An evolving, individualized higher ed curriculum preparing students for the workforce

In this episode of Work in Progress, I am joined by Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University to talk about how the online university flips the standard postsecondary education model to create individualized learning plans for each student. We also discuss the latest WGU offering: a new fund designed to help prepare students for jobs in nursing, which is now facing a critical shortage nationwide.
Since its founding in 1997. Western Governors University (WGU) has prided itself in innovating the way higher education prepares students to enter the workforce.
Pulsipher says at the heart of that continuing innovation is the idea that every person is unique, with unique needs and circumstances, as they enter into the workforce or seek a career that will provide them with economic mobility.
"It starts with a very simple truth: there is inherent worth in every individual and that we believe – and know, in fact – if given the opportunity, each one has something big to contribute. Everyone has the innate capacity for learning. It doesn't mean that we learn the same way or that we go at the same pace," he explains.
"We apply that by just simply recognizing everyone can learn and everyone has the opportunity to contribute, so how do we make these pathways as accessible and affordable and traversable for every individual?"
Pulsipher says that translates into offering individualized and personalized plans for each student, along with a mentor to help them navigate the pathway to their career goals.
"The program mentor is someone who's with you from the day you start your program until the day you graduate. Their job isn't to just augment your instruction and your learning, but to also help you deal with all the challenges, disruptions, offsets that you may have. It's like a bit of a secret sauce into helping our students complete at much higher rate than they might otherwise."
Another key to helping the students, according to Pulsipher, is working with employers across the country, accessing what skills they are looking for right now and in the near future.
"We always adapting and advancing the curriculum to be relevant to the world of work. Certainly, technology's increasing the pace of that change. We know the shelf life of skills is declining or the knowledge is declining, meaning you're going to have to make sure that what you're learning. Our curriculum is directly relevant to the opportunities you see within the next three- to five year horizon, two- to three-year horizon, one- to two-year horizon.
"We're always leveraging our engagements with our employer networks – we have over 250 employers – so that we're always ingesting that workforce data back into the design and development of our curriculum. I think one of the key things that our students rely upon us is for the relevancy of what they've learned to the jobs they want to pursue," he tells me.
One field that is in big demand right now is health care. For example, there's as many as 40,000 unfilled jobs for nurses across the country right now.
"We know that number is going to keep growing because of the aging population and the higher demand for the health care services that are needed. (WGU) is a nationally-scaled provider of nursing programs. We're an institution that operates in the most states for pre-licensure nursing programs, we're now in over 20 different states.
"This allows us to leverage that scale to solve a strategic workforce gap that exists in health care. The hospitals, health systems, community health centers that need those qualified individuals, here is a talent provider now that can do that with a high degree of relevancy and really high pass rates," says Pulsipher.
That combination has led WGU to partner with Social Finance to create the Reinvesting in Nursing Education and Workforce (ReNEW) Fund, which "aims to address these challenges by helping to cover the cost of the final two years of WGU’s...