Tag: education

Impact Next: An interview with Western Governors University’s Scott Pulsipher

Posted on by NationSwell Team

At a moment of growing inequality and division, who is advancing the vanguard of economic and social progress to bolster our most vulnerable communities? Whose work is fostering the inclusive growth that ensures every individual thrives? Who will set the ambitious standards that mobilize whole industries, challenging their peers to reach new altitudes of social impact? 

In 2024, Impact Next — a new editorial flagship series from NationSwell — will spotlight the standard-bearing corporate social responsibility and impact leaders, entrepreneurs, experts, and philanthropists whose catalytic work has the potential to shape the landscape of progress amid urgent need for social and economic action.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Scott Pulsipher, president of Western Governors University — an online university that utilizes a competency-based learning model to provide advanced education for working professionals.

Greg Behrman, CEO and Founder, NationSwell: What brought you to this field? Was there a moment in your life that galvanized your commitment to driving bold action on social and economic progress?

Scott Pulsipher, President, Western Governors University: I was raised by wonderful parents, and there were many tender mercies in my early development that shaped my leadership. I understood early on that one of the keys to a meaningful life is your influence on those with whom you associate. 

That understanding came into greater clarity for me in a professional context when I served as head of product for a startup, when through the process of being acquired, my seven-person product and marketing team scaled quickly to 120+ individuals across the globe in less than 12 months. There was this wonderful woman, Gloria Humes, who became my assistant. Early on, she reinforced the idea that my real value-add would be in helping these individuals realize that they mattered — showing them that I saw them for all the things that they were doing not only at work, but in life in general. 

Each week, she would give me two or three names, and I would pen a personal note to them to let them know that they were seen. I started improving my ability to observe what individuals were experiencing and taking that mindful moment to handwrite a note to them, acknowledging them, recognizing them, thanking them for their contributions, and congratulating them on a milestone in life or for another notable thing.

At WGU, I am constantly asking myself how I can increase my capacity and scope of leadership to lead a whole organization of more than 9,000 people. It has connected a professional pursuit with a purposeful mission. I want to be part of making a difference in the lives of others, and WGU’s whole business is changing lives for the better by expanding access to high-quality education so that they can pursue their opportunities. 

Behrman, NationSwell: Staying on leadership, what is it about your leadership that helps you to be effective? Is there a philosophy or approach that has really helped you to be an effective leader in this space?

Pulsipher, WGU: Baked into WGU’s core principles is a very clear sense that there’s inherent worth in every individual and that, if given the opportunity, everyone has something big to contribute. I see it as my responsibility as a leader to ask, “Am I getting the best out of this individual? Am I providing the feedback they need so that they understand where there are gaps between what they’re doing and what they actually want to achieve?” 

I’m also striving to do that in larger contexts — I’m trying to figure out how to connect with the individual, even if I’m speaking in a town hall to all 9,000 of our people. I’m continually trying to discern whether I’m influencing others toward an aspiration, whether it’s advancing innovation in our curriculum or new ways to partner and engage at a local level. 

In the past, I had a tendency to quickly jump to problem solving, but now I’m increasingly finding that the best counsel or support I can give is to let people work through their challenges themselves — without those challenges, they won’t really develop in the way they need. At WGU, we’re in a unique position where that logic extends to the business we’re in. With our students, we’re trying to figure out how they can pass a particular course or demonstrate mastery in something, or persist through all of the challenges they face while they’re trying to complete their degree. We endeavor to provide the right level of instruction, mentoring, and support to help them learn and master things for themselves.

At WGU, we’re trying to change lives for the better by acting as a unifying force in the midst of a lot of diversity — we’re striving to create a place where everyone from different backgrounds and all walks of life can come here as the glorious individuals that they are and work toward the same shared goal. And, in the process, we expect that we will also change and become better than we were before. 

Behrman, NationSwell: What else about the impact strategies, initiatives, or partnership models WGU is championing feels particularly unique or differentiated? 

Pulsipher, WGU: It starts with our core principles. In general, we’re operating outside of the specific paradigm most people think of when you say the word college or university — you’ll hear people say, “These individuals are the top talent because we’ve seen them perform in a certain way.” At WGU, our philosophy is that everyone is top talent. Everyone, if given the opportunity, has something big to contribute. 

