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.