Bill Kerr: In a 1995 meeting of the Western Governor’s Association, Utah Governor Mike Leavitt and Colorado Governor Roy Romer raised concerns about the ballooning costs of higher education and the growing disconnect between what was being taught in the college classroom and the knowledge and skills required in the workplace. From this spark grew the eventual birth of Western Governor’s University, a nonprofit online university with a dual mission to expand access to higher education and teach competencies that are relevant to employment.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. Today I’m speaking with Scott Pulsipher, an HBS alumni and the president of Western Governor’s University, or WGU. Scott is going to talk with us about the innovative practices and involvement of employers, which allows WGU to deliver on its mission. He will also discuss recent efforts to expand access even further by offering crucial support services to those close to the college-readiness gap. Welcome, Scott!

Scott Pulsipher: Thank you so much for having me, Bill.

Kerr: Scott, give us a few of the headline numbers about Western Governor’s University, or WGU.

Pulsipher: Sure. We today serve over 115,000 full-time students. Cumulatively to date, since our first graduate in 1999, we have over 130,000 graduates. This year alone, I think we’ll graduate nearly 35,000 bachelor’s and master’s graduates this year. Of those students, 70 percent of them are in one or more underserved categories, and that can include low-income households, military populations, under-represented populations. And I think some of the notable things too is that, among our graduates, 95 percent of them are employed, 89 percent in their field of study. They’re having $20,000 in income gains within four years of graduation. It’s really driving what we believe is the fundamental promise of education as being the surest path to opportunity.

Kerr: Okay, so it serves many different groups. Over 100,000 people—that makes you probably twice as big as any traditional university, bricks-and-mortar campus. How did this get started? You didn’t start at 100,000 people. Take us back to the beginning.

Pulsipher: No, we definitely didn’t. As you mentioned, the governors, particularly led by Governor Leavitt in Utah and Governor Romer out of Colorado, they realized that they had very large populations of their respective states that were not being served by their traditional systems of higher education. And, in particular, they noted the adults that had some college and no degree. And they were trying to figure out how to mobilize this population of residents into their workforce and to provide a means by which they could access high-quality education but fit it into their very busy lives already. If you looked at that population of adults, they typically have children already. Over 70 percent of them are working full time. They have many obligations that already consume much of their hours, and other things like they couldn’t be on a campus; geographic proximity was a challenge.

Kerr: Especially in the western states with lots of wide-open spaces.

Pulsipher: That’s right. A lot of rural populations. I think even among our students, over 15 percent of them are in rural counties. So these individuals, you had to leverage really probably two things. One is, just because they hadn’t completed their degree does not mean that they didn’t have a lot of education or experience already, so you had to figure out a way to better align the educational or pedagogical model to the experience that they could leverage into their learning. They don’t have four years or a full two years to stop work and go do that degree. And out of that emerged the notion of competency-based education. It is a model that basically focuses on identifying those learning outcomes for which you as a student have to demonstrate proficiency in order to complete the course. We did not invent it. It had already existed. But it was a way in which you could personalize the learning to the adult that was to be served. The other thing was clearly the internet at that time—1996, ’97—was definitely in its formative years, if you will. But this was technology that could surely be utilized to increase access to those individuals that could not leave their job, go to a campus; that they could access the learning independent of time and place because of the internet.

Kerr: Yeah, it’s amazing foresight to grab the internet that early and harness it into education. Tell us a little bit about the growth process over those first two decades. Was it smooth? Were there major transitions? And also, when you say stopping short of a degree, is that an associate’s degree, is it a bachelor’s degree? Tell us a little bit about those needs that you were trying to serve.

Pulsipher: In most cases, these individuals just had a few courses. Some of them have associate’s degrees, but by and large, they were transferring in somewhere around 30 credits, so that’s still even sub-associate’s. They may have attended a couple of different terms. They acquired some general education courses during that time, but in reality these individuals were really no better off than having a high school diploma, quite frankly. And if you’ve seen the trends over the last several decades, high school diplomas, and even associate’s degrees are like, while associate’s can add some value to a lifetime earnings of an individual, it’s not dramatically so compared to a bachelor’s degree, where you really unlock that potential. As it relates to the growth, there is no doubt that the first decade, by and large, was very bumpy—even just establishing, if you will, the credibility and the respect that would even earn that first enrolled student. It was …

Kerr: … getting regulatory bodies and the accrediting boards and all that behind this very, very different model.

