Leadership & Workforce Pell

It's been interesting and frustrating to watch universities (particularly private universities) stare blankly out the window as they pass the Workforce Pell billboard. 

Workforce Pell took effect in July, but too many university leaders see it as a community college thing. I'm seeing it as a test of sorts for how effectively universities can respond to a rapidly changing definition of "value" in higher education. The universities that pass the test have or will quickly develop a plan. This doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need to have the university authentically consider if workforce development is or will be a core part of the institution's mission or simply an opportunistic revenue experiment. If the answer is a serious and financially supported commitment to workforce development, the plan is easy. 

First, get into the room with the right state leaders in the Governor's office. Bring reams of labor-market evidence, your catalog of market-sensitive credit and non-credit programs, and employer commitments that demonstrate your university is all in on workforce development. Second, ground the presentation and the ask for funding in reasonable and achievable outcomes. If you don't have the program completion, job placement and earnings data required for funding eligibility, demonstrate how your current reporting infrastructure and data ecosystem will be deployed to measure and capture what works AND what doesn't. Third (and this is critically important), connect your current and future programs to the on-ramp(s) that Workforce Pell is intended to create. If the connectivity isn't already there to move students directly into qualified employment, identify how you're going to redesign your programs for that necessary connectivity. Fourth, align your institutional leadership and governance to cross academic affairs, financial aid, enrollment, and external relations. Finally, start small and build your credibility (don't kid yourself that you already have this). A few really well-designed, well-resourced efforts with early results will quickly build your reputation as a serious participate in workforce development.

Like many things in higher ed, this isn't hard. You just need to commit to being all in or step aside and cede the space to your regional community colleges. There's some small amount of dignity in admitting that your university just can't or wont do what's necessary.

Rethinking The Studio

This isn't specific to PCE or university leadership, but it's a topic that is increasingly important to universities that have in-sourced their online course production. 

For decades (and certainly the 26 years I've been working in online, distance and technology-mediated education), higher ed has operated under a phantom guidance to keep instructional videos under 8 minutes. The evidence informing the guidance is based on some very old research that suggested learner engagement with video content tends to drop off after 6 to 7 minutes, so the threshold instructional designers began using is 8 minutes.

A team at Northeastern University is pushing back on the "best practice" of 8 minute videos. Their argument is not that the eight-minute guideline is wrong, but they are suggesting that applying it uniformly across all disciplines misses important aspects of how learners process content. A conceptual video on business strategy can benefit from 8 or fewer minutes. A technical walkthrough of an algebra derivation or an accounting calculation might need more time as the learner has to follow an unbroken sequence of steps to master the skill. The Northeastern team suggests that chopping that sequence into shorter clips to satisfy an arbitrary time limit actually hurts retention and disrupts learning.

I see this suggestion as an opportunity for universities to reconsider how they are allocating budget, staff and faculty time on costly studio-based production for video-heavy online courses. There are too many universities now running video production through a full studio model with scripted sessions, camera crews, editing queues, and post-production polish that gets applied to every piece of video content. That model worked when video length was assumed to be short AND alternate methods of video production were sketchy at best.

This is where the growing set of AI enabled video production tools needs to be seriously considered. Even the most inept operations director should be able to recognize the efficiencies afforded by screen capture platforms that can record workflows and automatically generate narrated, edited video in a fraction of the time needed in a studio. Document-to-video platforms are turning scripts and slide decks into finished, narrated videos without a camera or a studio. AI assisted editing tools are handling captioning and pacing adjustments that used to require a team of video editors. Work that used to take days is now completed in a few hours.

None of this means that high-production studios an university campuses are irrelevant. Conceptual, narrative driven videos where an instructor's delivery and framing can genuinely shape a student's mental model can still benefit from high-end costly production. But the universities that are still routing every instructional video through a single, uniform, high cost production pipeline should be aggressively looking at AI-assisted and lower cost methods of video production. Matching production intensity to cognitive demand, rather than to a one size fits all workflow, will bring the cost of online course, and specifically video production, down dramatically.

PCE Units And Institutional Health

The pace of nonprofit university and college closures and mergers is accelerating due primarily to deepening debt caused by evaporating tuitional enrollment. Financial analysts and rating agencies have been suggesting for years that even well-established brands with exceedingly high tuition dependency are increasingly at risk as they double-down on their (expensive) full-time residential experience.

