The Power of Video Games to Heal America’s Heroes, A Surefire Way to Keep Students in School and More


How Games Are Helping Veterans Recover from Injury, Polygon
U.S. Army Major Erik Johnson discovered the healing power of video games firsthand while recovering from a horrible car accident. Today, the occupational therapist serves as Chief Medical Officer for Operation Supply Drop, a nonprofit that taps the therapeutic benefits of technology to help veterans and active service members recover from physical injuries, mental struggles, memory and cognitive problems and more. Sure, it’s unconventional to put a Nintendo Wii controller in a soldier’s hand during therapy, but the results are undeniable: reestablishing “themselves as an able body person who can enjoy things they used to enjoy.”
What Can Stop Kids From Dropping Out? New York Times
The massive amount of outstanding student loan debt might not be the biggest problem when it comes to higher education. What is? The fact that almost half of college freshmen fail to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years. Dropout rates are highest amongst minorities, first-generation undergrads and low-income individuals, but through advisory sessions at the first sign of trouble, classes that offer immediate feedback, tiny grants of just a few hundred dollars and more, George State University is helping these traditionally poor-performing students achieve higher graduation rates than their white peers.
The Bag Bill, The New Yorker
A self-described child of hippie parents, Jennie Romer fondly recalls visiting the local recycling facility with her parents. The weekly trips clearly had an impact on Romer, who’s spent much of her adulthood fighting for plastic bag bans. Success has been plentiful in California, with San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles all passing ordinances against the notorious environmental menace. Now Romer has her sights set on implementing a fee on plastic bags in the country’s largest metropolis. Will she add the Big Apple to her list of triumphs?
Editors’ note: Since the publication of the New Yorker article, the New York City Council has approved a 5-cent fee on plastic bags. 
MORE: The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War

This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses

When selecting a college from which to announce a new sexual assault awareness campaign in 2011, the White House had an easy choice. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan both arrived in Durham, N.H., the New England town that’s home to the University of New Hampshire’s flagship campus, to kick off Not Alone. The year prior, Biden hosted three UNH professors for a reception at his Delaware home, and in a 42-minute speech on campus, the former senator praised them for their work: “You guys are doing it right. You’re the model for the country,” said Biden, who introduced the Violence Against Women Act in 1990. “I wish all colleges had a little more UNH Wildcat in them.”
Renowned among policy wonks and feminists alike for its bystander intervention program, its research institute on violence against women and its independently-funded rape prevention and crisis center, UNH is an undisputed leader in ending sexual assault on campus. But this public school with 12,500 undergrads wasn’t always ahead of the curve. In February 1987, three upperclassmen repeatedly had sex with an intoxicated freshman female in her dorm, Stoke Hall — a story that matches contemporary accounts about rapes at the University of Montana at Missoula, Florida State University and many more schools. What’s different about UNH is that faculty and students responded to that crisis as an opportunity to eradicate sexual violence. As a result, it’s a standout amongst institutions of higher learning.
Over three bitterly cold days this February, exactly 29 years after the Stoke Hall incident, NationSwell spoke with Wildcats on campus about what encourages UNH students to intervene if a sexual assault looks imminent. Both students and faculty report that, over time, the gradual changes to campus culture snowballed into a strong ethic of condemning rape when classmates notice its signs. But UNH still isn’t satisfied with those results, citing the 23 students who reported being raped in 2014, according to federal data. To maintain its reputation as a leader, the school continues to better its campus-wide outreach to prevent sexual assault.
With, as of now, 175 open federal investigations into colleges’ compliance with Title IX (the federal law on gender discrimination), universities nationwide are introducing speeches that read like disclaimers, lengthy consent policies and online sex ed courses — many developed by a cottage industry to keep schools in compliance with the law. These additions may stave off government investigators, but they haven’t necessarily been proven to keep students safe, says Jane Stapleton, co-director of UNH’s Prevention Innovations Research Center (PIRC) which studies ways to end gender-based violence, including sexual assault, relationship abuse and stalking, and is located on the college’s campus. At UNH, “we don’t subscribe to that. That is not what we’re about,” she declares; instead, the school has developed evidence-based solutions that are proven to stop rape. “Whenever someone says [their prevention education is] evidence-based, I say, ‘Show me the evidence,” Stapleton adds. “Let’s see the studies.”

SHARPP’s “tabling on the go” takes its program message of “Wildcats get consent” out onto campus.

Stapleton emphasizes results because she’s seen the ugly damage sexual assault can do. In 1987, as a graduate student in sociology, she watched the Stoke Hall incident unfold in the press and a public tribunal held over four evenings in a 170-seat lecture hall. At the open hearing, all three men were cleared of sexual assault charges. (Two of the three were suspended for six months on related charges, and both later pled guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault in criminal court.) After the university’s decision, vocal confrontations broke out on the wooded, snow-carpeted campus, including a mass of protestors forcefully occupying the dean’s office, hanging a “Help Wanted” sign from a flagpole, which functioned both a joke about replacing the dean and a serious cry for administrators to recognize the problems. When the students refused to vacate the office, 11 Wildcats were arrested, according to news reports at the time.
Witnessing the seething anger on campus, Gordon Haaland, then university president, penned an apologetic letter to the student body just before summer break, saying he’d return to campus “ready to examine our moral behavior.” The following fall, administrators presented a plan to address sexual assault, the first steps that would grow into UNH’s current success. Haaland, administered a campus climate survey, which found that within the first six months of the 1987-88 school year, 37 percent of UNH’s women experienced unwanted sexual contact and 10 percent were raped, and males reported 11 percent and 4 percent, respectively.
Haaland also hired a full-time rape services coordinator, who beefed up the immediate services available to survivors, supplementing an underground, grassroots effort started by UNH faculty and staff a decade prior in 1978, according to current staff. That program would grow into SHARPP (Sexual Harassment & Rape Prevention Program), one of the only rape crisis centers located on a college campus that receives independent funding. It also has the distinction of being among the earliest, says Amy Culp, its current director. In the mid-1970s, “there was a big movement [against] domestic violence. Sexual assault didn’t come into the scene really until the early 90s,” she notes, meaning that SHARPP had a two-decade head start, allowing it to mature into the seven full-time staff (including one coordinator for male victims) and 90 volunteers it has today.
For five years, Stapleton provided direct services for rape survivors at SHARPP, including a yearlong stint as its director, before transitioning into research, where she collaborated with three colleagues (Victoria Banyard, Mary Moynihan and Elizabeth Plante, another former SHARPP director), who were using a 2002 National Institute of Justice grant to independently test a new prevention program, Bringing in the Bystander, on UNH’s student body.
The model’s experimental trial at UNH found that students who received three 90-minute training sessions showed significant increases in their willingness to intervene. “Perceived confidence goes up. We do see shifts in their attitudes in terms of, ‘I have a responsibility. I feel like I have a role to play in addressing these issues on my campus,’” says Banyard, a researcher at PIRC. After a two-month check-in, students had also reported more instances where they intervened, although “what’s trickier is figuring out how to link that to reported rates of assault,” Banyard says. Because only a handful of survivors bring their case to university administrators or police, sexual assault is “a hidden crime,” making it tough to measure changes without an established baseline, she adds.
Bringing in the Bystander would be the first rigorously evaluated prevention program on campus — eventually informing today’s “You Can Help” campaign, which is run independently by SHARPP. Drawing on its best elements, as well as those from several other renowned prevention programs (including the athlete-centric Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) and the more emotional Green Dot, a program developed at the University of Kentucky), the messaging of “You Can Help,” is simple, presenting options for what students can do, rather than lecturing them on what they can’t. “We go into classrooms and say, ‘You can help by calling the police. You can help by taking your friend home. You can help by not leaving a friend at a party. You can help by being an advocate,’” says Culp.
Student advocates spread the message of “You Can Help” by volunteering at SHARPP to help run the campus 24-hour support line.

