The Chronicle of Higher Education October 12, 2011 Georgia Institution Wants to Put Students on the Path to a Degree Before They Enroll By Sara Lipka Albany State University, a historically black institution in southwestern Georgia, will begin pushing prospective students this week to get as close as they can to a degree before enrolling there. The university plans to announce on Monday an On-Ramp Program that lets students "start college before college" through StraighterLine, a company that offers self-paced, online courses, and through LearningCounts.org, an online portal to document workplace skills and have professors evaluate whether they merit academic credit. "This is the way you democratize education in this country," said Everette J. Freeman, president of Albany State. "The issue is not where you start or how you start; it's where you finish." While the president clearly champions the arrangement, the faculty is taking a more cautious approach. Twenty-one other colleges, as StraighterLine partners, automatically grant credit for the company's courses, and about 200 institutions have pledged to award credit recommended by LearningCounts, based on portfolios students prepare. But Albany State is perhaps the first university to combine those resources in its recruitment. Research suggests that a head start toward a degree is no small motivator-that students who begin bachelor's-degree programs with some credit have higher graduation rates than other students, and finish faster. Albany State has reached agreements for credit transfer with five two-year colleges in the past five years, and campus officials have witnessed that upward trend in graduation rates. "The students who come to Albany State from our sister access institutions, they seem to have a focus that's nearly laserlike in completing their degree," Mr. Freeman said. "They're saying, 'By golly, I want to finish this thing.'" Transfer students' graduation rates are higher, the president said, but he could not immediately cite numbers. Over all, Albany State's six-year graduation rate is 45 percent, compared with a median of 53 percent for four-year institutions nationally, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. StraighterLine has recently lost favor<http://chronicle.com/article/Ambitious-Provider-of-Online/129052/> among some traditional colleges that, for reasons of quality control or revenue, prefer that students take their institution's own courses. But the company attracted Albany State in part on the promise that it could enroll students with good track records in the company's courses-and perhaps better chances of graduating. "We never had the conversation of, 'Your success rate is x, and it's going to go to y,'" said Burck Smith, founder and chief executive of StraighterLine. Still, lagging graduation rates at less-selective public universities call for multiple responses, he said: "This is one way to start attacking that problem." Faculty Concerns Mr. Freeman worries about college dropouts' debt, and the burden on taxpayers of their federal grants and student loans. Offering students a low-risk way to try to earn some college credit is conscientious stewardship, he said. If they fail, it's at a modest cost. "If they succeed," he said, he would tell them, "Come on in." Albany State already evaluates students' experiential learning for possible academic credit through the online-education company Learning House. Now it will use the LearningCounts portal for experiential-learning assessments, too, and it will grant credit for 13 of about two dozen StraighterLine courses, including English Composition, Introduction to Psychology, and Macroeconomics, so long as students earn grades of at least 70 or 80 on a 100-point scale (the minimums vary by subject). Over the past month, the Georgia university's deans and department chairs have reviewed StraighterLine materials, Mr. Freeman said. "Our faculty understood instantly the value" of finding equivalencies, he said. Faculty members are curious about StraighterLine, said Melvin A. Shelton, an associate professor of education and director of the honors program at Albany State. In informal conversations, colleagues have asked one another if the company's courses will meet their standards-"the normal kinds of inquiry questions that one would hear among university professors for any new initiative," he said. "I haven't heard anybody put it down," Mr. Shelton said, "or praise it." The president of Albany State's Faculty Senate, Donald J. Kagay, a professor of history, was surprised to learn of the partnership last week, saying that administrators had not consulted the senate about StraighterLine. According to Mr. Freeman, Mr. Kagay declined to attend a meeting, and another member of the senate participated. Mr. Kagay said last week that he and other professors previously unaware of the partnership feared that the university would be awarding credit for "dumbed down" courses. "It's an attack on faculty standards and academic standards," he said. "We might as well have Robby the Robot teaching those classes." Mr. Kagay suggested that tentative applicants take a course or two from nearly 2,900 the University System of Georgia offers online. The Web site for Albany State's On-Ramp Program does mention the university's own online courses. It also entices students to sign up for StraighterLine with a $50 coupon. StraighterLine costs $99 a month, plus $39 for each course. LearningCounts charges $500 for a portfolio-development course and $250 per each six credits students request in any one discipline. That means students now have the chance to complete some college for "pennies on the dollar," said Mark P. Campbell, vice president of LearningCounts, hailing Albany State's move. "This is an incredible accelerant to degree completion," he said. As federal college-completion goals loom, he said, he thinks the On-Ramp Program will catch on at other institutions. "We expect this to be the first of many." SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 Skype:sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.