producing institutional enlightenment. The discouraging aspect of this is that these are often the same institutions with long histories of announcing bold "innovation initiatives," "student success task forces," and "reimagined learning models" that quietly evaporate after the press release cycle ends and the consultants get paid.

The "discovery" of adult learners at these universities will come with zero meaningful change to the  current model. That's cynical, I know, but it's just the way things are. The full-time, 18-22 year-old, residential paradigm is nearly impossible to change. Real change will only come from shorter terms, year-round enrollment, rolling admissions, market-priced tuition, competency based pacing, employer-aligned programs, stackable non-degree credentials, asynchronous support, and services built for non-traditional students. Those of us in continuing and online education didn't need a budget crisis to figure this out.

Why Your PCE/O Unit Needs To Own Stackable Credentials

Imagine for a minute or so a mid-tier private university geographically located with six community colleges within a 95-mile radius. Each one of these CCs has spent the last decade building fast, affordable, employer-aligned credentialing programs. Now try to understand why the private university is still debating whether a 12-credit certificate belongs with the School of Computational Basket Weaving or the College of Aspirational Networking.

The reality is that this situation exists in varying forms all over the country. The action many of us in the private university PCO/E space have been advocating for is integration and interoperability with our regional CCs through scalable and funded workforce credentialing hubs. Located within and administered by the PCO/E unit, the hub becomes the place adult learners go after they've stacked a certificate or two at a community college and want the next rung on the education ladder. The efficiency of this simple model is that the private university isn't competing with the CCs on price or speed, they're just building the on-ramps the CCs can't offer with clear, credit-bearing pathways from workforce certificates to associate-equivalent credentials to bachelor's completion, all without the learner starting over.

Like most solutions in higher ed, this isn't that hard, but so many private universities are getting this wrong. They're still fighting a battle that was lost a decade ago and trying to retrofit workforce development (because it's now something they need to seriously think about) into traditional undergraduate schools and colleges, splitting strategies and tactics across different faculties and academic leadership who are anchored to decaying curriculum and the agrarian calendar. For the the hub model to actually work, these universities need to map existing certificates, badges, and courses into a ladder with real credit value at each rung. They need to negotiate formal articulation with those six community colleges instead of hoping students find them through poorly written marketing glop about accessibility and transfer credit.

Of course the programs, the articulation agreements, the employer partnerships, and the enrollment operations all need to sit inside schools or colleges of professional and continuing education. These are the units that already have stackable, competency-aligned pathways. They already support workforce-oriented learners and maintain employer partnerships. Centralizing the hub in a PCE/O unit solves the coordination problem that kills stackable credential initiatives before they launch. One unit, one team, one system of learner support from their first workforce certificate to degree completion. That's it. Simple.

The Unit Built For This Fight

Connecting dots and thoughts again. Two pieces this morning make the case through different lenses for strong, funded and empowered schools and colleges of continuing and professional studies.

An Inside Higher Ed interview with WGU president Scott Pulsipher includes a perspective that should be carefully considered by every senior academic leader. Asked whether "legacy" universities can pivot to competency-based, employer-aligned models, Pulsipher said the likelihood is basically zero, because the entire economic model of these universities is built around the credit hour, residential experiences, and the 16-week semester. Alternative credentialing and market-informed pathways into and through universities like this are most commonly found in their divisions or academic units built for a different kind of student and experience. 

An opinion piece by UC San Diego's Hugo Villar makes a similar point with a specific argument that schools and colleges of professional and continuing studies (PCE/Os) are the "hidden" workforce development partner within most universities. His central claim is that reskilling the professional class whose jobs are being reshaped by advanced technologies requires research-grade depth delivered at market speed, with employer input baked into the design. Villar suggests that PCE/O units are designed and function to do exactly that.

I've said before that schools and colleges of professional and continuing studies aren't side hustles for universities. They are the only part of a university that are structurally capable of doing what WGU does at scale and what Villar says the workforce actually needs. They build stackable credentials in months, not years. They already have the employer relationships that are missing from federal policy. And in mid-tier tuition-dependent privates, they are the only part of the org chart built for the world as it actually is.

When I hear about these universities thinking about folding their PCE/O divisions into a "main campus" or some administrative unit lead by visionless and doughy hacks, I hear an institution disarming itself in the one fight it might actually win. They're not simplifying the org chart and solving an existential budget crisis. They're ceding the adult and workforce market to the WGUs and the community college down the road, who are moving faster with more highly market-sensitive credentials and services.