I'll suggest yet again that tuition dependent privates with strong professional & continuing education divisions have at their disposal a means of creating alterative revenue streams not tied to the traditional enrollment numbers driving closures and mergers. A quick non-rigorous review of the shrinking concentration of mid-tier privates indicates that those universities with well-resourced PCE units demonstrate to the market, analysts and rating agencies a type of institutional resilience necessary to adapt to the dramatic changes sweeping higher ed (see Villanova, Case Western, Wake Forest, and Lehigh as exemplars). 

Mid-tier privates at financial risk should be aggressively leaning into and elevating their PCE division's role as a central element of their long-term strategic and financial planning. This means giving PCE leadership a role in enrollment and budget-planning rather than treating their units as self-funding side operation. Use the market-facing data PCE units have historically depended on to inform decisions that traditional undergraduate enrollment management is slow to consider. Build-out flexible degree pathways offered by the PCE unit into the university's most market-sensitive degrees (stackable certificates into bachelor's or master's completion, accelerated bachelor's-to-master's tracks for working adults). Use your PCE unit as recruiting funnel and retention tool. Invest in your PCE division now and position your shaky mid-tier tuition dependent private university with a genuine asset.

PCE Units Know What Lean Looks Like

You can't open the higher ed news and not find a lead story about University X laying off staff to shore up massive budget deficits. The worst of the layoffs and subsequent freezes are just starting to hit the large concentration of mid-tier tuition dependent privates confronting tightening margins and evaporating traditional enrollments. Those of us who've living through similar cycles before know that these tired and stale institutional decisions don't really save the pennies suggested in the press releases. What these decisions always result in is slowed innovation, strained staff and faculty operating with no slack, and systemic morale crises.

Professional & continuing education units have operated under intense budget scrutiny for longer than the rest of most universities writ large because their programs and services are judged directly on meeting their intended outcomes and generating positive revenues. As a result, many PCE divisions have had to operate with lean staffing models built around flexible, cross-trained roles rather than narrowly defined positions. Any private university considering layoffs and a hiring freeze should first study how its PCE unit is structured and operates, and then apply a similar integrated cross-training model to stretched academic and back-office departments. 

A round of layoffs and yet another hiring freeze applied uniformly across every department will cut capacity from areas already running on fumes while leaving less examined parts of the institution untouched. This is the way it happens regardless of how intentional or surgical the university claims it's being. Privates that use their PCE unit's lean staffing practices as a model will be more likely to implement salary+fringe budget reductions that result in real savings without gutting the place entirely.

Tuition Discount Rates & PCE Pricing

The average tuition discount rate at private nonprofit universities is now 57% on average. This "list price" phenomenon, where different customers pay different amounts, isn't unique to higher ed. Furniture retail and airlines are weirdly similar, but unlike those two industries, private universities have convinced themselves that transparent pricing just looks bad. So instead of telling customers "what you see is what you pay," full-time residential undergraduate students (and their parents) are presented an insanely high anchor price and a bizarre system of "discounts" that nearly every student ends up getting. If you've spent anytime with senior leaders in enrollment management and institutional budget offices, you come away saddened and amazed by the circus-like hoops and smoke-and-mirror gymnastics they perform every year to manipulate the discount rate to fill seats. 

Schools, colleges and units of professional & continuing education operate under a different logic, setting tuition to what working adults and employers are actually willing to pay, without the layered administrative nonsense and negotiation. Private universities caught in the eye of the rapidly worsening discount rate spiral should be adopting their PCE units models of pricing programs based on direct market research, adjusting rates by region, format, and employer partnership, and then applying those models to specific full-time residential undergraduate majors where demand and willingness to pay vary widely. It would be quite easy for a mid-tier tuition dependent private university to pilot a transparent, non-negotiated pricing model in one or two academic programs to test whether clearer pricing will reduce the need for deep individual discounts.

Private universities don't need to invent new pricing models from thin air. Market-responsive models already exist within their own PCE divisions, and they're worth studying before assuming the only paths forward are deeper unsustainable tuition discounts and draconian budget cuts.

Federal Aid Changes & PCE

The devasting federal changes to Pell eligibility and student loan structures are already affecting affordability and attendance across higher ed. Private universities with ridiculously high price tags are especially exposed and reeling.