One thing we’ve deployed in this highly personalized model of education is the notion of competency versus credit hour. Competency-based education is really important, because it basically says that mastery matters more than how long it took you to master something. We focus on what it really means to demonstrate mastery. All of us are going to progress at different rates, and when you design for that, you change the variable of time in terms of how quickly individuals complete their degrees. 

The second big thing is the highly personalized student experience. This is where technology and AI become incredibly beneficial, as most learning is inherently self-directed. We’re already utilizing machine learning, and tapping into existing AI models could make it just as easy to support very specific, personalized recommendations–suggesting the optimal next steps for achieving your objectives, demonstrating mastery in a module, or determining the ideal sequence of future courses, etc.

The third thing I’d highlight that differentiates WGU is our low cost. We have a declining number of traditionally-aged students, and the working individuals whom we serve need a means to upskill and uplevel. That long-form model of education is not manageable with all of the associated costs of traditional higher ed (e.g., living, board, athletics, student life), so that’s where we leverage the internet to reach and teach individuals where they are. If you want to talk about solving the student loan crisis and making opportunity work for everyone — especially those who’ve been historically underserved or disadvantaged — streamlining costs in this way is critically important. If education is supposed to be a great equalizer, let’s prove it to be so rather than being an engine of privilege (and an example of privilege begetting privilege).

Behrman, NationSwell: Of your peers in the social impact space, who are a few whose leadership inspires you, and whom you hold in high esteem?

Pulsipher, WGU: I recently reconnected with Joe Fuller, whom I used to work for at Monitor Group. He’s thinking very deeply about the need to diversify the workforce and how we need to think about talent pipelines. I find his research and work to be very informative and effective in shaping the challenges and opportunities we’re undertaking at WGU.

Another person that I have also come to be associated with is Ted Mitchell, who was formerly the Undersecretary of the Department of Education under President Obama. He is the type of person who stimulates the innovative thinking that’s necessary at this moment because he sees where the puck is going. It’s also been a privilege and a pleasure to work more closely with Tracy Palandjian, the co-founder and CEO of Social Finance — I think they’re also doing great work. 

Behrman, NationSwell: Could you recommend any insightful resources – maybe a book, report, podcast, or article — that has significantly influenced your thinking or inspired your leadership?

Pulsipher, WGU: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin has to be one of the best biographies ever written about one of our best American leaders, Abraham Lincoln. The biggest lesson I’ve taken from it is that if you want really good, productively reasoned solutions to some of your most complex challenges, you’d better staff your leadership and your organization with those who do not think the same way you do. If you create echo chambers or look only for cultural fit in your leadership, you will handicap your best efforts to solve complex challenges. 

I’m also a big fan of Peter Thiel’s Zero to One book on innovation — it resonates with us at WGU as we are motivated by the idea that what we did in the past has to be shed in favor of what’s needed for the future. I appreciate its framework of thinking about true innovation as fundamentally disruptive.

Lastly, I really like Daniel Pink’s book, WHEN: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The idea of timing as the one resource we can’t create more of resonates deeply — it makes you think carefully about how you’re allocating your time. This has been invaluable for me as I lead WGU; I have to be very careful about how I’m committing my time because life doesn’t stop. How will you invest your scarcest resource? It’s something I reflect on often.

NationSwell Leaders on the Biden Administration’s Student Debt Forgiveness Plan

Posted on by Brianna Provenzano

On August 24, President Joe Biden’s White House announced intentions to ease student debt obligations by up to $20,000 for millions of Americans. Early details of the plan included a commitment to forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt from the U.S. Department of Education for any borrower who earned less than an adjusted gross income of $125,000 ($250,000 for married couple filing jointly or head of household) in either 2020 or 2021, with Pell Grant recipients reportedly eligible to receive an additional $10,000 in relief on top of that.

While the finer points of the new debt forgiveness plan are still being hammered out, the measure is already set to have sweeping implications for those who qualify. To help make sense of the policy, NationSwell reached out to our community of experts for their reactions, and to ask if the plan goes far enough towards ensuring a more equitable playing field for millions of debt-saddled Americans.

Here are some of their responses:

NationSwell: What does the student loan forgiveness news mean in practical terms, for both workers and students? 

David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR
Similar to the enactment, further guidance, and activation of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness over the last year, this is another opportunity for economic relief and increased stability for folks who work for non-profits and anyone looking to start a career in the sector. It is also important to note that it will affect people of all ages, not just the person who is receiving loan relief. Economic relief for parents and spouses can affect whole families and communities. Student debt burden has also often been intergenerational as well. Awareness is crucial so that folks get the full benefit of this opportunity, and that’s where community-based organizations, mentors, and others need to spread the word and help folks access this.

