The twelve most innovative colleges for adult learners.

• Author: Alvarez, Joshua

COLLEGE ISN'T DESIGNED FOR STUDENTS OVER TWENTY-FIVE. THESE SCHOOLS ARE WORKING TO FIX THAT.

Universities may be full of brilliant minds, but as institutions, they tend to be slow learners. They can take years to recognize facts that ought to be screamingly obvious--for instance, that their graduation rates are too low--and then years more to figure out what to do about the problem, if they figure it out at all.

Another way to put this is that American colleges and universities, as organizations, are not very innovative. Or at least not innovative in the areas in which they most need improving. (They do tend to excel at finding new and better ways to hit up alumni for donations.)

That's why, for the last couple of years, the Washington Monthly has been profiling the most innovative people we could find in higher education--be they college presidents, administrators, faculty members, or outside researchers. By highlighting individuals who are devising reforms that make their institutions measurably better on the metrics we care about--providing quality degrees at lower cost, getting more students to graduate, and so on--our hope has been to encourage more people to try.

This year we're focused on innovation in the area of adult students, where the institutional "slow learner" problem is especially severe. The share of college students who are adults--defined as twenty-five years old or older--is now about 40 percent. But most colleges haven't adapted. For instance, they still schedule the majority of classes around midday, which is convenient for late-night-partying undergrads, rather than at night and on weekends, when grownups with jobs and families can actually attend them.

As you'll see in the profiles below--and in our ranking of the best colleges for adult learners (introduction on page 25; rankings begin on page 28)--elite colleges don't make the cut. Despite supposedly having the cleverest professors and students, they tend to be the slowest learners when it comes to serving adult students. It's the unheralded schools, the kind U.S. News and other gatekeepers don't notice or celebrate, that are figuring it out. Not all of the schools below made it onto our top 100 lists; a few were not even within shouting distance. But they are all doing something right that other schools ought to emulate.

Odessa College (ranked #209 in best 2-year colleges for adults)

Six years ago, Odessa College was the worst community college in West Texas. Its majority-Hispanic student body had a graduation rate in the single digits, overall enrollment was low, and the number of "stop-outs"--students leaving school intending to return later--was huge, especially whenever the local oil and gas industry was booming. "The oil and gas industry dominates the college-going culture in our region," said Donald Wood, Odessa's vice president for institutional effectiveness. "When unemployment is high, college enrollments go up. When the oil and gas industry is hiring, college enrollments go down."

But over the past five years, Odessa has improved dramatically. Metrics are way up across the board, enough to place it at number 209 (out of the nearly 1,300 two-year schools we looked at) on our list of the best colleges for adult learners. It also caught the attention of the Aspen Institute, placing as a finalist for this year's Prize for Community College Excellence. According to school officials, the improvement was due to two simple yet significant changes to the school's structure and teaching method.

First, in 2011, Odessa targeted teaching with its Drop Rate Improvement Program. Through internal research, the administration had discovered that while personal and financial issues contributed to students' decision to drop classes--in turn making them more likely to drop out of school altogether--having good relationships with instructors could overcome those factors. After studying what instructors with high retention rates were doing differently from instructors with low retention rates, the school identified four practices of successful teachers, which Odessa turned into a four-pillar teaching framework: use students' names from the first day of class onward; intervene early if a student is having obvious problems (like falling asleep in class, or failing the first exam); meet one on one with students at least once per term, preferably early; and lay out clear expectations and penalties in the syllabus, while judging infractions on a case-by-case basis. New instructors are trained in this framework.

Second, in 2014, Odessa transitioned all of its core courses--80 percent of its offerings--from sixteen-week semesters to two eight-week terms, something no Texas school had ever done. The idea was to double the number of opportunities students have to enroll in classes and increase the course completion rate. Instead of taking four or five classes in a sixteen-week term, full-time students take just two classes per eight-week term; part-time students take just one. The class hours are doubled in order to fit sixteen weeks of curriculum into eight weeks, which allows students to still qualify for Pell Grants. To help students manage the increased classroom hours, Odessa offers courses at various times of day and on weekends.

The first semester with eight-week terms yielded the largest enrollment in Odessa's seventy-one-year history, and the numbers have grown each year since--even though regional unemployment is low. The school also saw a 4 percent increase in course completion and a 3 percent increase in student success (earning a C- or higher) a year after implementation.

Offering eight-week terms and improving instruction both got students in the classroom and made it easier for them to stay The course completion rate is now over 90 percent, up from around 85 percent. Odessa has also experienced a dramatic increase in annual graduation/transfer rates, from 15 percent to 32 percent in five years. And achievement gaps are shrinking. Hispanic men were historically among the lowest-performing student groups at Odessa. But now they complete 96 percent of the classes they start, get at least a C in 78 percent of those classes, and have more than doubled their graduation rate in the last five years.

University of Maryland University College (ranked #88 in best 4-year colleges for adults)

University of Maryland University College (UMUC), a member of the University of Maryland system that offers fully online and hybrid degrees, is once again ranked in our top 100 four-year schools for adult learners, thanks to its large adult student population, low tuition costs, and high average earnings for graduates. But what those numbers don't capture is UMUC's reputation for serving military and veteran students at home and abroad. The college was founded in the wake of World War II with the intent of serving returning veterans, and it was the first university to send professors overseas to offer classes to active-duty service members. Now that was distance learning.

Shortly after joining UMUC in September 2015, Keith Hauk, the associate vice president of veterans initiatives, visited the University of Maryland, College Park (Maryland's flagship public university), for a meeting with that school's ROTC detachment. Hauk, himself a veteran, passed through the school's veterans' lounge and found five students sitting together, trying to figure out how to get through their calculus course. UMUC has a lounge on its campus, but because the vast majority of students who use veterans' benefits take classes online, it wasn't serving military students the way College Park's was serving theirs. That got Hauk thinking about how to build something like a virtual student union for UMUC's online military student body.

Last summer, Hauk's vision came to fruition as the...