SHARPP’s staff teaches workshops on these lessons to students. After running through the causes, prevalence and impacts of rape on campus — “the ‘why’ we do this work,” Culp says — the instructor explains how a person can change the statistics as an active bystander. Rather than watching a very drunk girl be carried into a bedroom, for instance, a bystander should check in to see if the woman wants to go back to her own room instead. Instructors tell stories of interventions that range from aggressively pulling a person away, fists up, to more subtle methods, like drawing the person into a circle of friends on the dance floor. (Football player, Daniel Rowe, prefers a bait-and-switch, telling his teammate, “You know she doesn’t want to talk to you, but there’s this other girl downstairs who really likes you,” even though the second girl is nowhere to be found.) At the end of the session, students fill out an evaluation form that asks them to name specific ways to intervene.
Like the One in Four men’s program at the University of Virginia, the ultimate goal of the training program is to create an environment where perpetrating violence against another community member is socially unacceptable. Undergraduate leaders report that students feel fiercely involved in the cause. “Young adults today don’t want their generation keeping quiet about the pain and horror of [sexual violence]…We want to make it more comfortable to speak out,” says Emily Counts, a sophomore who chairs the Student Senate’s Health and Wellness Committee. Stickers created by SHARPP bearing the simple message, “You Can Help,” now adorn refrigerator doors, corkboards, backpacks and laptops. “There’s so many ways of being a bystander,” Ryan Grogan, a senior history major who works with SHARPP, tells students. “If you let it happen, you’re part of the problem.”
The efforts of upperclassmen like Grogan and Cameron Cook, current student body president who ran on a platform of combating rape and a certified peer educator himself, are particularly valuable to incoming freshmen, whose lack of social capital may deter them from intervening as they’re still trying to adjust to college. You’re basically “asking them to act differently from the crowd when they are trying to fit in and make friends,” Banyard says. Still, training new students early is essential, since some research suggests rape is most likely to occur during the first months of school, a period of time known as the “Red Zone,” when drinking is especially heavy on campuses. During the first two weeks of school, there’s a lot of girls who are “very vulnerable and make very poor decisions,” says Counts. With UNH’s “You Can Help” program, workshops during orientation and consistent messaging give clear actions to new students.
That messaging, however, hasn’t been rigorously tested in the same way Bringing in the Bystander has, but its broader meaning clearly resonates, says Cook. “I think the message is simply to teach everybody in the community to stand up for each other in whatever way possible. Not just with sexual assault, but with other violations as well,” he explains. But while it reinforces the idea that students have the power to help each other, SHARPP’s “You Can Help” doesn’t require students to practice specific techniques to prevent a sexual assault, nor does it experimentally test its effectiveness. The lack of evidence-based training might seem okay for a campus that’s already a White House-recognized model for the rest of the country: one might think, there’s no need to educate students on establishing a safer environment when those norms already exist. But harping on sexual assault without those tangible results that Bringing in the Bystander emphasizes risks making consent workshops seem like a lecture or a joke.
The campus leaders that NationSwell interviewed didn’t treat the subject of sexual assault lightly, but only one student could actually point to a time when he and a few friends had personally intervened by separating a “definitely intoxicated” girl from a group of guys and walking her home. “What happened was the best-case scenario: the young lady was walked home, and that was the end of her night,” explains Justin Poisson, a sophomore fraternity member who staffs SHARPP’s hotline. Others share secondhand stories, like inviting someone in trouble to get pizza or a male friend saying, “Babe, let’s go,” to imply they’re dating. Still, even if those students haven’t personally stood up to anyone, they say there’s a stronger sense of community on campus when it feels like someone has your back. Campus climate surveys, following up on the original 1988 questionnaire, appear to demonstrate progress too: by 2012, self-reported victimization rates had been halved in every category, for both men and women.
Nationwide, focusing on prevention has made a recent resurgence in college dorms. (It briefly fell out of fashion as a solution to campus rape, partially because so much attention from the media and policymakers focused on victims’ horrific stories of rape and accused perpetrators’ demands for a fair hearing, Stapleton says.) And soon, to stay in compliance with Title IX and the Campus SaVE Act, all universities will need to formulate broader responses that include prevention to the rapes occurring on their campus. It’s up to them. Will they do enough to barely stay in compliance? Or will they implement a more robust bystander intervention program (like the one at UNH) that changes how students interact with each other?
By giving sexual assault the attention it deserved, the University of New Hampshire became an undisputed leader. Everyone else has a lot of catching up to do.
MORE: Can a College That’s Notorious for Sexual Assault Reform Itself?