Pulsipher: A very, very different model. And it had to be relevant in a variety of different ways. One, the student had to know that in acquiring the education, they could, in fact, leverage it to pursue new opportunities that would open up either career progression or even a change of a job, whatever it may have been. Otherwise, the value proposition was just going to be completely moot. Establishing from the get-go, really ensuring that the curriculum was going to be aligned with the competencies that were needed in the workforce, that that was going to be a core differentiator in WGU’s offering. At the same time early on, because it was 19 western states, they also had to convene the regional accreditors that covered all these 19 states, and so they even formed what was interestingly called IRAC, the Inter-Regional Accrediting Commission. The regional accreditation model was your service area was within your respective states, and a certain number of counties in those states. It was not a national footprint, let alone just the west. So they didn’t know how to tackle this thing.

Kerr: The disruptive business model and the challenges of bringing that out to market.

Pulsipher: Not only that, if you consider that the funding and economic model of WGU is very different than traditional systems, where you depended heavily upon operating budgets that came from the state or you depended heavily on grants as a private institution. You know, we designed the model to be self-sustaining on tuition only.

Kerr: I think most of our listeners would be familiar with online education, but let’s go back to competency-based education. Unpack that a little bit more for us. What is it, and how do you deliver it?

Pulsipher: You have to be proficient sufficiently so that you can then advance from one course to the next course. So in the design of the curriculum itself, you have to be really, really good at identifying key learning outcomes, not just at a full program level—a program being a major. If you’re going to get your degree in finance or your degree in nursing, whatever it may be, that is a collection, if you will, of over 200 or even 300 different competencies. Then those competencies are identified into course units. Those course units may have anywhere from 8 to 12 different competencies or learning outcomes that you have to demonstrate proficiency in.

Kerr: You have to get through every single bit of it. You can’t just pass on the margin.

Pulsipher: That’s right. And it is a pass-fail model. In the case of competency-based education, you have to be proficient or not. I actually think that most of us that have had experience with competency-based education already. And by that, what I mean is, think of the courses that you had. The ones that you are pretty proficient in, you didn’t spend a lot of time in, but you were required within a credit-hour model to actually persist in that course for three and a half months or 15 weeks or whatever. But in reality, you may have not gone to the lectures. You may have just spent …

Kerr: Perhaps not.

Pulsipher: ... two weeks of studying the textbook. You did the work that you needed to do to ensure that you achieved the level of proficiency that you desired. Whereas you then end up spending more of your time on those courses and that you don’t have proficiency in. That is effectively what happens in competency-based education. It allows the personalization of education to happen. And back to the adult learners that we serve and those that have some college and no degree, they have a lot of experience. So, they can leverage that experience to accelerate at a pace that’s right for them through the courses they’re already quite competent in, and then spend the time focusing on those that they’re not. And one of our designs is that in a six-month term for our students, you can complete as many courses as you are able. Time is the variable, not proficiency. So, we don’t have grades. We let time be the variable. And the other thing about competency-based education, it allows you to design the curriculum to directly map to competencies in the workforce.

Kerr: Yeah, how do you build these curricula?

Pulsipher: You build a curriculum with very regular and consistent input from advisory councils that represent the workforce that allows us to then identify what are the future needs of that workforce. A good example in health care right now. We are one of the leading providers of a degree in value-based health care, which focuses more on integrated care and the at-home services, and everything else like that. And what are the competencies that the individuals who are providing all those services need to be effective in that workforce? And that may be in contrast to traditional development, which is very faculty-centered. And those program councils, as well as the full college councils that we have. We also have assessment councils. All these different councils operate pretty much in conjunction with our curriculum faculty to ensure that they’re always designing the learning outcomes to map to the competencies …

Kerr: One other thing your model does is it separates out a whole bunch of different roles. So, you have someone that designs the curriculum, someone who teaches it, a mentor for the students, someone separately who assesses it. Whereas at Harvard, most all of these things get often embodied in a single person through a course. So, tell us about that choice to parse things up.