Professional & continuing education units have long served a population less dependent on traditional federal aid. Our students are working adults using employer tuition benefits, military education benefits, or self-funded enrollment in shorter, lower-cost credential programs. Unlike the main campus, PCE divisions are built around the pricing structures designed for students financing their education outside of federal financial aid.

Tuition dependent mid-tier privates experiencing enrollment softness due in part to the new aid restrictions should be expanding their PCE unit employer tuition benefit partnerships and securing direct-bill contracts with regional employers to remove the need to front costs and wait for reimbursement. They should be expanding military and veteran education benefit processing capacity, and investing in streamlined systems for TA, MyCAA, and VA/GI Bill processing. They should build income-share or institution-financed payment plans specifically within PCE to give students a financing bridge that doesn't touch the federal aid system.

Federal aid policy isn't changing anytime soon and will likely get more restrictive before it gets better. Privates with limited institutional aid can't afford to wait it out. The ones that lean hard into PCE's alternative programming, pricing, and financing relationships will be better positioned to counter ongoing full-time enrollment declines than those waiting on federal aid stability.

The International Student Gap

This fall we're all seeing the devasting impact an eviscerated international student pipeline is having on graduate enrollments. For tuition dependent private universities desperate for international students paying full or near-full tuition, it is impossible to replace lost revenues through domestic recruitment alone.

Professional & continuing education units within these privates provide multiple options for alternative revenues not dependent on students physically relocating or securing a visa. Fully online degrees and credit-bearing certificate programs can reach the same international markets with reasonable and intentional refocusing of international outreach and recruitment.

Tuition dependent privates that have watched their international graduate applications evaporate should be unleashing their PCE divisions to design, build and launch cohort-based online programs marketed specifically to international students in the geographies relied on for campus enrollments, removing the visa requirement from the equation entirely. They should be aggressively expanding their PCE units' existing degree-completion pathways with specializations or tracts in disciplinary domains of high interest to students in these geographies.

Waiting for immigration policy to stabilize is a passive and failing response to a long-term problem. Tuition dependent private universities smart enough to leverage their PCE division's market-sensitive programming and delivery modalities have some opportunity of recovering part of their lost international student revenues without depending entirely on a policy environment they can't control.

Let Your PCE Revenues Work For You

The newly enacted tiered tax on university endowments is already impacting the small number of wealthy private institutions now facing annual tax liabilities of tens of millions of dollars. Several of these schools have already announced hiring freezes and administrative cuts, treating the tax as a fixed cost they can absorb through austerity.

That strategy isn't going to work for mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities sitting below the tax thresholds. While they (currently) owe nothing under the new law, they still face indirect exposure from the ripple affects of wealthy university PhD cuts, layoffs, hiring freezes, and the ongoing federal squeeze on research funding. Austerity actions at mid-tier privates won't insulate them from the downstream pressures already eroding full-time residential enrollments and devasting operating budgets. 

I'll again suggest that the majority of mid-tier privates have on their campuses a resource to offset the indirect impacts of the endowment tax. Schools, colleges and units of professional & continuing education are one of the few parts of mid-tier privates that can generate new revenues on short timelines. Universities anticipating indirect pressures should be proactively expanding their PCE unit's programming and shifting underused faculty capacity into short, PCE-designed courses and credentials for working professionals that are already generating alternative revenues. 

Ignoring the endowment tax and treating it as something that only concerns a handful of wealthy schools will be a disastrous decision for mid-tier privates. Universities that recognize the indirect pressures early and make deliberate investments in their PCE units will be far better positioned to stay ahead of the fallout than those waiting to react.

PCE Programs’ Worth & Value

Surveys continue to show rising conerns about whether a college degree is worth the cost. Private universities with ridiculously high sticker prices face the sharpest skepticism. With few exceptions, their efforts to counter the doubts and cautions are to make expensive marketing appeals about their idyllic campus traditions and stellar reputations.

The irony is that nearly all of these universities have on their campuses a school, college or division of professional & continuing education that doesn’t rely on reputation and residential experiences to attract enrollments and drive revenues. Non-traditional students attending universities through PCE units are paying with their own money or an employer's tuition benefit, and they expect direct, demonstrable connections between program and career outcomes, not climbing walls in gyms and mediocre Division I sports. PCE divisions have built the habit of proving the value of a university credential up front.

