Frank Nowaczyk was determined to finish up his bachelor’s degree in business, but work and family obligations kept derailing his plans. After a stint in community college, he enrolled some years later in a for-profit online college “and realized after six months that I had racked up quite a debt,” he said. “It started to look pretty daunting.”
Then a friend urged him to look into Western Governors University (WGU), a nonprofit school whose tuition and fees were much lower than other online colleges: about $3,000 per six-month term.
The low tuition immediately raised Nowaczyk’s suspicions. “I thought, 'Is this for real?'” he said. "It sounded too good to be true." But after investigating students’ online reviews of the accredited online school and satisfying himself that it wasn't a degree mill, he enrolled. Three years later, at 55, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in business management. One of 10,000 graduates honored at the last commencement, Nowaczyk was among the thousands of graduates and family members who gathered in Salt Lake City for the graduation ceremony this summer, which coincided with WGU’s 20th anniversary celebration.
“In my three years at WGU, I paid about the same amount as I did for six months at the for-profit place,” he said.
Nowaczyk said he wishes he had heard of WGU sooner – a common refrain. Businesses may be eager to hire its graduates, but by all accounts, many students looking for an online college are more likely to see heavily advertised for-profit schools and hear about WGU only through word of mouth. And that’s too bad, because at a time when controversy swirls around some for-profit online colleges for predatory recruiting or poor performance, Western Governors University is known for its results.
Among them:
- WGU graduates are more likely to get jobs, according to a 2016 Gallup-Purdue Index poll commissioned by the school: WGU’s employment rate after graduation is 81%, compared to the national average of 74%.
- Graduates have netted top jobs at places like Aetna, JPMorgan, Chase, American Express, Toyota, and Delta airline, according to Education Next.
- Nearly three-quarters of WGU students (73%) say their education was worth the cost, compared to 38% nationally.
- Its teacher-prep is ranked first in the country by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
- WGU fees are among the lowest of any online college.
“WGU as a whole is very different because we are so student-obsessed,” says WGU President Scott D. Pulsipher, who has a master’s in business administration from Harvard and has worked at a number of startups, including Amazon. “In everything we do, we put the student at the center of it.”
A master’s degree for $6,000
The college was originally designed for Western residents, many of whom live in wide-open spaces in which a brick-and-mortar university for working adults may be hundreds of miles away. Twenty years ago, in a Western Governors Association meeting, 19 U.S. governors founded the online Western Governors University to help far-flung rural residents, low-income students, ethnic minorities and members of other underserved groups graduate from college.
“Many of our students are the first in their families to go to college,” says Pulsipher with pride. Since its inception, WGU has graduated nearly 90,000 students from all 50 states, with 87% of graduates working in their chosen field.
One of the most striking innovations is WGU’s fee structure. As an online college, it charges less than the average public university, even though it doesn’t take any public subsidies. And unlike most colleges, which charge by the course, WGU also offers a flat fee structure: around $3,000 per six-month term, no matter how many courses a student chooses to take. “We use a competency-based education model,” says Pulsipher. “That means that as long as students demonstrate competency in the standards they need to meet, they can move through the program at their own pace.”
Since students entering WGU have to have taken some college courses in the past, they can get credit for their prior coursework. The average time it takes to graduate from WGU is about two years and three months for a bachelor's degree, which would cost roughly $15,000. Within four years of graduation, the average WGU graduate sees a boost in annual salary of nearly $20,000, according to WGU data.
Wes Moehlenbruck, 38, managed to graduate with a Master of Science degree in cybersecurity in 18 months, despite having young children and a full-time job.
“It was a tough one; you’re just hammered, but I did my studying late at night and lived and breathed [the work],” said the San Diego cybersecurity specialist. “My employer contributed $3,000 in education expenses, so I wound up paying only $6,000 for my degree.” Like Nowaczyk, he attended the graduation ceremony this summer.
Moehlenbruck, who was already working in the field when he began his master’s degree, said the master’s program was especially valuable because it included two key cybersecurity certifications: the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and the Certified Hacking Forensic Investigator (CHFI). The curriculum also complemented his work toward the all-important CISSP Certification. “It’s the gold standard certificate in cybersecurity,” he said. “A master’s degree certainly gives you street cred, but employers want you to have that certificate, too.”
He added that WGU fees were a bargain compared to comparable programs, some of which cost up to $35,000. Other students echo this sentiment.