Pulsipher: So in that same model, the faculty notion is very different. You don’t have faculty who contain all of the responsibilities of a traditional faculty. You don’t have one person dealing with the design of the curriculum, designing the syllabus, also writing the tests, you know, and then teaching and lecturing and then ultimately grading the tests as well, administering and grading tests. We unbundled that entire role into four different roles. So we have faculty who are exclusively focused on designing and developing the curriculum, inclusive of the assessments, to ensure that every single student who takes those courses are taking the same courses regardless of where you are in the country, et cetera. The other set of faculty are really our teaching faculty, but there are two different types of roles there. One is the program mentor. We recognize with these students that the reasons for them stopping out had little to do with their cognitive ability. It often had to do with other dimensions. We call them the “affective domain,” or non-cognitive domain of things. It could have been self-efficacy. It could have simply been time: “I had too many constraints or financial issues,” et cetera. And a program mentor for us is a faculty member who has a master’s degree or higher in the major or the field of study that the student is pursuing but they operate as a dedicated instructor, a dedicated faculty member who “sherpas” every single student from the start all the way until their graduation. And their responsibility is to ensure that they have a very well personalized course plan, so their traverse through their major is going to be unique to them. They focus on augmented or integrated instruction in preparation for their assessments, everything else like that. The last thing within the teaching model is we also have then dedicated subject matter experts who are the instructors for every single course. So, if you’re enrolled in a major, you’ll have your mentor that you’ll talk to every week, but then depending on your level of proficiency, you’ll be talking to different course instructors. So, if you had a 40-course program, you can meet with 40 different instructors, but you always have the same program mentor. Then the last faculty model is we have independent evaluators—those that independently of those who designed and taught the curriculum, we have evaluators who then do the evaluation of all students’ performance on those assessments.

Kerr: So a lot of specialization in the process.

Pulsipher: That’s right.

Kerr: And you didn’t mention research. I assume that faculty are not engaged in research at WGU.

Pulsipher: They are not. We are decidedly a teaching institution. We focus absolutely on the transfer of knowledge and not the research.

Kerr: And do most of these faculty work from home, or are there places in Salt Lake City that they’re sitting? Where are the faculty located?

Pulsipher: They entirely work from home, yeah. So over 70 percent of our workforce is remote. That is true for almost all of the faculty. The only ones who are somewhat co-located are those curriculum faculty.

Kerr: There’s a lot of data flowing around here. Talk to us about how WGU is using data to enhance student outcomes, what interventions happen along the way.

Pulsipher: The data that comes from that technology-enabled student journey starts to become quite useful in terms of really personalizing the interactions that the students are going to have with the different learning resources, getting them prompts and notifications to nudge them in the right direction and keep them consistent in their studying and preparation. But the data is also helpful in terms of the faculty, the mentors, and the course instructors understanding the learning style and approach that each individual student is taking to their learning. How do they engage with learning resources? Where are their choke points, if you will, in their studying? In their pre-assessments, where are the areas that you need to focus on the learning and development?

Kerr: So separate learning profiles for each student and how to interact with them?

Pulsipher: That’s right. Every individual has the capacity for learning, but we learn in different ways. With data, it’s starts the power of better understanding of how each individual approaches their learning, and then how do the faculty adapt to that, as well as how does the technology adapt to that? Another simple example may be focused on how a student works in shorter time cycles of work rather than a month-long of you have a goal at the end of the month. You’re like, nope. You have a goal every three days, you have a goal every week, because the way in which you engage, you require more regular interaction.

Kerr: And many of your students are taking classes sequentially rather than in parallel.

Pulsipher: That’s right. Typically they’ll maybe have one or two courses simultaneously, but in reality, we have had students who have completed their entire degree in one term. And so they’re probably covering 20, 30 courses over the course of six months.