Private universities (particularly mid-tier tuition dependent privates) should be asking their PCE units to measure "time to value" for all market-sensitive PCE-run degree programs, non-credit certificates and alternative credentials, track how quickly learners who successfully complete these programs reach a meaningful salary increase or career transition, and publish that data alongside the university’s traditional admissions materials for full-time students. Make measurable, near-term career outcomes as visible as rankings to reclaim, through your PCE offerings, some of the ROI that your traditional on-campus degrees are struggled to prove.

Recovering public confidence in college degrees requires evidence. PCE units already collect and act on that kind of evidence because their students demand it. Private universities that lean on their PCE units to bring the same rigor to their broader value proposition will have a stronger case to make to skeptical families than those relying on brand history alone.

Try To Keep Up

The number of 18-year old high school graduates has begun a long (and anticipated) decline. Private universities dependent on filling a freshman class that can pay the better part of the sticker price each fall are flailing to address revenue short-falls with tired plans that double-down the full-time residential experience. That's not sustainable when you're primarily drawing from a rapidly shrinking pool of traditional students. The better strategies for privates include targeting non-traditional students who have little interest in climbing walls in the fitness center and Division I sports but high demand for accessible and affordable market-sensitive credentials.

At nearly every US university, there is a division, school or colleges of professional & continuing education that sits closest to the non-traditional student market (the only market of learners that is growing while the traditional learner market contracts). These are the working adults and life-long learners looking for industry-relevant credentials that can be accessed and completed flexibly and affordably. Tuition dependent privates can spend budget they don't have on expensive recruitment and merit aid for a shrinking pool of eighteen-year-olds, or they can increase alternative enrollments and revenues through their PCE units.

Regional public universities are doing this exact thing at scale. They're unleashing their PCE units to launch degree completion pathways and short, stackable credentials tied to regional employer skills gaps, and generating significant alternative revenues in the process. Progressive tuition dependent privates should take heed and move quickly to invest in and prioritize their PCE units the same way. The privates that are actively de-prioritizing or deconstructing their PCE units are effectively ceding the alterative credential and adult learner market to regional publics and hoping that some how they'll sustain the enterprise with full-time residential students attending on a 52% discount.

Higher Ed Leadership Has An Imagination Problem

I was re-reading Inside Higher Ed's retrospective on 2025 and how so many university leaders were caught flat-footed by massive disruptions to federal research funding, catastrophic declines in traditional enrollments, and a complete collapse of the international student pipeline. The piece refers to the subsequent lagging institutional responses as "failures of imagination." When you overlay this assessment on the 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, it's hard not feel like universities are treating the existential pressures of affordability, trust, workforce relevance, evaporating enrollments, budget deficits, etc. as things to casually react to rather than redesign around.

Nowhere is this latency more evident than at mid-tier, tuition-dependent private universities that are reeling from the demographic cliff and waves of affordability backlash. Faced with cratering enrollment and increasing revenue pressures, we're seeing too many of these universities doubling down on their traditional residential experience as their differentiator. It's an understandable bet because the residential model is what they've sold for the last 100 years. But it's a flawed bet because it doesn't seriously include new revenue streams and new populations of learners beyond the 18-22 year-olds sitting in classrooms.

What's more conspicuously and dangerously absent from these institutional responses are strategic uses of existing Professional and Continuing Education (PCE) units as innovation platforms. These are the units already positioned closest to workforce and adult-learner markets, which represent the fastest-growing, most credential-agnostic population of potential students. Yet at too many mid-tier tuition-dependent privates, PCE is being pushed further to the periphery or deconstructed completely. Instead of letting PCE units experiment with pricing, delivery, programming and audience in ways the university can't, leadership is myopically suggesting these units' services, programs and missions can be spread across the university's schools and colleges, and administered by hack unimaginative robotic staff and doughy consultants. It's this dangerous inability to see the innovation infrastructure inside their own institutions that is the real failure of leadership at these universities. 

This Is Finally Being Documented

HEPI's new report, The Invisible Majority, shouldn't be read as a UK-only crisis. US universities are just as dependent on professional and support staff and just as ruthless in cutting that same workforce as financial pressures increase. When you read the report alongside the Higher Ed Dive roundup of layoffs, you understand that this is a structural pattern across Anglo-American higher ed.