“As a mom on a teacher’s salary, WGU’s flat-rate tuition of $6,000 a year was crazy good – half the cost of other online universities,” wrote Hilary Tinnesand-Darnold from College Place, Washington, who earned a master’s in teaching mathematics.
Of course, like any university, WGU has had its bumps along the way. One issue is that the federal College Navigator lists its six-year graduation rate as approximately 20%, although WGU’s rate is actually 41%, compared to an average of 36% nationally. Why? The federal Navigator only counts first-time, full-time students, while virtually all WGU students have spent some time at another school.
As one of the fastest-growing online colleges, WGU is also in the fourth year of an audit by the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Education Office to determine whether its program should be classified as distance education or correspondence courses. This has angered some education experts, one of whom criticized the audit as “as a waste of time and taxpayer money [that] only serves to slow down the innovation that is so sorely needed in higher education.”
The power of mentors
Another important feature of WGU is mentorship. Besides having a course mentor, each student is assigned a faculty mentor, who helps create a personalized program and works with them closely until they graduate. “I can’t tell you how important that was,” says Nowaczyk, who recalled the elation of meeting his business mentor, Mike Ray, at the graduation. “A couple of times I was really overwhelmed, and my mentor guided me through it. It’s hard to say whether he or my wife was my biggest cheerleader. But I would not have graduated without him.”
Erin Bishop agrees. Bishop is a former teen mom who grew up in poverty and an unstable home. Raised by a single working parent who struggled with methamphetamine addiction and having to ask for water from her neighbors when her family’s utilities were cut off, Bishop says it may be hard to understand how remote the dream of a college degree may feel for someone from a background like hers.
“I remember as a teen meeting someone with an AA degree from a community college and just staring at her in awe,” said Bishop. “It seemed so incredible back then that all I could think of was, wow, she really made it.”
Bishop lacked the confidence that she was college material, a notion that WGU mentors helped dispel. “It’s really easy for people like me to feel self-doubt; my faculty mentor had her work cut out for her,” she said. “I was very worried, for example, that I’d fail the entrance exam. But my mentor told me that if I didn’t pass, I could study more and take it again. I raised every objection in the book, and every time, she had an answer.”
At WGU, Bishop earned a dual Bachelor of Art degree in general education and special education and went on to get her Master of Art degree in instructional design, all the while working full-time and raising her two children as a single mom. Her grandparents helped out by watching the kids, her father opened his home to the family and a former high school teacher offered moral support.
“The program was very rigorous,” said Bishop, who was a commencement speaker at the most recent WGU graduation. “I’d work all day -- exercising at lunch so I’d stay healthy -- then go be a mom in the evenings. And after my kids went to bed, I would study for hours every night.”
Bishop now has a job designing individual programs for troubled students with behavior problems throughout the school district, the kind of students that some teachers dread to see. “But I love them,” she said of the students. “I can empathize with them because I was that kid. I tell the teachers, give them to me. I love their energy and their honesty. And the kids sense that.”
School spirit without a quad
WGU doesn’t have dorms, a quad or coffeeshops to hang out in. Nonetheless, the Gallup poll shows that WGU students are twice as likely as the average student to be emotionally attached to their university – something that the administrators say is proof that it’s possible to build strong personal connections through long-distance education.
In addition, WGU graduates are twice as likely to be thriving in terms of community, finances, social networks, purpose and overall well-being. “We’re reinvigorating the possibility of higher education,” Pulsipher said. “WGU shows that the return on a college degree is possible for everyone.”
Growing up, Pulsipher lived in three foreign countries and 13 different cities and enjoyed all of them. Not surprisingly, he welcomes the challenge of building collegiality in an online school. The school has thriving online student and alumni networks, and Pulsipher is experimenting with virtual campus sports. “We’re talking fantasy football right now,“ he said, “but for the future, who knows?”
“One thing we’re definitely investing in is our one-on-one relationships,” Pulsipher said. “We chose to have a physical commencement so people can meet their cohort, faculty mentors and other professors in person, and we have a mixer the night before the commencement that is very popular. You see a lot of hugs, a lot of deep emotion.”
Nowaczyk loved the mixer and the ceremony, but said that graduation “didn’t feel like a life-changing event” at the time. But over time, that changed.
“I have to say that since graduating, I find I can hold my head a little higher, especially at work and in front of customers,” he said. “It used to be that I’d hear a lot of jargon at work I didn’t understand, and I'll admit that in meetings with engineers and managers, I sometimes felt inadequate. But that is no longer the case.”