For Education to Improve, Emotional Learning Must Be Emphasized

In his 20s, as a Teach for America fellow in a Washington, D.C., classroom, Nick Ehrmann, found himself reading Shel Silverstein’s poem “The Little Blue Engine,” which satirizes the well-known kid’s story of the Little Engine That Could who repeats, “I think I can, I think I can,” to power its way up a steep hill. In Silverstein’s version, instead of reaching the summit, the train slips backwards and crashes: “If the track is tough and the hill is rough, / thinking you can just ain’t enough!” the poet writes. Ehrmann took the lesson to heart and, after completing graduate work in sociology at Princeton, founded the educational nonprofit Blue Engine, its name a nod to the poem.
As CEO, Ehrmann takes the hard look at the shortcomings in our nation’s secondary schools, rejects pat inspirational messages and instead provides students with critical support to succeed in higher education. Blue Engine’s most important innovation is the introduction of teaching assistants (known as BETAs), mostly recent college grads, in the classroom. By breaking up large classes into small groups, teaching assistants personalize lessons for class performance and learning styles. With 89 BETAs in seven schools today, the program has been shown to nearly double the number of college-ready students — a 73 percent increase at three schools, according to New York’s 2013-14 Regents test data — and cut the number of failing students by one third.
On a recent weekday morning, Ehrmann, wearing a scarf against the 34-degree chill, plopped down at a table at Au Bon Pain in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. NationSwell spoke to him about rethinking the education sector, leadership and fatherhood.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
There’s an expression that we have here that we have to earn the right to do this work. I think there’s a pervasive illusion that the fact that you have good intentions is going to lead to positive outcomes. And in actuality, it can lead to feelings of entitlement and arrogance and a lack of partnerships — true partnerships — in the communities in which we work. So from the minute we step foot into the office or to a school or to a classroom and sit across the table from a young person, who are we to say that we deserve to be there? We have to earn the right to be there in the eyes of young people, teachers, parents and each other. That’s number one. It feels like that’s the most grounding way to honor the work and not lose sight of what’s most important, which is achieving results.

Nick Ehrmann (far right) stands with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the College Opportunity Summit in Washington, D.C., Jan. 16, 2014.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
Number one is broadening the evidence base in how we define success, continuing to embrace academic achievement outcomes, but also incorporating measures of student growth, social-emotional learning, learning climate and the ways that schools can and must nurture the growth of young people more holistically. Students aren’t just data points. They’re people, and I think we’re seeing a really reductionist narrowing of what success means into standardized test scores at the expense of things that help young people grow and learn and develop independently in their lives. I think the pendulum is swinging back.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Dude, I have like 5,000 books. Hmm…
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
I have three boys under five [years of age]…we’re watching “Cars 2” and “Wall-E” for the 14th time, and actually, I just watched the Star Wars trilogy — the original three — with my four-year-old, and he was glued to the set. It’s just amazing.
What’s your biggest need right now?
Sleep! No, I think I’ve got it: a relaxation of the assumption individual organizations can or should scale to solve social problems alone and to encourage the essential forms of collaboration in systemic partnerships, where the most promising organizations become part of a much broader theory of change in how problems get solved. Look at Malaria No More, for example. There was no single organization that would have set themselves up to become the global malaria response. Too often, I think, entrepreneurs face pressure to scale to the size of the problem alone.
What inspires you?
Working with an incredible team. Having the chance to be part of an organization that sees the strengths in young people, instead of their weaknesses and deficits, and builds from that strength without taking credit for it. And the sliver of possibility that this work is going to have a dramatic impact on how students learn across the country.
In turn, how do you try to inspire others?
It’s easy to lose sight of what drives us and unites us as an organization, when the work itself is so hard. And part of my role is to consistently hold that vision and sense of possibility, just grounded in young people, to hold that front and center, so we can recharge.
What’s your perfect day?
I thrive on routine. I’m just going to describe my current day. A perfect day: I’d say it starts with not waking up three times in the middle of the night, step one. Step two: Cook breakfast for my boys. Get in a quick run in Central Park. It’s equal parts being in the field at schools and managing teams. Getting home in time so that Annie [my wife] and I could put the boys to bed. And eking out 36 minutes of “Homeland,” before I fall asleep on the couch. #LivingTheDream.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
I was a musician for most of my life. I come from a family of musicians. I play cello, so I grew up doing classical and jazz ensemble work most of my life. I miss it. That would be part of my perfect day, if I had the time. I started around [the age of] four and put it down in my early 20s.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this work?
To not to apologize for thinking big. And to not allow caution or fear to limit people’s sense of what’s possible.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This article has been edited and condensed.

Can a College That’s Notorious for Sexual Assault Reform Itself?