Senior academic leaders weighing whether to atomize their school and colleges of professional studies should first ask themselves which part of their university is actually capable of building what the market needs in the next eighteen months (trust me, it's not now and never has been the business school). If the honest answer is their PCE/O unit, then fund it, empower it and release it for scale.

That One Program

I was speaking with a colleague in the PCO/E space and the question came up again about which new online program should universities be launching in the next twelve months. My first instinct was to say a full specialized Bachelor of Professional Studies degree in a hot field built for working adults. But the timing for full degree programs is wrong. At most universities, a full degree takes 2 years to design, another year to get through governance, and by the time it enrolls its first cohort you've lost market share on something that still has to prove itself in a soft product space. 

Like a broken record, I started babbling again about Workforce Pell. Credit AND non-credit programs between eight and fifteen weeks are now Pell eligible for the first time, and it's a funding source that is just going to grow. So the answer isn't a new degree, it's short-term stackable credentials, built with named employers or workforce partners already attached, that ladder directly into a degree program you're already running. This does three things a full program can't. First, it launches fast, inside a policy window that's open now and will only get wider. Second, it gives you real completion and placement data before you ever have to defend a bigger investment. And third, it uses the infrastructure your PCE/E unit already built for adult learners, which is exactly the asset the rest of your institution doesn't have. 

A good plan violently executed treats this as a pilot. One program, one partner, three month development, and tight scope, and prove the stackability works before you scale it.

PCE/O Messaging

A recent evoLLLution piece on measuring continuing education's impact reminds us how professional, continuing and online education units bring tremendous value to their universities. Public and private universities are bleeding enrollments, with some tuition-dependent mid-tier privates finding themselves floundering for alternative lines of business. Meanwhile, the PCE/O units on those same campuses are the only units seeing growth and opportunity. However, the challenge for too many of these units is that they struggle to prove their strategic value in ways that move budget conversations.

The evoLLLution piece focuses on a sector-wide measurement gap in Canada, but the same gap has existed for plenty of US university PCE/O units with years of innovative programming and no consistent way to show what that history adds up to. For well-established PCE/O unit, it's beyond time to get aggressive about measuring and articulating impact. Standardize the outcomes data, track it against labor market signals, and put it in front of the BoT before someone else frames the story for us.

Employers Don't Care Where You Learned It

A new NBER study offers a telling data point about the value of institutional brands to potential employers. In this study, which considered a specific career field, employers didn't care where an applicants degree came from. The institutional brand of associated with the degree just didn't matter.

A version of this disinterest has been bubbling up for some time. There are hundreds of mid-tier privates who've built entire "we're different" narratives around the idea that their diplomas are better than the public university across town. The NBER study is the first real evidence I've seen that the market is simply uninterested in where a degree is completed or how much it cost. 

This really isn't a surprise to those of us in professional and continuing education. We've been making versions of this claim anecdotally for years, because we work with the adult learners who TELL US they just need a credential that works in the real world. If they can quickly and cost-effectively get the credential a prospective or currently employer requires, they don't care where it comes from. 

My concern now is that universities will respond to this shift like their responses to the demographic cliff, alternative credentials, and the adult learner market. Those disastrous responses are simply bolting a "workforce pathway" onto existing undergraduate programs, staffed by faculty who've spent their careers teaching eighteen-year-olds living in dorms. To say it again (and again and again), you can't retrofit a residential university culture into serving adult, part-time, career-driven learners by adding a few online programs and calling it innovation. The incentives are wrong. The faculty criteria are wrong. The advising model is dangerously wrong. The academic calendar is wrong. What you get is an administrative hack leading a new "initiative" with glossy PowerPoints and unqualified projections, but no change, growth or movement to evolve the institution.

The findings of the NBER study should remind us why schools and colleges of professional studies exist, and why their mission isn't some side hustle for the university. Our units already understand competency, pace, and relevance because they're the reasons our students show up. If a mid-tier private university is serious about responding to what this data and other workforce data are telling us, the fix isn't hiring a consultant or atomizing existing specialized services and programs for non-traditional learners. It's giving PCE/O units the authority and budget to rapidly expand what they are already doing.

Mission Critical

I had an inspiring conversation this morning with the chief strategist at an ed tech company. We were talking about PCE/O units, and she noted that she enjoys working with these units because they are built for agility, innovation and action. She also noted that the students PCE/O units historically serve represent the only growth opportunity for higher education. 

And yet...

Walk the campuses of mid-tier, tuition dependent privates right now and you'll find a different perspective. Leadership, staring down the financial crisis and reaching for the nearest budgeting cliche, decides the fix is to atomize the PCE unit, break it up, distribute the pieces across the university, and call it operational efficiency. To be clear, this isn't efficiency. You can't distribute purpose built infrastructure across departments that were never designed to hold it and expect it to survive. What gets lost is the flexibility, the specialized advising, and the credential pathways nobody else on campus understands.