Mohan Sivaloganathan, CEO of Our Turn:
We need a future-facing lens with respect to student debt. President Biden’s announcement provides current day relief for past issues, but the structural issues that perpetuate racial inequity still exist — such as students of color lacking financial, college, and career planning resources in middle/high school (a stark contrast to white and/or affluent students).

Zeeshan Ali, a former Our Turn student leader who recently wrote a piece on student debt:
For both workers and students, such forgiveness provides a great opportunity for upward mobility and financial sustainability. Whether it be $10,000 or $20,000, those amounts mean the difference between eating three meals a day or going hungry, being able to pay rent or becoming homeless, buying a car or walking miles to work . For current and prospective students, I believe it generates ambition within them to continue their pursuit of higher-education, knowing that attending a college is within their reach .With hope that such a culture of affordable education is prolonged, I foresee an increase in minority enrollment in educational institutions, thus closing the wealth inequality gap. Workers will feel that relief as well: I know of many friends who are working jobs that do not interest them, however, the pay of such jobs helps with their student debt. With this forgiveness, workers can have more flexibility in their career paths, and it can enable them to work in a field they want to, vs. one that they have to.

Martin Kurzweil, Vice President of Educational Transformation at Ithaka S+R:
While there are some open questions about when it will take place (as it will likely be challenged in court) and how it will operate, once in effect, President Biden’s loan forgiveness order would completely wipe out debt for millions of borrowers, many of whom have not completed their degree, are not recognizing the value of their investment, and have been shut out of ineffective existing options for reducing or cancelling their debt. Getting out from under that burden will allow those individuals to make family, financial, and educational plans that their debt has put on hold. I do worry that the forgiveness program, as seemingly simple as its criteria are, may prove administratively complicated — the process will need to be carefully designed to ensure that it does not put bureaucratic barriers in the way of individuals who would otherwise be eligible. The more the Education Department can process the forgiveness automatically, using information it (or other branches of the federal government) already has, the better. Although debt forgiveness doesn’t address the ongoing accumulation of new debt, it does put greater pressure on the administration and Congress to address problems of college affordability, wasted individual expenditures by those who don’t complete or get a credential of value, and ongoing processes for ensuring repayment and interest accumulation aren’t overwhelming. The administration’s announcement included some indications of how it plans to address income-based repayment, public service loan forgiveness, and institutional accountability, but a lot more detail is needed on those plans.

Jean-Claude Brizard, President and CEO of Digital Promise:
In many countries around the world, students don’t exit formal education saddled with debt. In practical terms, students can spend more time building the foundation for economic security and not worrying about repaying a loan that often greatly exceeds their annual income. It also allows some to enter graduate school and further their education. 

NationSwell: What are some of the next steps we’ll need to take in order to advance educational and workforce equity?

David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR:
Driving equity is about culture, structure, and systemic examination and change. We have to look at the barriers and biases that drive access, engagement, and retention. These could be economic, process driven, geographic, representative, along with other factors. And it requires deep listening, action orientation, benchmarking, communication, and marking progress and setbacks. It is a consistent pursuit and while there may be milestones, there is not an endpoint.

Dr. Noel Harmon, President and Executive Director of APIA Scholars:
We are grateful for the Biden administration’s recognition of the crippling effects of student loan debt, especially for the relief that will be directed towards the most under-represented and disadvantaged students in the educational process. While we appreciate that this is progress in providing aid to those who are most in need, we also feel that there are core problems that remain unsolved and must stay in the forefront. We need to continue to address systemic issues impacting educational equity, including financial barriers, access, and support.

Zeeshan Ali, former Our Turn student leader:
Outside of the student debt crisis that still remains, we must provide resources to marginalized communities in the form of community building, career guidance, and most of all, financial investments. I have seen it in my hometown of Palm Beach, Florida: There are mansions on one block of the street, but if you drive a block or two away, there are houses with broken windows, rundown schools, and mold-ridden recreational centers. We must allocate money towards such poverty-ridden areas to build better institutions that encourage personal development — in areas of both education and career, we need to reaffirm to the younger generation that they are not forgotten, nor do they mean any less than a student who lives in the wealthier part of town. And above everything else, we must make progressive change together, on every level. From the grassroots organizer to the President of the United States, there cannot be change if we are not unified in our efforts to make the world a better place, a place that promotes inclusion, offers opportunities of growth, and relentlessly fights for equity, for this generation and those to come. 