The night after Rolling Stone magazine’s since-retracted story “A Rape on Campus,” hit the web, bottles and cinder blocks were hurled through windows at the University of Virginia’s Phi Psi house around 2:45 a.m., and its walls were tagged “UVA Center for Rape Studies.” The following day, in a Slut Walk, angry students marched past the frats on Rugby Road to the dean’s offices in Peabody Hall, chanting, “You can’t get away with this,” and, “One in four, let’s change the score,” a reference to a survey by the Association of American Universities which found that 23.1 percent of female college students experience sexual assault or misconduct while enrolled. Even faculty members held their own Take Back the Party march, tracing a similar route. “It’s shocking that it took an article by Rolling Stone in order to get this started,” Rita Dove, an English professor and former U.S. poet laureate, said in front of the Phi Psi house.
Dove’s comment spoke to the long-simmering outrage on campus, and the fact that almost a quarter of female UVA students experience sexual assault (a self-reported 2015 survey put the university’s exact number at 23.8 percent) marked an opening for an overdue conversation about what enabled rape to occur on school grounds, what could be done to limit further victimization and the role that men should play in the discussion.
Hoos (a nickname for UVA community members) put forward new ideas for policies and programs to prevent future rapes and to shift the conversation from scandal to solutions. Several students called for a thorough review of Greek life, a more robust bystander intervention program and stricter punishments when assailants are found responsible for sexual misconduct.
Inter-Fraternity Council members offered to ban hard liquor, place sober brothers as monitors and lock all downstairs bedrooms during social events. On December 1, 2014 in a university address, President Teresa Sullivan applauded the recommendations and announced that many would be implemented. The move likely was also prompted by an announcement by the U.S. Department of Education Office Rights that UVA had been under investigation since 2011 for violating federal law in its handling of gender-based violence — putting the school under legal pressure to ensure it remained compliant with Title IX.
One year later, has the school make progress in improving its campus climate and reducing incidents of sexual assault? During four days in February, NationSwell visited the university, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 and is known as Grounds to its 15,700 undergrads, to investigate if there’s been a shift in student behavior that’s resulted in safer sexual interactions.
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In interviews with 16 students (NationSwell reached out to several members of the UVA administration, but were denied requests for comment), a complicated portrait of the aftermath emerged. Most agree that awareness and candid discussion about sexual assault increased and unified the campus. On the whole, Grounds now feels like a safer place. That’s not to say the problem’s solved: In 2014, according to federal data, Hoos reported 44 rapes to the university administration, a significant increase from 2012 (when 16 forcible sexual offenses were reported). That spike could be considered a good sign — more survivors trust the university to handle the misconduct — but it is also hard proof that rape still occurs on campus. As school policies and initiatives aim to foster a safe environment, organizations like the all-male One in Four (its name a nod to the aforementioned sexual assault statistic) educate men and empower them to establish new norms about sexual violence against women, bringing welcome change to a community in need of it.
Before Hoos even start their freshman year, they receive education about nonconsensual sex through two mandatory online modules. But as soon as this official messaging ends and students arrive at their dorms, a different sense of accepted standards on drinking and hooking up can emerge. Those who are the most vocal about their weekend exploits can dominate the conversation, even if the majority is disgusted by the behavior — allowing a sexist norm to persist, says Alan Berkowitz, an independent consultant who advises colleges, the military and public health departments on preventing substance abuse and sexual assault. “My research, which is called the social norms approach, shows that most men don’t think it’s okay, but most men don’t know that most [other] men [also] don’t think it’s okay.”
For more than a decade, One in Four has elevated the discussion about what men can do, either as bystanders who can prevent dangerous situations or as friends who can direct rape survivors to the appropriate professional support. UVA’s chapter was founded by John Foubert, then a dean at the school and now an Oklahoma State University professor and president of the national One in Four network. In his opinion, there were few legal consequences for rapists and only by introducing social pressures — creating a new campus ethic that rejected the objectification of women’s bodies — could UVA’s culture begin to shift. (The university came under fire from student activists for not expelling a single student found responsible for an alleged rape between 2004 and 2014; UVA has reversed course and “recently expelled students responsible for sexual misconduct,” a university spokesperson writes in an email to NationSwell.)
The core component of One in Four’s work is a 45-minute presentation clarifying expectations for how women should be treated and addressing the role of masculinity in stopping campus rape. The class is delivered more than 100 times a year to male groups, including freshman dorms, new classes of fraternity pledges and sports teams. Deviating from Foubert’s original methods, today’s group of 50 members places emphasis on dispelling the notion that false reporting of rape is a common occurrence. One in Four is sticking with the message, “which is to trust survivors,” Yash Shevde, the group’s incoming president, says. “Our job is not to be an investigator.”
One in Four stresses that empathy is the crucial emotion necessary in preventing violence against classmates. At UVA, the presentation’s first exercise generally begins with asking the men in the room to close their eyes. The speaker presents a hypothetical scenario in which a close female relation — sister, girlfriend, best friend — tells the man she has been sexually violated. When the men open their eyes, the speaker briefly refers back to the statistic in the group’s name: chances are that a young woman close to them will experience some form of sexual violence, whether she tells them or not. “But the group doesn’t dwell on the exact numbers, which vary from one survey to the next. “The debate about the statistic is useless,” Shevde says, “because it is still one too many.”
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Grounded in that imagery — thinking about how actions affect a specific woman the man knows rather than someone abstract — the conversation touches on definitions of consent and checks in on the group’s norms, which have often never been discussed explicitly. So, rather than delivering a preachy set of rules, One in Four uses indirect methods to get men talking about what is acceptable behavior. At fraternities, for example, they asked an incoming pledge class to rank actions on a continuum of acceptability, from flirting with someone you’ve just met to touching someone’s genitals without verbal consent, all the way to engaging in sex despite use of the word “no.” Next, pledges are asked to delineate which behaviors are unacceptable and which count as sexual assault. While the exercise seems simple, it gets the young men debating about their viewpoints in a new way. (“When the majority of men know that most other men share their discomfort, they are more likely to intervene,” explains Berkowitz.) From there, One in Four’s presenters give a clear explanation of affirmative consent, stressing that students should strive to hear “yes,” Shevde says, rather than “no” since social pressures, physical intimidation or intoxication can prevent someone from verbalizing an objection, while still not giving consent.
On the surface, it appears that One in Four’s ultimate goal is to make it explicitly clear to rapists that they are alone in their behavior, that the man who treats women as objects for his sexual pleasure isn’t respected by his peers. But that’s not exactly what the group is after. Knowing that only a very small number of men will commit sexual misconduct (6.4 percent are perpetrators), the organization doesn’t waste much time trying to ferret out the one potential rapist in the room with scare tactics, Shevde explains. One in Four doesn’t preach down to the audience or explicitly say, Don’t sexually assault people! “We’re definitely looking at our male audiences as allies, not someone who has to be taught anything,” says Shevde. Instead, the group trains men to be more thoughtful in all their actions, says Kevin Hare, the group’s vice president, as well as empowered to intervene when they see improper sexual advances, Shevde adds.
Shevde worries about men not engaging with the subject because they’ve heard it so many times. No matter how informative One in Four’s lessons might be, it doesn’t matter if the guy in the back of the room tunes them out, tired of hearing about sexual assault after taking the online module before getting to campus, listening to administrators’ speeches or watching his R.A. flyer the dorms with green stickers that mark those trained in bystander intervention.
It’s difficult to measure One in Four’s success. Men may offer respectful discussion while Shevde is in the room, but how do they act that night? Looking for a correlation with reducing violence is even more difficult. Rape, as a crime, is severely underreported: nearly two out of every three sexual assaults — 65 percent — went unreported, according to 2012 findings by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So a decline in the number of cases doesn’t necessarily mean fewer women are being assaulted on campus.
Anecdotally, several female first-years told NationSwell that campus generally feels safe. “After being put under such a spotlight, I figured [UVA] would be better than other places because [the school was] so heavily scrutinized,” says Elizabeth Fadl. And a fourth-year student, Mark Lundy, said he could think of multiple times when he’s grabbed his buddies to separate a girl from a “sketchy” guy. He described the interventions as “a moral duty.” Maybe the situation just looked bad and nothing would have happened anyway, but at the same time, one wonders if Lundy’s small interaction might have prevented another rape on campus.
The problem with activism at the collegiate level is that students only have four years to make a difference before their work resets with a whole new crop of faces. After such a turbulent year, One in Four learned that one-time responses aren’t effective and that the norms it is helping to establish can quickly be unmade. Which is why an ongoing effort — spearheaded by men themselves — is clearly so essential for UVA to triumph at reforming its campus ethos.
Homepage photo by Wenhao Wu/PittNews