These universities aren't streamlining. They're refusing to evolve, and calling it strategy, and that's terribly sad.

What RTO Mandates Say About Leadership

There is a now well known study out of Stanford getting cited by a lot of higher ed leaders. In some cases, these leaders are lifting entire phrases from the report and dropping them into university job postings to explain why certain positions aren't remote or hybrid. This feels kind of greasy to me because the study didn't consider fully remote workers, it only compared employees at one company (Trip.com) who worked five days in the office against those who worked three days in-office and two from home. That's it.

It's quite easy to find examples of the misappropriation of the Stanford study negatively impacting university staff. On some campuses, you can look no further than the teams whose only jobs are developing and supporting online programs and serving online students. Yup, require the staff and teams who support fully remote students to swipe a badge five days a week, and justify it by citing a study about a travel agency. 

The issue I have with these decisions and the subsequent return-to-office (RTO) mandates is that they are devoid of metrics, but full of dried over marketing vomit and listless leadership buzzwords about how uniquely different organizations doing entrepreneurial things require people to bump into each other in the hallway and organically begin creating something special. The claim is that real productivity then follows from these physical encounters. The assumption is, of course, that productivity isn't already optimized with staff working on remote or hybrid schedules. But every online facing unit in higher ed has their productivity numbers sitting in front of them (enrollment velocity, persistence rates, retention rates, response times, course completions, etc.). And it's incredibly naive and shortsighted to believe that any of those numbers will improve because an advisor listened to an operations specialist drone on about their kids summer vacation plans standing in front of the bathroom last Tuesday. 

In my humble but reasonably informed opinion, the RTO thing is more about the individual leader than it is about the institution. There's a growing list of research making the point that RTO mandates correlate less with productivity concerns and more with a leader's discomfort at not being able to see people. It's a modern version of management control dressed up as culture, where visibility gets mistaken for value. Frankly, I find leaders who resist remote work embarrassingly narcissistic. At the very least, they're expressing a type of doughy weakness that ultimately compromises their ability to lead at all.

If higher education leaders are serious about improving outputs (as distinct from productivity), they should be creating the conditions necessary for their teams to excel. That's it. When they impose in-office mandates on the staff and teams that have already figured out how to serve a remote population well, it's worth asking what problem is actually being solved.

You're Missing Workforce Pell

July 1 came and went, and Workforce Pell launched. And as NPR reported, only 12 states have road maps ready, colleges are scrambling to restructure programs that don't met the instructional hour minimums, and the funding won't reach students until next spring at the earliest. But as noted in the report, this is just the start of longer cycle, so it's still not too late to do what has to be done if universities want a piece of what will quickly become a significant source of federal financial aid. 

I'll say with some degree of hubris that none of this surprises me. I, and many of my colleagues in professional & continuing education, have been saying for years that the short-term credential and workforce training space is where real growth will happen for higher education, and that the federal government would eventually find a way to put Pell dollars behind it. Community colleges saw it coming, which is why they're already doing the unglamorous work of mapping employment data, chasing state approvals, and redesigning programs and policies to meet the rules. Private universities, especially the tuition-dependent ones bleeding full-time on campus enrollments, are still standing around dumb-struck.

It doesn't have to be this way. It really doesn't. First, audit every certificate and workforce program on the books against the eligibility criteria. Don't guess, do the audit. Second, build the state and federal approval relationships now (in some cases they're already in place and waiting to be exploited). Third, stop treating workforce training and the non-credit programs running out of your PCE/O units as a side hustle bolted onto your shiny 4-year degrees. Start now on creating real academic pathway with stackable credit into your degree programs. 

Like that old mixed tape that keeps playing on a loop... this isn't hard. Implementation just takes a good plan, the will, and the right people to do it.

Solving The Adult Learner Problem

This U.S. News opinion piece makes a well-articulated call for higher ed to step up its adult learner game. I'm in full agreement with the call to action, but I think it's an unequal problem among public and private universities. And it's particularly troubling for tuition-dependent mid-tier privates holding onto decaying models of perceived brand equity and selective admissions.

Tuition-dependent privates have built their financial models around 18 to 22 year olds living in a dorm, eating in the dining hall, and paying inflated tuition for the privilege. That model was wobbling before the demographic cliff. Now it's in a death spiral. So when I read, "colleges need to serve adult learners better," I attach the addendum that private universities need adult learners to survive. The issue with may addendum is that most of these institutions are embarrassingly bad at serving the adult learner population. 

