College Unbound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students by Selingo Jeffrey J

Author:Selingo, Jeffrey J. [Selingo, Jeffrey J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2013-05-07T07:00:00+00:00

Getting Credit for What You Already Know

If you think Jose Brown or Sheryl Schuh took unconventional pathways to a degree through StraighterLine or Western Governors, meet Mike Russo, who received college credits for his life experiences. The square-jawed fifty-five-year-old is part of a radical rethinking of college that abandons the age-old idea that learning happens in structured ways, whether face-to-face with an instructor or, in recent years, in virtual classrooms.

Russo graduated from high school in 1975, with plans to work for a year in construction before enrolling in college. As he puts it, “life then got in the way.” Within two years he was married with two kids, and soon after, divorced. Rather than go to college as a single father, he continued working, eventually landing on the production line at an Owens Corning insulation factory outside Albany, New York. He joined the union, and over the next two and a half decades moved up through various leadership roles, first in the local chapter, then in the international union. By 2006, he was ready for a new challenge. He thought it was time to finally get his bachelor’s degree.

Russo had been taking classes on and off at local colleges since the mid-1990s. But he was well short of the 120 credits he needed for his bachelor’s. The last thing he wanted to do, however, was sit through dozens of classes regurgitating information he would probably know as well as the instructor. During his career, Russo was often the lead negotiator for national labor contracts and taught training seminars on arbitration. He was a trained mediator. Russo simply lacked the piece of paper to prove it all. “My family all has college degrees, successful people all around me have college degrees,” Russo said. “You never know what life is going to bring you. I wanted to be sure I had a degree, too.”

To reach that goal, he needed credit for his work. That led Russo to Empire State College, part of the State University of New York. Created in 1971, the institution was at the vanguard of an education movement where students plan their specific degree programs in a dozen broad areas and are assessed on what they have learned through their own experiences. It was designed for adult students exactly like Mike Russo. Colleges can provide credits for what someone has learned outside the classroom through various means: scores on standardized tests such as the College Level Examination Program, evaluations performed by a national association of corporate or military training, or portfolios of work put together by students.

Russo completed nearly two dozen portfolios. In one for Advanced Arbitration, he described how his many union leadership roles “provided me the opportunity to personally process grievances through all of the steps, including arbitration. This has allowed me to thoroughly understand and prepare the case for the actual arbitration and to understand what should be done from the very early stages of the process in order to be successful.” After each portfolio was completed, a professor, an expert in the subject matter, read it.

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