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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This Program Shares Its Wisdom About Producing Minority Ph.D. Science Students

It goes without saying that the folks at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) know a thing or two about supporting and encouraging minority and low-income undergraduate students in continuing their studies and earning science Ph.D.s.
Impressively, over the past two decades, the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UMBC has produced 900 graduates who have gone on to rack up 423 advanced science degrees and 107 medical degrees.
Compare that to Penn State, which was recently named one of the top 40 schools for educating black students who eventually earned advanced science degrees. Despite the recognition, the public university earned that status by producing just four (!) degrees earned by black science students out of about 3,000 STEM students total.
“The data is shocking,” Penn State Chemistry professor Mary Beth Williams told Jeffrey Mervis of Science Insider. “Clearly we have to do a better job.”
So the people behind UMBC’s successful Meyerhoff Scholars Program will mentor faculty and staff at Penn State and the University of North Carolina in an attempt to increase the number of minority students enrolled in science Ph.D. programs. Over five years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will dedicate $7.75 million to the effort.
Clearly, UMBC has figured out a formula that keeps minority and low-income students on track to become scientists: Close monitoring of academic progress, a summer program for incoming freshmen, scholarships, research opportunities, and a close cohort of talented students who foster a sense of teamwork with each other. Its current four-year class of Meyerhoff Scholars includes 300 students, 60 percent of which are underrepresented minorities.
Williams said she plans to study these lessons carefully in the program’s implementation at Penn State. “My goal is to clone it as much as possible. It’s been successful for 25 years, so why mess with it? The more you change, the more you’re inviting failure.”
The president of UMBC, Freeman Hrabowski, is proud of how the scholars program has grown from its initial class of 19 African-American male science students in 1989. “What Meyerhoff has done is get us to think about our responsibility to students who say they want a STEM degree,” he told Mervis. “And what helps underrepresented minorities will also help the rest of our students.”
MORE: When People Said Minorities Weren’t Interested in Science, This Guy Proved Them Wrong
Correction: June 5, 2014
A previous version of this post misstated the funding for this program. It is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, not the UMBC.

The Next Frontier in Crowdfunding: DIY College Scholarships

Fed up with the lack of scholarship opportunities at your school? Well, now even scholarships can be DIY thanks to Cabell Maddux, a recent Wesleyan University graduate.
Maddux and his friends started a crowdfunding system called Scholarships Expanding Education to help students pay for college. SEE flips the traditional scholarship crowdfunding model around by inviting donors to start a scholarship in their own name. Then donors can recruit other people to donate to the fund. The donor can set GPA limits and majors so that the scholarship can be catered to what he or she would like to see. “We noticed the buzz around crowdfunding for students with a couple of sites that started up years ago, and these were sites where students were creating their own profile. As students ourselves, we thought it would be so hard for us to sell our stories to 100 strangers,” Maddux told Fast Company. “So we came up with this concept of flipping this on its head, with starting with someone who’s essentially the giver, so the student isn’t having to mobilize this crowd of donors.”
SEE debuted last month with encouraging results. A fund set up for Maddux’s grandfather’s birthday has raised $550 in the last week. And SEE has raised $8,000 in scholarships for Harvard, Fordham, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Averett University. Maddux and his team have applied for nonprofit status hoping to make scholarship donations tax deductible. The team aims to get things running smoothly before Maddux goes to medical school next year. “We want to build and provide another access point to financial aid,” Maddux told Fast Company. “We want to make this simple for the schools as well.”
MORE: The Neediest Students Couldn’t Afford His Help, So This Test-Prep Prodigy Stepped Up