The solution, of course, is found within the schools and colleges of professional, continuing education & online education (PCO/Es) within these universities. These are the academic and service units designed and built for adult learners. They have decades of experience running flexible and shorter terms; models for awarding credit for prior learning, curriculum designed around stackable credentials, and advisors who understanding adult learner needs and behaviors. The irony is that many of these universities sadly (and ignorantly) select to ignore their PCO/E units, having historically treated them as some kind of side hustle. It's increasingly difficult for me to imagine a senior leader who suggests their tuition-dependent private university's best path forward starts with their PCO/E unit. I'm sure such a leader exists, but it would certainly be someone willing to admit the old model isn't sustainable and the answer isn't going to be found in word salad PowerPoints created by hack consultants.

The private universities serious about exploiting the adult learner opportunity (and addressing the enrollment crisis facing all of higher ed) will put their PCE/O units on point for growing alternative enrollments and revenues, with real authority over how the rest of the campus needs to adapt. Once again, this wouldn't be hard, it just requires the will to do it.

Rhetoric And The BPS Degree

There's a piece in The EvoLLLution that resurfaces the decades-old claim that high school graduates show up to college underprepared to write, and further down the path, employers say they can't find enough entry-level hires who communicate well. The new dimension to the old concern is AI, which students now use to produce polished paragraphs without doing any of the thinking that writing is supposed to refine. Instructors are seeing longer, cleaner discussion posts but students aren't demonstrating better understanding of the content. 

I've been trying for a while now to develop a cogent framework for suggesting that rhetoric can best bridge the gap between fluent output and real understanding. I also think this is the curricular space where Bachelor of Professional Studies (BPS) programs have an advantage over BS and BA degrees. AI can generate sentences instantly, but it can't (at least today) decide which claim is actually worth making, which evidence will move a specific audience, or where an argument is weakest before someone else pokes a hole in it. That's invention and judgment, which are the core of rhetorical training, and the layer of thinking that vanishes when a student lets AI generate a finished draft. A student who's never developed lines of argument, structured proofs, assessed agency, identified rationale or practiced rhetorical criticism, has no way to tell whether the AI's output is going to produce the desired outcome. "It sounds right" is the only test they've got before submitting it for grading.

BPS programs are built around applied, workplace-facing coursework. Case studies, client projects, cross-functional communication, courses shaped around what jobs demand. That structure is a natural home for rhetorical training because it turns rhetoric from an abstract humanities exercise into something students can immediately apply. A BPS student writing a project proposal or a client-facing report has to thoroughly understand the function of the artifact they're producing, who will use the artifact, and how they will use it. The understanding and the related rhetorical skills determine if the student can correctly and ethically direct an AI tool. I think that in the workplace, this skill becomes prompt writing and evaluation expertise. Students who've been trained how and when to ask, "what's my point, who's reading this, where's the weak spot" can push an AI output toward something genuinely useful. They can catch the hollow arguments, redirect the generic responses, and sharpen weak first drafts. 

The ironic thing I keep circling back to is that AI tools look like they're making writing instruction pointless. In fact, they've made the ability to judge writing more important that the writing. For BPS programs trying to turn out graduates who are job-ready, teaching students to think rhetorically AND  write well is another distinguishing feature of their market sensitivity.

Higher Ed's Core And Leadership

There's an interesting article in Fast Company that got me thinking about what happens every time we see a leadership change in higher ed. The piece raises an interesting question about internal vs. external hires, but I'm more intrigued by the description of the organizational "core."

For the sake of discussion, let's accept the claim that every organization has a core that everything in the organization revolves around. For universities, this core is traditionally described as knowledge production, credentialing that leads somewhere, or a loosely defined social mission. When university leadership turns over, there's a predictable script of reassessing the core before or shortly after new leadership arrives on campus. The assumption is that the university has drifted from it's core due to some form of leadership wobble. But what if we assumed the core is actually broken and the underlying model of higher ed is fractured?

Imagine a university that ran with that assumption. If the core is broken, you stop trying to polish old versions of it with faculty committees and public pronouncements, and start asking wilder, more interesting questions. What if credentialing didn't mean four years and a mountain of debt, but a series of stackable, verifiable skills that employers actually trust? What if knowledge production stopped assuming every discipline needs its own tenured priesthood, and instead let schools and colleges within universities specialize the way hospitals do, some doing world class research, others doing world class teaching, without pretending to be one in the same? What if the vague social mission got specific and was tied to regional economic needs? None of this is guaranteed to work and faculty senates would have a field day with it. But treating the core as broken rather than a bit wobbly opens the door to genuine reinvention and innovation.