Kerr: Good ROI, given that you charge them a single price.

Pulsipher: Oh, yeah.

Kerr: By the way, tell us the price at WGU right now.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Our tuition currently is $3,250 for a six-month term. Like I mentioned previously, you can complete as many courses as you’re able in that six-month term, and we have a flat $145 learning resource fee, which basically covers all the virtual resources that you’re utilizing: your textbooks, all of the content, all of the, you know, assessments, everything else.

Kerr: So for a little over $6,000 a year, you can be in college, take as many courses as you want.

Pulsipher: That’s right. In our model today, we see our median time to complete for a bachelor’s degree is two years and four months. So five terms, you’re talking about $17,000 total cost to complete a bachelor’s degree.

Kerr: Wow. And what does this do in terms of student debt, which is a big and growing challenge in America?

Pulsipher: For our students, we introduced the “responsible borrowing initiative” just about five years ago, too, which just informed them about what is the cost of attendance at WGU. And we recommend that you only really borrow the absolute minimum that you need to cover that cost. And so we were able to reduce annual borrowing per student by 40 percent, and that has reduced then debt per graduate just in the last five years from over $21,000 to now we’re about $15,000, and it’s still trending down, which is great. And especially considering, again, among our underserved populations, just about 70 percent of our students are utilizing federal aid in some way: grants, loans, or military benefits, et cetera. So not only keeping the costs low, but reducing the borrowing that they need to cover that cost increases the ROI for them.

Kerr: Some of the criticisms that come toward competency-based education include maybe a lack of a liberal arts perspective, or work on citizenship, or it’s a very specialized knowledge base, but not broad enough. I’m sure you’ve heard that one before. So tell us, how do you respond to those types of criticisms?

Pulsipher: All of the liberal education, the general education core is integrated into all of our programs, and so we don’t subscribe to the notion that in a competency-based model that for some reason you can’t teach and assess liberal education as well, including the key aspects that are needed in the workforce, like critical reasoning, written and verbal communication, dealing with ambiguity, interpersonal engagement. We believe you can actually teach those as well, and that you can assess those. One of the ways in which we rely on some of that assessment is the practical application of that learning. By that what we mean is, within our nursing programs and our teacher education programs, we actually have demonstration teaching and clinical rotations, and those are integrated, they are applied field experience of the learning that you’ve had in courses that is assessed then in your actual engagement. We think that we’ll see ourselves continue to advance the notion of applied liberal arts, or applied general education; that we anticipate in the near future that we’ll see the advancement of interdisciplinary studies in a competency-based model.

Kerr: Scott, I want to spend a little bit more time on your decision to join WGU. Give us that story.

Pulsipher: I did not have a singular path. A colleague of yours here, Clayton Christensen, he often talks about that emerging career vs. the deliberate one. Mine was decidedly an emergent one, having gone from consulting, work in pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, ultimately ending up in software and technology. But I think through all of that, the thing that I really started focusing on was how was my life and my leadership going to make a difference in the lives of others. And so as I was at another startup and being recruited by WGU, and I started learning more about how this is making a difference in the lives of not just hundreds of the individuals that I might associate with in a professional context. It was impacting tens of thousands, if not even now hundreds of thousands, of lives, it just struck me as how meaningful it was. That came to a climax, if you will, when I was invited to attend a commencement, and at that commencement seeing that it wasn't just parents, it was actually parents and children there attending. When these individuals were meeting their faculty mentors for the first time, the amount of emotion that was just pouring out was incredible. Then hearing the student graduates and their speeches at graduation, and the things that they had to overcome to reach this milestone in their lives, what I walked away with was this realization that this milestone meant way more to them than the same milestone meant to me, and it was because if only because we were already on different paths. I came from a strong middle class family, but education was part of my life. My father was the first generation, he was the first college graduate in his family. My mother was also a college graduate. That was kind of already on the expected path, and for so many of these adults that we serve, it just wasn't. It was something that they had to kind of pull themselves up by their bootstraps, overcome so many challenges, both within their communities, and within their families, and financially, and everything else like that, that now reaching this it became and pinnacle that just realized that this was the single greatest catalyst for people to change their lives. It just was so moving to me.