A House That’s Actually Affordable to Those in Poverty, Stories of Innovation from Coast to Coast and More

 
This House Costs Just $20,000 — But It’s Nicer Than Yours, Fast Co.Exist
Is it possible to build a house that’s cost-effective to someone living below the poverty line? The answer is yes, according to students at Auburn University’s School of Architecture, who worked on the design and construction dilemma for more than 10 years. Last month, they revealed two tiny houses in a community outside of Atlanta that cost just $14,000 each.
How America Is Putting Itself Back Together Again, The Atlantic
As writer James Fallows says, “As a whole, the country may seem to be going to hell.” But as he’s discovered while visiting various towns across America in his single-engine prop plane, there’s actually a groundswell of renewal and innovation already happening — from impressive economic growth in an impoverished area of Mississippi known as the Golden Triangle, to an investment in the Michigan public education system and a creative movement in more than 10 cities where artistic ventures are being celebrated.
Here’s What Happened When This School Made SATs Optional on Applications, Mic
Along with prom and getting your driver’s license, taking the SAT or ACT is a teenage rite of passage. But that’s no longer the case for some college-bound students. In a bold move, George Washington University made standardized test results optional for undergraduate applicants. The positive outcome: A more diverse candidate pool, including a sharp uptick in applications from African-American, Latino and first-generation college students.
 
MORE: Meet the Courageous Man Who Has Housed 1,393 Chronically Homeless Individuals in Utah
 
 

Emphasizing Learning over Memorization, This Group’s Students Achieve Life-Altering Success

Eric Eisner is that teacher you feared, the instructor who set high expectations and believed his students would push themselves to meet them. He praises success, but doesn’t shy away from criticism. Maddening as the workload could be, he was the teacher whose class you appreciated most, since the challenge gave you a better sense of your own capabilities. Tough love, some might call it. “I’m rough, I’m abrasive and blunt,” Eisner says of his teaching style. “The thing in the jungle that bites.”
Eisner has no formal background in education. He came to it, by chance, as a second career. After graduating from New York’s Columbia Law School in 1973, he crossed coasts and entered the glitzy entertainment business in Los Angeles, working his way to the top spot as president of the David Geffen Company. Big paychecks bought a home in the city’s western hills, paid for his kids’ private school tuitions and allowed him to retire in his late forties.
Looking for a way to occupy his time outside of improving his golf game, Eisner was persuaded to get involved in a nonprofit in South Los Angeles, a low-income, predominantly Hispanic area. (It took some coaxing: “I had time, but I lacked the inclination to give it,” he confesses.) Eisner recalls not knowing what he could do for the families the nonprofit helped, but he wanted to meet the children to find out what made them tick. Partially, this was self-serving — he wanted to better understand his own children, whom he was losing in “the battle to pop culture” — but he also wanted to know why kids weren’t learning in school.
The roundabout answer to those questions led to the founding of Young Eisner Scholars (YES) in 1998, a group that took the “smart kids” out of regular classes for biweekly lessons on debate and language, helped them transfer to private, high-performing high schools and mentored them through college graduation and their first jobs.

Justin Hicks helps Leslie DeCuesta on a coding exercise during YES’s summer program.

YES has mobilized $50 million in financial aid and scholarships to fund its scholars’ tuition and underwrites college tours, application fees, summer programs and medical bills beyond a family’s budget. All that capital seems to have paid off. The scholars come from neighborhoods where two-thirds of students drop out of high school, but YES’s participants have been accepted to top-tier universities and won prestigious awards like the Fulbright, QuestBridge and Gates Millennium scholarships.
Eisner admits that YES was never founded with a long-term vision in mind. Instead, the group pivoted as they learned more, reacting with the critical thinking Eisner wants to see his kids develop. The program has found success in urban Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, and this school year, it’s testing its worth in four schools in western North Carolina. (The expansion into Appalachia drastically increased the number of white children participating in YES.)
Justin Hicks, YES’s Appalachia program coordinator, says he spends much of his day in the car, driving 45 minutes to each school on one-lane switchbacked roads. A graduate of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., Hicks pitched the idea for a rural version of YES during his first phone interview with Eisner. In this role for less than a year (previously, he was an intern with the organization), Hicks sees cultural differences in what these children hope to be — youth saying they want to be carpenters and farmers when they grow up, instead of lawyers or doctors — but he doesn’t see a difference in their ambition, the way they learn or their intellect. For now, the program is waiting to see if children from rural backgrounds will express interest in attending first-rate schools far from home, like their first-generation immigrant, urban counterparts.
An essential part of YES’s strategy and the way Hicks runs his classrooms is with an emphasis on language. Typically in schools, children are judged by how they perform on tests. If they score well, they’re considered to be smarter. But once Eisner started prying into how much his students actually comprehend, he realized that they were often memorizing answers that would later appear on exams, rather than learning concepts.
In hour-long sessions during the school day, YES reverses the “I, We, You” model (the teacher demonstrates, the students practice with her aid, the kids do homework alone) into something closer to the Socratic method. There’s no instruction without student participation. In math lessons, this means that there are no equations, only word problems like “If two trains, 56 miles apart, leave stations at the same time…,” although the instructors often deliberately leave out the question. When learning vocabulary, flash cards are practically banned, because Eisner says, they often define words using other terms the kids barely understand. Instead, YES sessions involve personal discussion and debate over contemporary issues.
YES students complete a newspaper exercise.