If you've worked inside a private US university for a decade or more, you've seen this cycle play out about every three years. A deficit appears, "financial exigency" is declared or threatened, and the first budget item cut are professional and support staff. HEPI's report notes that professional staff make up 48% of university overheard budgets in the UK. There are some estimates that put this number at 50–65% of total operating expenditures for private US universities. The actions vary by campus and country, but they look eerily the same. Freeze hiring, suspend annual raises, and start to trim staff to find quick cash for the current fiscal year.

But what's more discouraging and troubling is what happens to leadership while all this slashing is going on. The HEPI report finds that when universities restructure under financial crises, they routinely introduce additional management layers that include expensive consultants and external "specialists," which add costs just as they are cutting the professional staff who deliver services and support. The HEPI finding is consistent with what I've seen across private US universities, where institutions pay more for "senior leaders" who prance publicly with grand flair as if they know what they're doing, then get handed more responsibility in spite of their abject failures.

The "invisible majority" in higher ed are woefully under-paid and increasingly squeezed by a systemic accountability gap. Private universities are aggressively and unapologetically cutting the people that keep the lights on while they are simultaneously protecting (and often expanding) the senior administrative layer that apparently isn't required to do anything measurable.

You Missed The Runway

New federal data reported by Inside Higher Ed confirms online learning is now permanent infrastructure throughout higher education.

Duh.

If you've spent any time working in professional & continuing education the last 10 years, this new reporting doesn't surprise you. But where the data can be helpful to senior leadership at private nonprofits is illustrating where they are lagging dangerously behind other institutions.  

Private for-profit four-year universities have the highest rate of online enrollment of any sector (90.5%) of students taking at least some classes online in fall 2024. The for-profits have been "all-in" on online delivery for a long time, a legacy of schools like the University of Phoenix building their entire model around.

Public nonprofit colleges are second-highest and climbing, with 54% of their students taking online courses in fall 2024 (that's up from 35 percent in 2019). This growth is attributed to demographic pressures that are shrinking pools of traditional 18-to-22-year-olds and pushing publics to use online programs to reach adult and nontraditional learners as an alternative student base (see Indiana University for a public that is doing this exceptionally well). 

Private nonprofit universities are growing online enrollment anemically slow (46% of their students took distance courses in fall 2024), just as they are reeling from steep tuition dependency, evaporating traditional enrollments, and acute budget deficits. This is also the slowest moving sector in higher ed. There are hundreds of private nonprofits struggling just to get out of the hanger because too many of them are wedded to a dying business model and doubling down on their "residential experience" as an identity worth holding onto. And while nearly all of them have an internal unit built to actually compete for non-traditional online learners (their PCE/O units), too many are dismantling their PCE units and calling it "efficiency" and reorganization. 

If the serious mid-tier tuition dependent privates looked at their peers that are doing online right, they'd pause on folding their school or college of professional & continuing education into generic back-office divisions of hacks, and delay handing their PCE budgets to unctuous consultants selling 300-percent online enrollment growth fantasies. Stop and look at what NYU, Northeastern, Boston University, USC and DePaul are doing with their PCE units' decades of online delivery, adult-learner expertise, and market-sensitive pricing.

The private nonprofits that figure this out in the next two years will realize tangible alternative revenues just as their traditional enrollments bottom out. The ones that keep dismantling their PCE units to save pennies this FY or next are just adding miles to their increasingly dilapidated runways.

Revisiting the St. John Rivers Problem

Suffer me this silly literary tangent...

I was re-reading an old essay about the failures of leadership in higher education and was reminded of a previous post in which I tried to reconcile the positional authority of individuals within universities with the complete lack of accountability and scrutiny that their authority would require in any other sector. When we consider the issue through the lens of "performance" (where individuals pretend to lead with cliche tropes and appearances, not action), it's easy to conclude that higher education manufactures this dangerous type of leader and then affords them an environment that tolerates incompetence and failure.

Leadership within a university (particularly mid-level leadership) is one of the few professional tracks where appearing to know what you’re doing is the primary currency. You don't get promoted by hitting the enrollment numbers or improving student persistence rates, you move into a position of authority because you're seen as the person who cares. Yes, the person who sincerely cares about the students and the team and the mission and all the things that senior administration likes to hear their unimaginative robotic mid-level leaders say. Ethics of care, commitments to staff well-being, removing barriers to access, blah, blah, blah. Spew all that with pronounced emphasis and the vocabulary of service and you're going to get that office with a window.  

