New Study from Capella Supports Support for Non-Traditional Students

Capella Uni­ver­sity com­mis­sioned a study recently on the value of return­ing to school. The results lend sup­port for just about every­thing we’re doing in the indus­try to fig­ure out the rapidly evolv­ing learn­ing mod­els. You can find the results site at http://www.degreesofopportunity.org. There’s also an inter­view with the head researcher on the page, Dr. Lyun­gai Mbilinyi from Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton.

Amidst all the brouhaha about qual­ity of edu­ca­tion, it appears that the num­ber of peo­ple want­ing to head back to school in a non-traditional fash­ion just keeps grow­ing, fuel­ing the fly-by-night pro­grams and extend­ing this sharks v. jets street fight between the tra­di­tion­als. We need to move past this. From the findings:

• Only one-third of those who would like more edu­ca­tion said that they would “prob­a­bly pur­sue this.â€�





• The top two bar­ri­ers to pur­su­ing higher edu­ca­tion were:





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  • Find­ing the time for school amidst work, fam­ily, and other commitments.

  
  
  

  • Find­ing the money for school, includ­ing the need to pro­vide for them­selves and their fam­ily while attend­ing school.

  
  

  
  

We need to launch a cam­paign that edu­cates on the real­i­ties of edu­ca­tion — not just the beyond-the-degree ben­e­fits. I was talk­ing with Mark Alexan­der today about other stu­dent ser­vices orga­ni­za­tions that exist specif­i­cally to sup­port the extra-curricular needs of stu­dents. This one struck me: Stu­dent Resource Ser­vices.

What genius, right? With now a full 60% of atten­dance in higher edu­ca­tion com­ing from a non-traditional age range (from the sur­vey and inter­view), it should make per­fect sense that this group begin to demand the same ser­vices they receive at work from their Employee Sup­port Orga­ni­za­tions. What are the biggest obsta­cles for col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties to get into this sort of sup­port busi­ness for their students?