Kerr: Now you get to come aboard. So you’ve been with WGU for about three years. What have you tried to bring from this private-sector experience into WGU, and as you think about the next five or 10 years into the future, what are the core things that you can inject from the outside into WGU?

Pulsipher: We actually focus on those who aren’t being served well. Who are 3 to 5 percent who really hate this thing? And why is it that they hate it? Because if you solve it for those 3 to 5 percent, it’s going to actually improve the product for the 100 percent of the students that you serve. It is incumbent upon us to actually envision a future for how education integrates into opportunity, opportunity being employment, or workforce, or whatever individuals want to pursue. I think we have to utilize our success as a catalyst to kind of reinventing the whole system of higher education. The last point is that I think I’ve learned is when you’re trying to really manage a high-growth, high-scaling organization, leadership is absolutely critical. Our single greatest constraint on our ability to execute our vision is the leadership capacity. And so we’re investing heavily in developing our leaders because they are the ones who will expand our ability to handle more innovations, more inventions, the execution, implementation of those—not just domestically, but even on a global scale. And that requires not just really strong hiring practices, but really strong development practices, because our own organization is growing over 20 percent just year over year in terms of the talent you’re bringing on.

Kerr: Yeah. That second point in particular pulls out or connects to your 10-times vision. Formulate that for us, and then tell us about some of the exciting new things, like the academies that you’re engaged in, to try to start making the journey down that way.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Yeah, the notion of 10x or 10 times came about simply because one day I was contemplating, okay, so if WGU continues to grow in enrollment at 20 percent a year, we’ll double every four to five years. And if you measure that impact of WGU on the number of graduates that we could enable or advance their lives, as a percent of the total need, it was a single-digit percent. I mean, in the US alone, there’s over 40 million to 50 million adults who need access to high-quality education, and that doesn’t even include the future model of a life-long learning loop, where even those of us who have degrees need to come back and get reskilled and upskilled to get the new certificates for the future of work. The notion is simply that we believe we can accelerate the invention of new operating models that will address readiness and expanding pre-college or pre-postsecondary readiness pathways that begins the on ramp much sooner. Rather than remediate it later, better prepare them sooner. And so how do you address adults that have no college, or adults that are coming into a post-secondary age demographic, and address those non-cognitive factors that were limiters before? Attainment rates in the US are still ... 42 percent or so of adults have an associate’s or higher, 33 percent have a bachelor’s. The attainment rate is getting better, meaning of those that are college-going, I think now it’s 56 or 58 percent of those who enter college will actually complete college, which is great. It’s definitely improved dramatically. On the flip side, only 70 percent of high school graduates are college-going, and within one year, 26 percent of those who went to college drop out. So, of 19-year-olds alone, over 45 percent of them are no longer in the post-secondary system. We have to figure out how we make that more accessible and ready. We see ourselves enabling and spinning out or funding entities that are going to address learning and the personalization of it to improve student attainment. We see ourselves investing in things that are going to increase the workforce transition and ongoing employee-enabling …

Kerr: So sparking various areas toward improvement …

Pulsipher: ... various areas. And so that they’re going to be very nontraditional. I mean, you won’t look at them and go, “Oh, that’s an accredited, regulated, federal student-aid eligible entity.” You’re like ... no, I think these are elements …

Kerr: In your academies model, you talk about things like power skills and grit. Explain those to us.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Power skills for us are the new version of soft skills. Everyone says they’re soft skills, but in fact these are the most enabling skill sets. And so power skills have a lot to do with, first and foremost, do you have self-efficacy, do you have a purpose in your life, do you understand how education ties into that purpose and your progress around it? It addresses the communication capability. Can you be persuasive, and can you convey ideas and your thinking? It addresses things like interpersonal engagement and collaboration. Those power skills often also associate with liberal education. It’s in how do you understand humanities and psychology, and also the history and everything else like that. Those power skills that are a key part of the curriculum around readiness. The sense is that leveraging the innovation and the proving ground that became the large-scale university, that will allow this kind of network effect of stimulating and reinventing a number of operating areas around the entire higher education system.