Mohan Sivaloganathan, CEO of Our Turn:
We need to invest in reframing the narrative around education and race. Too often, education is viewed as a critical lever for upward mobility and success — UNLESS — it is a Black, Indigenous, or Student of Color, and suddenly they are viewed as asking for a handout. The elimination of predatory higher education practices — while addressing an unjust playing field leading up to higher education — can actually forge a more prosperous, inclusive, and healthy country.

Jean-Claude Brizard, President and CEO of Digital Promise:
We need to make college more affordable and create better pathways from education to a meaningful career — one that puts young people on a path to economic security, well-being and personal agency. The Education Secretary’s push to greatly increase PELL is one good step in that direction. 

Martin Kurzweil, Vice President of Educational Transformation at Ithaka S+R::
There’s so much to do! Focusing on the federal and state level, the federal government and states ought to orient their spending and policies toward providing value with their investments in education — improving affordability as well as attainment of credentials that have labor market value. An important step is providing adequate resources to public institutions, especially those that serve large populations of students of color and lower-income students (which currently are less resourced than those serving wealthier, whiter student populations). An important issue that affects attainment is that the majority of students will earn college credit and other forms of validated postsecondary learning from more than one source, and we are terrible at reconciling all that evidence of learning and enabling seamless transfer — it results in a huge waste of time, money, and effort, and it disproportionately harms people of color and those from lower-income backgrounds. Streamlining transfer by aligning policies, providing better access to information and guidance, and reducing administrative barriers will benefit millions of individuals.

How Charles Best, CEO of DonorsChoose, Leads With Purpose

Posted on by NationSwell Team

Ahead of Summit West 2020, NationSwell is profiling leaders and luminaries from a diverse array of fields to discover how they lead with purpose — and inspire others to do the same.
Educator and entrepreneur Charles Best was crowdsourcing before it was cool.
When he started DonorsChoose, a platform that connects underfunded public school teachers with donors, the entire company operated out of the tiny classroom in the Bronx where he was a teacher.
Best says he and his colleagues would spend lunch breaks discussing how much of their own salaries they spent on paper and pencils for their students, or on trips and projects their schools couldn’t support. He knew they weren’t alone in their passion for their students’ success, and soon envisioned a way to connect motivated citizens with classrooms in need.
What began almost twenty years ago as a scrappy classroom operation in the Bronx will soon be able to boast that it has raised over a billion dollars. They’ve helped fund half a million projects in 80% of our nation’s public schools. Best says purpose has been always core to DonorsChoose’s mission, and that acting with that core value in mind has been key to his success. But as they learned in 2003, and again in 2010, a little shine from Oprah never hurts, either.
NationSwell spoke to Best on Friday. Here’s what he had to say about putting purpose into action.
NationSwell: You were a teacher in the Bronx when you started DonorsChoose. Would you be willing to share the story with me about how that idea and that inspiration came to be?
DonorsChoose Founder and CEO Charles Best: Absolutely. I taught there for five years. During my first year of teaching, like teachers everywhere, my colleagues and I would spend a lot of our own money on copy paper and pencils, and then we would talk in the teacher’s lunch room about projects we wanted to do with our students that we couldn’t personally pay for — and that might’ve been a novel we wanted all our students to read, or a field trip we wanted to take them on or a science experiment that required a couple of microscopes.
And as we were talking in the teacher’s lunch room, I just figured that there were people out there who would want to help teachers like us if they could see exactly where their money was going. This is years and years before crowdfunding was a word or a thing, but it just made fundamental sense that there are people who want to support public school classrooms but don’t really see where their money’s going, and I thought we could connect teachers like us with donors or concerned citizens along the lines of what I described.
NS: Can you talk to me a little bit about where DonorsChoose was at the end of its first year versus where it is right now in terms of its growth?
CB: DonorsChoose launched in the spring of 2000, and we were operating out of my classroom. My students were our staff members. We even used my classroom as a mail sorting center after school because we were writing letters to people trying to get the first donations on our site. And we were actually hand-addressing and compiling physical letters because it was that far back in the day. And every desk in my classroom represented a different part of the country, so we could pile up letters going to different regions and get a cheaper postal rate. In any case, end of the first year, our nerve center, our headquarters is still my classroom and we had just expanded beyond the teachers at the school where I was teaching and there were a good number, let’s say 50 or so other teachers in other parts of the Bronx who were creating projects on our site. That’s status at end of year one.
And then we’re now in year 20 and in probably just a few months we’ll cross $1 billion of giving through the site to classroom projects. More than half a million public school teachers have gotten projects funded through the site. 80% of all the public schools in the country have had teachers who have posted projects.
So we’ve grown a lot since those more humble origins 20 years ago.

