Originally founded in 1997 to help working adults access higher education, one online university is helping nearly 1,000 students across Benton and Franklin counties get degrees while staying in their hometowns – and their jobs.

Western Governors University, started by 19 U.S. governors, was designed for working adults. At the time, the governors decided that traditional higher education systems weren’t serving this group of people, so they created a competency-based curriculum. 

Now, almost 30 years later, the university is serving 190,000 students across the country, 75% of whom are working adults. Washington is one of the university’s biggest markets, with 13,000 students statewide and 957 in Benton and Franklin counties. 

How it works

WGU offers bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and certificates across four main areas: education, health care, business and technology. 

Those are the areas in demand in almost any community, said Tonya Drake, regional vice president for WGU. That means that whatever region students are in, they can find access to a good-paying job in one of these fields. 

To honor working adults’ time, all of the curriculum is online, asynchronous and competency-based. 

A competency-based curriculum means that once students have demonstrated knowledge, they can move on. That ensures that those who come into the program with skills learned in other areas of life don’t have to waste time relearning what they already know. Instead, they can move on to the next topic. 

Students pay a flat fee for each year: an average of $8,300 a year for bachelor’s degrees and $8,856 a year for master’s degrees. During that time, students can take as many courses as they can move through. Some students may go through courses more quickly and others more slowly, but all will ultimately gain the same skills. 

Once students have shown competency, they can move on to the next course. As a result, students tend to finish their degrees faster than in traditional schooling, averaging about 2.5 years to complete a bachelor’s degree. 

The programs are focused: there aren’t electives or undecided majors. Students typically go into their schooling knowing exactly what they’re looking for. 

Since all classes are asynchronous, working adults can learn on their own schedules. 

“You take a test at the beginning of each course to tell you what you know and then you take the time that you need and study the way you need to in order to learn the things that you haven't mastered yet,” Drake said. “So you can do that at 2 in the morning. You can do it at 2 in the afternoon.”

Local opportunities

At the same time, students aren’t left to manage their education on their own. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor who meets with them once a week to check in and set goals. 

Students in health care and education programs eventually will need in-person experience, whether that’s participating in hospital clinicals or getting classroom teaching experience. WGU helps students connect with their local opportunities, and often, students might go on to be hired by those organizations. 

Benton and Franklin counties together boast a little over 3,000 WGU alumni. Drake recalled hearing a story from a Hanford engineer who had come to the end of their career and decided to get a degree in education to become a high school teacher and give back to the community. 

In addition to helping people find well-paying jobs in their hometowns, WGU also partners with organizations to help educate their workforce. One partner is Amazon, which has a Career Choice program to help employees in the company’s data centers and fulfillment centers get degrees and move up in their careers. 

In partnerships like this, Drake said, students can “earn and learn.”

Keeping up with the times

WGU’s structure allows it to expand and contract with its students. In addition to the faculty who serve as student mentors, there are two other groups of faculty: those who serve as discipline experts, and those who review coursework and competencies. 

Splitting the faculty into these three groups, different from traditional education where each faculty member would do all of these things, has allowed WGU to scale up and serve more students, Drake said. 

That became important during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, when student numbers swelled. 

Drake recalled colleagues in higher education reaching out to her about how WGU worked as an online school, and students ended up finishing courses much faster with more time on their hands. 

Since that time, WGU has also seen a younger audience interested in the university’s offerings. 

The average age group attending the school has typically been the mid-30s, with a focus on serving the “stranded talent,” or those with some college education but no degree. That age has begun to come down, with WGU’s average student age nationally at 33.

The university also prioritizes listening to industry leaders to ensure that its programs are meeting workforce needs, Drake said. In the last few years, the feedback WGU received was that there is a need for more short-term credentials or certificates, especially in the field of technology. The university began embedding certificates into its degree programs, and also offering separate certificates for more bite-sized chunks of learning, she said. Those certificates help people “upskill” if they aren’t looking to pursue a degree. 

WGU is also incorporating AI skills, like prompt engineering, into its curriculum to stay on top of emerging needs in efficiency.

Go to: wgu.edu.