While its students are thriving, Eisner’s answer might not be a scalable solution to our nation’s failing public schools. For one, YES requires huge sums of cash, which bars it from assisting more than a few dozen students in any given city. And troubling for some is the fact that YES plucks only the best students — the talented tenth, to use W.E.B. DuBois’s words — out of the public school system, leaving the most troubled students behind.
Eisner, for his part, would agree with DuBois about elevating the most exceptional students from low-income backgrounds is a way to bring along the rest of the class. He updates DuBois’s 1903 essay with a modern spin. “We are an advertising agency for educational aspiration. The fact that a kid goes to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Columbia, there’s a little perfume that goes with them when they come home from school. It might reach a friend or cousin,” he says. “We succeed when these kids become glamorously successful.”
MORE: Only 1 in 5 New York City Students Graduates from College. This Nonprofit Is Going to Change That
 
 
 

3 Colleges That Have the Formula for Making Higher Education Affordable

Just about every news story reporting on this country’s college debt climate uses the same word: crisis.
It’s an accurate descriptor — or so the numbers seems to indicate. Public college tuition costs have risen 250 percent over the last 30 years, while median family income grew only 16 percent during the same period. The average student is looking at $26,000 of debt when they graduate. Even President Obama labels the situation as a crisis, as the poorest students are saddled with more and more debt.
In an effort to combat the problem, the Department of Education created the College Scorecard, which provides students and families with a new kind of ranking by taking into account graduation rates, financial aid offerings, post-grad earnings — and most importantly — average debt. On it, these three liberal arts schools stand out as valuable options for low-income students, thanks to their high graduation rates, low student loan debt and the percentage of students eligible for federal Pell grants, which are available to those whose family incomes do not exceed $30,000 a year.
In stark contrast to many other universities, each of these colleges keep their students’ loan debt at least 50 percent lower than the national average. How do they remain academically solvent while not piling debt on their graduates?

Berea students hang out between classes. Courtesy of Berea College.

Berea College, Berea, Ky.

If you’ve never heard of Berea College in Kentucky, keep reading. It’s the only residential liberal arts school in America offering a completely free education to its nearly 1,600 students.
As President Lyle Roelofs explains, “nearly everything is different.”
Like other colleges with strong financial aid programs, Berea is selective, but it isn’t need-blind. It only accepts students whose family incomes fall beneath an income ceiling, providing a higher education opportunity — as Roelofs puts it — “to students wouldn’t get one otherwise.”
Berea is a very efficient educational experience, says Roelofs. Each student works part-time while on campus, holding jobs in numerous fields, from woodworking to hotel administration, to contribute to the $27,000 to $28,000 annual price of school. “We’re never interested in whether we can send some money to shareholders at the end of the year… We are much more like an entrepreneurial business with the idea that profits and successes get ploughed back into the enterprise,” he notes. To cover costs, 75 percent of tuition is handled by the endowment the college has accrued over its lengthy history. Only 15 percent comes from loan sources, primarily Pell grants (99 percent of students qualify) and similar state grants. A third of students don’t borrow anything at all, with the remainder receiving an average of about $6,700 in loans, almost 4 times less than the national average.
Perhaps more important is Berea’s graduation rate: 64 percent of its students receive a diploma. The average graduation rate for similar-income students nationwide is a dismal 9 percent. Roelofs attributes this jump to the focus that the school puts on each student and their families.
But can every college follow the Berea model? It would take something of a paradigm shift in approach, admits Roelofs. “Institutions are usually quite preoccupied with dealing with immediate challenges; they don’t consider radical changes,” he says. Still, other colleges could consider a more frugal approach. “If you don’t charge tuition, you can make much more sensible decisions on what the students actually need,” Roelofs notes. “People don’t look the gift horse in the mouth.”
“One of my favorite sayings is that just because an education is free doesn’t mean you can cut the corners. It still has to be first rate. Otherwise, our students would finish in four years and have nowhere to go.” Which would defeat the purpose of a place like Berea entirely.

The campus at WIlliams College. Courtesy of Williams College.

Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.

Williams College, located in western Massachusetts, is tiny and idyllic. It’s also the top-ranked national liberal arts college by U.S. News & Word Report, and it is one of the 50 most expensive colleges in the U.S., with an annual price tag of around $65,000. But it has a need-blind financial aid policy, making the average loan debt just over $13,000 (about half the national average), and many of the students who qualify for financial aid (more than 50 percent are eligible) are free of loans altogether.
How does Williams do it? By maintaining a strong endowment and an individualized approach to financial aid packages, says Paul Boyer, director of financial aid at Williams.
As one of the first schools in the country to make available a net price calculator for prospective students, Williams tries to evaluate each student, case by case, to ensure it’s offering the best plan. The school also makes a concerted effort to recruit students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, seeking out lower-income applicants. About 20 percent of current students receive Pell grants, double the amount at most other liberal arts colleges — and it’s increasing. “It’s been rising maybe 1 percent per year,” says Boyer. That may not sound like much, but it’s a far cry from most other schools (including Harvard, which hasn’t been able to crack a 10 percent ceiling).
Earning an average income of $58,000 a decade after graduation, students that receive financial aid, in general, have little trouble paying back their loans. The U.S. Department of Education even ranked Williams in its top 23 schools with low costs that lead to high incomes.
 

A spring day at Amherst College. Courtesy of Amherst College.

Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.

There must be something in the water in Massachusetts: Amherst, number two in U.S. News’s liberal arts ranking, also comes with a $65,000 yearly price tag. But just like Williams, its need-blind financial aid opportunities — which 58 percent of students qualify for — minimize its real cost. In fact, what students pay, on average, is actually half of the annual sticker price: $33,000.
Amherst is strictly anti-debt. “The most distinctive thing is our approach of not including loans, as we meet students’ full demonstrated need,” says Gail Holt, Amherst’s dean of financial aid. About 70 percent of students graduate with no debt whatsoever.
That’s an achievement that Amherst should be particularly proud of, considering that college costs and incomes aren’t rising at the same level in this country. As a result, more qualify for financial aid, and resources must be distributed among a wider number of students. At Amherst, Holt and her team try to serve a full spectrum of families and financial capabilities. “The hardest part is meeting the needs of such diverse populations.” With 24 percent of students eligible for Pell grants, it seems to be making headway.
 
Fortunately, for their students, these three schools earn As in crisis management. Will other universities be able to make the grade?