“We try and infuse purpose into our work without ever feeling overly virtuous. Humility is one of our core values.” — Charles Best, CEO and founder of DonorsChoose

NS: What are the key factors behind your success?
CB: Well, we got lucky in any number of ways. I’d like to think we worked hard for the luck, but there absolutely was serious luck involved. I’ll give you just one example. In 2001, I cold-called a whole lot of reporters, and I probably had to call 100 reporters before I found one who was willing to talk to me and hear me out as I described this nonprofit that my students were helping to get off the ground. And he wrote a one paragraph story about what we were up to for Newsweek, and Oprah Winfrey’s producers saw that little paragraph and reached out.
And so in 2003, Oprah Winfrey shines her spotlight on us and in the aftermath of her segment, and I had describe it as an aftermath only because she completely crashed our site, the moment she mentioned our website, I think there’s 20,000 people that simultaneously typed our URL into their browser and we just melted down. But when we got back up again, people started calling us from different parts of the country wanting to see DonorsChoose expand to their public schools. And so that really put in motion our national expansion, which culminated in 2007 when we opened our site to all the public schools in the country. But that national expansion wouldn’t have gotten moving when it did, if not for the pure stroke of luck of Oprah’s producers reading that one little paragraph.
So that’s a long way of saying that media coverage where, in any number of cases, we’ve just gotten really, really lucky has played a serious role. I think just the DonorsChoose experience itself has helped to spur growth because when a teacher creates a project on our site and gets funded — and more than 70% of teachers are successful at least once on our site — and when they are, the arrival of books or art supplies or science equipment tends to inspire other teachers to have a little bit of hope that if they were to share their best idea for helping students learn on DonorsChoose, that it might get funded. And then, of course, when a donor gives to a project and has this experience of finding a project that matches their passion or their background, and seeing where their money goes and hearing back from the classroom in a really vivid way, hopefully that inspires them to tell other people.
NS: What does acting or leading with purpose mean to you?
CB: I think folks who work at nonprofit organizations have a little bit of an easier time seeing how purpose is integral to their work and what they do during the daylight hours. And at DonorsChoose, I think we work hard to ensure that purpose that does infuse our work, and that purpose being to bring America a little bit closer to a place where students in every community have the materials and experiences they need to learn. We try and infuse purpose into our work without ever feeling overly virtuous. Humility is one of our core values. And if we’re going to pair humility with another attribute, it’d probably be hustle — because we think that hustle and humility are the two things that will enable you to create an organization that’s built to last, and one that continues to grow. The best situation is one where you feel like you don’t ever have to be thoughtful about purpose because it feels given, or it feels that have already evident in the work.
NS: What or who inspires you to keep committing to acting with purpose? How do you stay mission driven?
CB: One person who inspired me way back when and who I think of frequently is my high school English teacher and wrestling coach, Mr. Buxton. He really inspired me, and I figured if anybody ever looked up to me the way that I looked up to Mr. Buxton, I’d have done my share in life. And so it was thanks to Mr Buxton that I knew from sophomore year of high school that I wanted to be a teacher when I graduated. And it was only by virtue of being a teacher that I started DonorsChoose because DonorsChoose is of the breed of startup that comes from someone having an itch, and figuring out a way to scratch it  — and it turning out that a lot more people have that same itch.

At a time of extreme tension and uncertainty, people are losing confidence in traditional institutions’ ability to solve bigger problems facing our communities and environment. To fill the vid, leaders and organizations are expected to make a commitment to a purpose that benefits all stakeholders.
NationSwell’s Summit West will bring together a diverse group of impactful leaders and organizations. Together, we will learn from the people practicing purpose every day.
Charles Best is a member of the NationSwell Council. To find out more about the NationSwell Council, visit our digital hub. And to learn more about Summit West 2020, visit our event splash page.