This phenomenon isn't corrupt, but it does impose a selection process that filters for people who are good at sounding selfless while saying and doing nothing really. Perform just publicly enough and the diffuse, doughy and consensus-driven nature of university power permits these people to fool themselves that they're good and selfless leaders. Never overtly hostile, just calmly withdrawing warmth and connection from anyone who doesn't buy into the act. You know the feeling I'm talking about here? It's kind of creepy and genuinely sad when you see it happen to colleagues and friends.

What might help at this time of existential crises battering universities (particularly tuition dependent mid-tier privates) is real structural change. Implement real accountability based on real results, not yearly performance reviews that reaffirm mediocrity and reward playing "leader dress up" each day. Tie salary increases to those results. Consider IEP-like plans for mid-level managers that fail to do what they've convinced you they can do with their opaque and slow head-nodding confirmations. 

This isn't hard and it's desperately needed at universities that are starting to fray at the edges. Real accountability doesn't care how sincerely someone believes their own bullsh*t. It cares about results.

They're Coming For Your Adult Learners

Generations College, a 122-year-old two-year institution in Chicago, just started offering bachelor's degrees at the same tuition rate, scheduling and modalities as its associate degrees. Increasingly, community colleges across 24 states are doing the same thing. 

Community colleges aren't just nibbling at the edges of the adult learner market anymore. They're building the exact same four-year degree completion pathways that regional privates have spent decades assuming was theirs by default, and they're doing it with lower price points and less student debt. 

Like a broken record (but only because it's so ridiculously obvious), I'll say again that most mid-tier privates already have the internal unit built to aggressively and successfully compete for this market.  Schools and colleges of professional & continuing education (PCEs) have spent decades solving for exactly what Generations College proved by delivering flexible scheduling, non-traditional admissions, employer partnerships, accelerated formats and pricing structures that don't run through the spiraling, self-defeating discount rate strangling the traditional undergraduate side. PCE units can price a program to the market it's actually serving. The main campus, wedded to its sticker price, financial aid formulas and residential cost structures can't. But instead of scaling their PCE units to meet their regional community colleges head-on, some flailing (and failing) private universities are dismantling their PCE units or trying to fold their programs and support services into hack back-office administrative units with no experience or leadership in serving adult and non-traditional learners.

PCE units and community colleges understand that adult and non-traditional learners are looking for a place that understands them, will flex for them and support them, and won't make them start over every time they need to stop-out. Private universities that are truly committed to access and supporting this population of learners all the way through a 4-year degree need to scale their PCE units and staff them with people who actually understand the market, or stand-down anything they're doing that is "non-traditional" and cede the space to the community colleges that are doing it better.

"Start From Yes" Must Include PME

AACRAO's "Start From Yes" campaign includes nineteen organizations and several regional accreditors that are committing to the recommendations of the LEARN Commission. The simple but compelling outcome is to orient higher education away from presuming a learner's prior credit can never count toward a credential. AACRAO has found that 66% of learners who try to transfer prior learning credit end up repeating coursework anyway, and that 16% of those learners walk away from higher education entirely because the process is too cumbersome and exhausting. The "Start From Yes" campaign asks colleges and universities to flip the default and presume that prior learning is equivalent to a significant amount of credit.

No population has been harmed more by the institutional default than active duty service members and veterans trying to convert military technical training and professional military education (PME) into academic credit. A service member who completed advanced electronics training at a fleet school, or a senior enlisted leader who sat through the Sergeants Major Academy, enters a university admissions office with a JST or a CCAF transcript that routinely gets treated as a curiosity. The default is to have the military-connected learner prove to a faculty member or untrained academic advisor that their prior military training and education holds value beyond the transcript and applies directly to course objectives and outcomes within the curriculum.

The stakes here are exceedingly high for private universities trying desperately to generate alternative revenues from part-time and online learners (the markets in which active duty military and veterans reside). Regional publics already have the name recognition, legislative backing, and price points that box out most privates in the adult and military-connected learner market. So a progressive, fast, and transparent credit-for-military-training policy is one of the few genuine differentiators a private university can still offer this population. 

