What are the key motivators for why someone decides to go to college? What are the expectations of academic success for students and institutions? Are they aligned?
WGU leaders Kelvin Bentley, Sr., Ph.D., consultant at WGU Labs, and Reshma Gouravajhala, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist at WGU Academy, discuss the challenges surrounding retention and attainment for learners who are systemically marginalized and not well supported or served throughout their academic journeys. They are joined in conversation with Matt Griffin, Senior Manager of External Communications, to consider scalable strategies to help learners meet their academic expectations.
“Traditional higher ed has found out the hard way that they have not done a great job of servicing the needs of adult learners,” says Kevin. “The promise was always [been] if you go to college, you’ll make more money…[Higher ed] wants to say that [it is] student-centric, but [it is] not. There [are] lots of gaps in the system [and] processes are not as frictionless as I think institutions want them to be or understand them to be.”
Aligning the expectations of both institutions and students can reveal many disparities in understanding for learners who may encounter various obstacles when accessing needed resources.
“Learning is the variable right,” states Dr. Gouravajhala. “[T]here are going to be students that absolutely 100% capture everything that they need because they had generational knowledge [on which to] capitalized on. There are [those] students who are going to miss on that [knowledge] and will be aware that there’s a gap in their knowledge. [Lastly], there will be a subset of students who don’t even know that they’ve missed anything.”
WGU researchers are most interested in this latter group of learners by understanding how these learners learn and help to create a mindset for long-term academic and career success. This research is at the forefront of research at WGU Academy.
“80 percent of WGU Academy learners are systematically minoritized and [are] trying to achieve degrees while juggling multiple jobs and family responsibilities,” states Dr. Gouravajhala. WGU Academy’s transferrable Introduction to Communication course, also known as Program for Academic and Career Advancement (PACA), helps students develop persistence, a thriving mindset, and self-directed planning and learning skills that have on-ramped thousands of students to date for four-year degree programs at WGU are more likely to achieve on-time progress relative to those that didn’t.
To learn more about WGU Academy, visit theacademyatwgu.org.
To learn more about WGU Labs, visit wgulabs.org.