The American Dream Isn’t Dead. This Is How Immigrant Families Are Achieving It

Every year, more than 20 Americans are named MacArthur Fellows and given a $625,000 stipend for being, well, geniuses. Across the arts and sciences, their personalities and contributions often loom large — this year, think Lin-Manuel Miranda (the playwriting prodigy of Broadway’s “Hamilton” and “In the Heights” fame) or Ta-Nehisi Coates (perhaps the foremost author and voice of the black American experience in the news media today).
Some MacArthur geniuses, however, labor in significantly less lauded roles, doing their work on a much smaller scale. That’s the case for Juan Salgado, who has spent the last 15 years at the helm of southwest Chicago’s Instituto del Progreso Latino. The adult vocational training school appears modest on the surface. Yet dig in, and you’ll find an educational program with a surprisingly high 80 percent graduation rate — better than most high schools and college degree programs across the nation — and a radical approach to community support. What’s the Instituto doing? It’s asking poverty-level working parents to give up their evenings (over the course of three or more years) to improve their potential for employment through language and vocational training. It’s promising to lift families out of poverty and fulfill their American dreams. And it’s working.

Students congregate after classes let out from Instituto del Progreso Latino on Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2015.

Forty to 60 percent of residents of south and west Chicago are living below the poverty line, according to data collected by the New York Times. Those who come to Instituto are usually facing even more dire straits: they are often immigrants, and their average annual income is between $14,000 and $18,000. Having just around a 6th grade level education, they’re underemployed, working menial labor jobs, and supporting an average of 3.1 children.
So how do you help these families move forward and upward? When the Instituto opened in 1977, it focused on basic adult education needs for the local Latino community: how to pass a citizenship test and how to improve English-language skills. In 2001, Salgado became president and CEO of the Instituto and realized that these tools weren’t enough.
“We weren’t really connecting that adult learner with a specific career path where there were going to be jobs — where there was going to be opportunity to build. We weren’t connecting them to post-secondary education in a meaningful way,” he explains. Recognizing that assistance needed to stretch even further, Salgado emphasized that the second generation, the kids, would have to be part of the solution, as well.
It’s this holistic circular vision — a center that caters to the full needs of an entire family, from basic learning to career pipelines to childcare — that has fueled the success of Instituto in recent years. It takes a village, and Salgado has made the Instituto that much-needed community support system.
Juan Salgado, president and CEO of Instituto del Progreso Latino, in his office.

Mirna Holton, who served as associate director of the Instituto for three years and now sits on its governing board, notes that the increase in focus came at a critical moment. “It was a phenomenal time for big ideas… We challenged ourselves in the way that our families and individuals challenged themselves by shifting perspectives.”
The first step: identifying nearby career opportunities. Salgado sought out industries with robust job markets and gains that Instituto participants could realistically access. Manufacturing and nursing stood out as the most promising options. From there, the Instituto prepares students for the secondary degrees they need to enter those career paths with its Carreras en Salud and Manufacturing Technology Bridge Programs. Each has specialized training to bring adult students up to speed and introduce them to the skills and language they’d need. The important thing was to transform a 6th-grade-level education into a high-school-graduate education, but in fewer than the six years it normally takes to get there.
Participants spend five nights a week in classes for four or more hours at a time‚ the equivalent of attending high school while working a full-time job and managing a family. “We turn that into a 3-year deal,” emphasizes Salgado. “We’re doing accelerated learning. We’re doing contextualized learning. And we’re focusing in on a career occupation that the student is motivated for.”
To help students with the rigorous schedule, the Instituto offers a key service: family support. The nursing preparation track, in particular, draws a crowd of single mothers; Salgado estimates that 60 percent of its students provide for their children independently. Since they need childcare while they’re in class each evening, the Instituto provides it, along with a healthy meal. “The trick is, how do you get [the mothers] to juggle one or two fewer things?” asks Salgado. “It’s all about reducing complexity so they can be successful in the learning process.”
Nursing program participants have found that success. In less than a decade, about 500 students became licensed practical nurses, and more than 200 are currently enrolled. “Once they’re licensed nurses, 100 percent of them get a job,” boasts Salgado. Along with employment comes a significant pay raise. Instead of making less than $10 an hour, they’re now receiving $24 an hour and up. “It’s life changing.”
Finally, seeing that the kids need schooling to match their parents’, Salgado identified a third need: educating children. So the Instituto opened two charter high schools for the next generation.
Full circle support.
Inside Chicago’s Instituto del Progreso Latino.

It’s “creative leadership,” as the MacArthur Foundation puts it, that defines Instituto’s success. With more than 10,000 people receiving some form of assistance each year, according to ThinkProgress, the organization is an integral part of the Windy City. And because of its “collectivist manner,” as Holton describes it, nothing is embarked upon without taking the queues from the community itself.
But as Instituto has expanded, it has also encountered a common roadblock: funding.
Right now, the organization depends equally on private and public support, accessing funds from the government and from local Chicago philanthropies like the Chicago Community Trust and national organizations such as the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Forbes Foundations and the Aspen Institute. But Salgado and his team are not satisfied. Without a sustainable solution, they’re just another drain on the charitable economy. If the purpose of the adult training program is to provide a pathway for long-term career development, Salgado believes that the Instituto needs its own forward-thinking growth plan.
For that, he’s looking to new models — specifically, a revolving loan fund with the promise that students don’t pay unless their careers are set and their income is stable. “If we don’t get you there, you won’t pay us back,” says Salgado. “That’s risky, but our results have been pretty solid,” he says. A loan fund would keep the capital flowing, removing the Instituto from a nonprofit’s typical Sisyphean struggle of fundraising and spending. Instead, Salgado wants to put in motion a self-sustaining cycle of mobility.
“You know, in the business world, they take a bunch of chances, and there’s a whole culture for taking chances, right? And people get extremely rewarded for taking chances, right?” he muses. “In our work, there are all these disincentives to take chances, so everybody plays it safe, right? And as a result, we don’t often make as much progress as we actually need to.”
Salgado’s ready to take a risk in order to bring Instituto’s best practices out of Chicago and onto the national stage. Already, the Instituto provides technical assistance to groups looking to emulate their techniques in California, Indiana, Minnesota, and Texas. With the MacArthur grant, that list is likely to grow further. Because, as he says, “Almost every one of our cities could qualify for this.”