Private universities serious about serving those who serve(d) have to enact policies that default to awarding credit for ACE-evaluated military training unless a specific academic reason says otherwise. They have to aggressively retain and hire evaluators and advisors who actually know how to read a JST and a CCAF transcript. They have to design flexible degree maps to remove time-bound requirements a “retake” rules that override ACE recommendations. They MUST give their PCE units ownership of these evaluations, because that's where the expertise already resides. And they have to actively track and publish their own credit-award rates for military learners. "Start From Yes" gives private universities an easily implemented plan. Whether they take up the plan and run with it depends on how truly committed a university is to being the better place for all military-connected learners, not just those arriving with GI Bill benefits.

The Military Student's Time Poverty Problem

Inside Higher Ed has a great piece this week on the University of Louisiana System's StudyNPlay partnership, which gives student-parents a supervised space to study while their kids play nearby. It's a success and cost-effort to help resolve the use of "time poverty" that so many student-parents contend with each semester. Time poverty is the gap between finding a study window and actually having one, and it's a problem that many of us in the professional & continuing education space are well aware of because it affects nearly every adult or non-traditional student we serve.

The article has me thinking about active duty military members trying to finish degrees online. Civilian student-parents studying full-time on campus typically have modest control over their calendars. Active duty students don't have that control. Unlike a student-parent whose time poverty is chronic but predictable, an online active duty service member's time can vanish entirely with short notice or no notice at all.

I'm imagining what universities that claim they're a better place for military-connected students could do to operationalize something similar to the StudyNPlay program for their online active duty students. What if private universities increased the number of asynchronous courses they run, built with flexibility and self-guided learning, not a collection of recorded lectures and live sessions welded to a fixed course schedule that assumes a student can log in every Tuesday night? What if they implemented a policy for "orders-based" extensions and withdrawals that are automatic and don't require reams of paperwork and appeals to prove hardship to an untrained back-office staffer who's never heard of a permissive TDY? What if they hired qualified and trained advisors who actually understand military life, and not rely on AI bots or a shared inbox staffed by whoever is monitoring the student help email account that week? Just imagine the positive impact that would have on the persistence and success of online active duty military students. 

Imagine.

None of this is complicated. It's easily implemented because well-established schools and colleges of professional & continuing education have been doing versions of it for years. These are the units within every university that already understand learners whose lives don't run on an agrarian calendar.

Tennessee's Mic Drop

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the "Tennessee Promise" confirmed that free community college can work without bankrupting a state or the community colleges serving its residents. The program, which covers whatever tuition and fees remain after financial aid, boosted college enrollment by 5.4 percentage points and associate degree completion by 2.9 percentage points, while transfers to four-year institutions climbed 8-9%. Participants in their early 20s earned 6-8% more than peers who skipped college entirely. The cost per student is under $1,000 a year, because most participants were already Pell- or state-aid eligible. The NBER analysis suggests the program pays for itself after accounting for the wage premium a community college credential produces.

This is a model that will be repeated throughout the country (New York, Michigan, Ohio, and North Carolina have similar initiatives underway). And this is why tuition-dependent mid-tier private universities need to take serious notice. This is a model that is fully replicable on a smaller scale if an institution is willing to identify a specific, underserved population, strip out unnecessary cost and friction, and support it with market-sensitive degrees and alternative credentials. Not surprising, I will suggest that this is precisely what schools and colleges of professional & continuing education (PCE) are built to do.

PCE units have the pricing flexibility, the employer relationships, and the operational muscle memory that traditional academic units don't to successfully implement at the institutional level a bold and aggressive model like the Tennessee Promise. A last-dollar scholarship initiative, scaled down to a workforce partnership, an employer tuition-benefit population, or a bridge cohort of adult learners with some prior credit, isn't a stretch for PCE units. These are the units on private university campuses that have been running micro-versions of "remove the barrier, add support, capture the attainment" for years, almost always without adequate funding or executive leadership support.

I'll note again that this is the tragedy and missed opportunities playing out at so many mid-tier privates. While places like Tennessee are executing on targeted affordability and student outcomes, too many private universities are deprioritizing or dismantling the only units on their campuses equipped to replicate the success. These privates still have a narrow window to compete for these markets on smaller, targeted scales, but only through the PCE units they're currently busy dismantling.