Access And Selectivity

I've been looking more closely at community colleges and the ways in which they seem to have quietly figured out the false access vs. selectivity dichotomy that private universities like to prop up as a dilemma they publicly express resolve to address.

I think because they're just built differently, community colleges have been able to effectively shatter the traditionally narrow treatment of access through alternative credentials. We're seeing daily stories about how community colleges are launching applied credentials designed to stand-alone AND to readily stack into higher order credentials. A student can complete a welding certificate, walk into a job, and then return to apply the certificate to an associate degree or another advanced cert without having to take unnecessary courses and clear archaic curriculum hurdles. I'm watching this access strategy turn community colleges in my state into true higher ed on ramps, not as backup options for students who couldn't get into the university across town.

I've also watched with dismay and frustration too many private universities manipulate the word "access" to fit some ridiculous claim about being a place where everyone is welcome. I've sat in rooms with senior leaders at some genuinely prestigious, carefully branded private institutions and listened to them say, with a straight face, that their universities are accessible because they offer online degree completion programs. That's the whole of their treatment of access. Move the curriculum to the cloud and call it accessible. The part that so many of these (maybe) well-intentioned academic leaders choose to leave unaddressed is that an online degree is still a three, four, six year commitment. And it's still priced like a private education (because it is one), thereby not being accessible to anyone whose life doesn't align with the agrarian calendar or who can't afford a $90,000 credential.

For me, creating greater access to higher education has never been about delivery modalities. Nobody's life ever got easier because they did the exact same four year degree from their dining room table instead of a lecture hall. I've always treated access as an outcome. Can the person with a full time job, a kid, and forty five minutes free at ten at night actually complete a credential they can use? Not something they'll be able to use in three years, but something they can apply next month.

I had a conversation a few years ago with a scholar and administrator I respect a lot, someone who's successfully led in higher education and thinks hard about what universities are actually for. One comment from that conversation has stuck with me. "You can't sell selectivity and inclusion out of the same brochure," they said. The misguided claim they were making is that access and selectivity are mutually exclusive for universities with brands and reputations built on selectivity. So many of these places have spent decades building (perceived) prestige on who they keep out. How could they possibly pivot to "we're truly accessible" without gutting the thing people are paying for?

So I'm trying to imagine what would happen if a private university actually tried to implement the community college access model. Could they successfully break their degrees apart the way community colleges can? And not into disconnected piles of random one-off credentials scattered around with no relationship to each other! You would think that there's a progressive private university out there that could actually knock out applied, market relevant credentials that stack easily and readily into a full degree. Then price the whole thing honestly and stop measuring success one degree at a time. If a working adult takes one applied credential, gets a raise, and never comes back for the degree, that's success.

Let's Actually Support Active Duty Military Students

Three years ago a select group of private universities gathered with officials from the DoD and the VA to consider how higher education and the military could better serve active duty and veteran students. Ideas were traded and everyone left talking about momentum and a call to action. Three years later, we have a few press releases and a stale list of recycled pledges.

What was missing in those discussions was addressing the most significant challenge facing active duty military attending college: control of their time. When orders, assignments and responsibilities pull a service member away from their studies, the burden of managing the chaos that follows falls on them. Most university policies require the student to email their professor, fill out the forms, loop in the registrar, and hope that no one flags their absence as unexcused before the paperwork clears.

I've imagined a highly unpopular model for better serving our active duty students. What if we stopped asking these students to report their own disruption and permitted the university to plug directly into the systems that manage and document the disruptions? The DoD already tracks duty status through platforms like milConnect and DEERS. Imagine a university that is permitted to secure a data sharing agreement, with the student's consent at enrollment, that lets its SIS read duty status changes the same way it already reads GI Bill eligibility through the VA. When a set of orders gets cut, our student advising platform flags the disruption so the instructor doesn't tag the student absent, and the student's status automatically moves to "paused." No forms and no waiting on an advisor to confirm that they've received the email and processed the paperwork.

The objection I've heard to this model is that no university wants to or can truly afford to build and manage an interface into DoD personnel systems. It's a reasonable objection, but smaller versions of this approach already exist. Base education offices maintain their own records of who is where and for how long. A university with real partnerships, not just a recruiting table at the base education center, could start there. Pull duty status updates from the education services officer instead of the student. You get the same outcome of enhanced service and support with a lighter lift. Like much of what we can be doing in higher ed to better support those who serve, this one isn't hard. It really isn't.