This Scorecard Could Help Make College More Affordable for Millions of Americans

When it comes to important decisions in a young person’s life, picking the right college (for both educational and financial reasons) ranks right at the top. So it makes sense to do some research beyond the rankings from the folks at U.S. News & World Report.
That’s where President Barack Obama’s College Scorecard comes in, as he says, to help you discover “where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” The U.S. Department of Education grades universities by alternative criteria like graduation and loan default rates, which are arguably more important than the number of Nobel Prize-winning professors a school employs.
Potential applicants might be interested to know, for example, that Harvard is the best deal for a top-10 school (the average student pays $14,445 annually) or that Columbia University in New York City has the highest loan default rate amongst all the Ivy League schools (2.9 percent, which is still far lower than national average of 14.7 percent).
“We know students and families are often overwhelmed in the college search process, but feel they lack the tools to sort through the information and decide which school is right for them,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says. “The College Scorecard provides a snapshot about an institution’s cost and value to help families make smart decisions about where to enroll.”
The site has drawn some criticism as being overly simplistic — it currently shows only four criteria — in grading something as intangible as the value of a liberal-arts education (although you can measure faculty degrees and student ratios). And others have called for data that would be directly relevant to at-risk students, like demographics and outcomes for racial minority, low-income or first-generation students.
Sure, the scores aren’t perfect, but the scorecard has started a conversation about college and affordability. It’s a start, providing plenty of interesting data. Here’s some findings we gleaned from the site, among the top 50 national universities:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology (#35) is offering the best deal on a four-year degree from a national university. The average net price (meaning the cost students pay after scholarships and grants are deducted) is $9,116. Four years at Georgia Tech will get you just one at the country’s most expensive school, New York University (#32), where the average net price is $37,656.
  • Harvard (#2) students, as you may expect, are most likely to don a cap and gown. They have the highest graduation rate — 97 percent — among the top colleges. Case Western Reserve University (#36) in Cleveland, on the other hand, has the lowest. Only 77.8 percent earn a diploma within six years.
  • Alumni from Duke University (#8), in Durham, N.C., generally have the smallest bill to worry about after graduation. Families typically borrow $8,000 in federal loans, which works out to a repayment schedule of about $92 per month over 10 years. High-priced New York University again bottoms out the list. Families take out an average of $32,090 in federal loans, which means they’ll be paying about $369 a month for a decade.
  • Graduates of Stanford University (#4), near Palo Alto, Calif., top the list in their ability to manage student loans. Only 0.7 percent default on their federal student loans within three years of beginning to pay them back. (No surprise, considering that Silicon Valley’s not too far away.) Happy Valley in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as lucrative. Eight percent of students from Penn State’s University Park campus (#48) default on their student loans.

Half a million unique visitors checked out the scorecard last year, but the government thinks it can reach an even wider audience: not just high schoolers and their families, but also nontraditional students older than the age of 25 (a demographic that accounts for half of all college students). Before next fall’s application season begins, the department plans to release long-promised data on employment rates and starting salaries, and there’s talk of eventually tying some of the federal government’s $150 billion in financial aid and state government’s $70 billion for public colleges to school performance.
Now more than ever, as unpaid student loans total an unbelievable $1.16 trillion, it’s a valuable tool to find a degree that’s worth more than just ink on paper.
MORE: How Do Young Men Become Better Fathers? They Attend This Boot Camp

25 Universities, 100 Free Classes and the One Bold Idea That’s Making College More Affordable for Millions of Americans

Ditch your stuffy seminars and dusty libraries. A slew of big-name colleges are now accepting online courses for credit.
A consortium of 25 schools, including University of Memphis, University of North Carolina and University of Maryland, are allowing all or most transfer credits that students earn from a select number of online programs. The broad list of institutions — both public and private, two-year and four-year, for-profit and non-profit — will focus on roughly 100 intro courses in up to 30 subject areas that are offered either at a low cost or for free. It’s already received the stamp of approval from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, along with a $1.89 million grant.
This is welcome news to many, primarily the 31 million working adults who took a few college classes but never finished. Now, they’ll have a better shot at obtaining a degree, certificate or credential for the knowledge they’ve already accrued. The program also has major appeal to kids who followed a non-traditional path out of high school, first-generation and low-income students and pretty much any young person who doesn’t like the idea of graduating knee-deep in debt.
More and more students are taking some online courses: the most recent figure by the Department of Education says 5.5 million students took at least one virtual class. A degree earned online doesn’t always have the same heft as one from awarded on a physical campus, but sometimes it’s the only option.
The popular Kaplan University, for example, a school that’s been offering distance courses since 1999 and is a part of this program, draws non-traditional students. Two-thirds are over the age of 30, and nearly 8,800 active military, veterans and spouses are enrolled. On the flip side, at Kaplan (a for-profit), there’s been allegations that teachers felt pressure to pass underperforming students, and the school paid a $1.3 million settlement last month for hiring incompetent teachers without minimum qualifications. That’s not to say online education is inherently flawed, but there’s still a number of problems that must be addressed.
The American Council on Education (ACE), essentially a trade organization for colleges and universities, is working to resolve this. One of the most important aspects of the alternative credit program will be setting standards for online courses and helping the 25 schools verify sources and select criteria for evaluating quality. It’s also hoping this move leads the wider higher education community to have “greater acceptance of alternative forms of credit, in a way that ensures quality and encourages more people to complete their postsecondary education,” says Deborah Seymour, ACE’s assistant vice president for education attainment and innovation. If all goes well this year, ACE plans to recruit additional schools by the start of the fall term.
“The institutions serving in this pilot project will play a valuable role in helping enhance the work we have been doing for many years in developing quality mechanisms for determining the credit worthiness of education, training and life experiences outside of a formal higher education classroom setting,” says ACE’s President Molly Corbett Broad. Referring to the Gates Foundation, she adds, “We very much appreciate this generous investment and the commitment it represents to the effort to provide a more flexible and cost-efficient way to increase the number of Americans able to gain a college degree or credential.”
Wondering if your school is accepting online credits? Here’s the complete list:

  • American Public University, Charles Town, W.Va.
  • Capella University, Minneapolis
  • Central Michigan University, Pleasant, Mich.
  • Charter Oak State College, New Britain, Conn.
  • Colorado Community College System
  • Colorado Technical University, Colorado Springs, Colo.
  • East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.
  • Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, N.C.
  • Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kan.
  • Goodwin College, East Hartford, Conn.
  • John F. Kennedy University, Pleasant Hill, Calif.
  • Kaplan University
  • Lakeland College, Plymouth, Wis.
  • Metropolitan State University of Denver
  • National Louis University, Chicago
  • Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz.
  • Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, La.
  • Notre Dame College, South Euclid, Ohio
  • SUNY Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
  • Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas
  • Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, N.J.
  • University of Baltimore
  • University of Maryland University College, Adelphi, Md.
  • University of Memphis
  • University of North Carolina

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