Kerr: As you think about this 10x vision, and the partnerships that you could build along that way, many people given the groups that you’re serving and the drop out after high school and stuff with would point toward community colleges, and possibly also unions or organized labor. Are you working with those types of groups on programs?

Pulsipher: We are. In April of 2019 we announced, for example, our engagement with the Service Employees International Union. It’s one of the largest unions in the US. It’s particularly strong in California around the health care sector. And so partnering with SEIU—United Health Workers West, we’re specifically addressing those certificates and those particular credentials that are necessary to address a workforce gap that is nearly 400,000 in allied health just in California alone. We’re doing that in a way that those certificates and credentials are fully transferable and stackable into degree programs as well, because we don’t want them to be a one-and-done opportunity cul-de-sac. We have over 400 partnerships today across the US alone, and in some states like California, and Ohio, and Florida, we have statewide articulation agreements where we specifically design what are generally called “two plus two” programs. Complete your associate’s degree with a community college; you’ll have guaranteed transfer of all those credits and enrollment into a WGU bachelor’s program. So you can go straight, for example, from an associate’s in nursing into a bachelor’s of nursing, which is a requirement for the future work of nursing.

Kerr: ... and start working at the same time.

Pulsipher: ... and you’re working at the same time. So you’ll notice that between community college populations of learners at WGU, there’s also a lot of similarities there. They are working, they have children. They may even be going part time to community colleges, but it allows them, again, to fit their pursuit of education into their already busy lives.

Kerr: You mentioned earlier when talking about SEIU this kind of notion of pathways, or that you didn’t enter the cul-de-sac of skills. Walk us through what one of those transition processes could be.

Pulsipher: Yeah. Opportunity cul-de-sac is the notion of achieving a particular professional credential that doesn’t have any path beyond that credential. An example would be like a pharma-tech. You could pay upwards of $10,000 to become a certified pharma-technician earning $25,000 to $30,000 a year. But if you want to go into furthering that career, you have to start over. You basically don’t get any transferred value from achieving that credential into the next credential you may want to pursue. And so, what we’ve designed within this space in health care, particularly beginning with medical coders certification, is that medical coders certification and the learning that you acquire from that has also transferable credit upon which you can stack the learning. And so the next credential may be a medical assistant, so that you increase not only the learning that you have but also the opportunity outcome. You can now actually get a higher-paying job. You can fill needs that may also start leading to physician’s assistant, et cetera. But even once you acquire that medical assistant credential, we can leverage all that learning and stack on it further. So now you want to pursue a bachelor’s degree in health informatics, or even a bachelor’s in nursing. It’s not throw-away credit, it’s not throw-away learning. The notion of the future in learning is that it’s fully transferable and stackable. And being a competency-based education provider, I think we’re uniquely suited to be able to validate and assess learning from a variety of different channels, whether they’re alternative providers, employer-based training, military. And that then can have credit attached to it upon which you can stack them to the next credential.

Kerr: Yeah. So then taking this from a four-year, one-size-has-to-fit-all type of program on campus to something that has much more flexibility and adaptability towards the future of work.

Pulsipher: We kind of see this as an integrated network of stairs that ultimately could result in a degree of a bachelor’s, but it may have been 10 years in the future.

Kerr: Scott, I’m sure you’re very busy with the 10x vision and all of the various growth paths that you have in mind. But as a final question, if you could take any WGU course, which one would you take?

Pulsipher: Oh, that’s a tough question to answer. One of my favorite ones is though, we call it “Leadership and Communication,” and it is a course that specifically addresses some of these aspects around self-efficacy. It’s very unique because it actually allows you to learn more about how you learn. That Leadership and Communications course is probably the one I’d sign up for.

Kerr: Scott, thanks for sharing with us the experiences of WGU over the last 22 years, reaching 100,000-plus students, and best of luck with the 10x vision that lies ahead.

Pulsipher: Thank you so much.

Kerr: And thanks to all of you for listening in.