American Women's College

Bay Path University (MA)

Completion Commitments [White House Summit on College Opportunity, Dec. 2014]

GOAL:  Bay Path University commits to producing 399 additional graduates by 2020 and a total of 2,662 additional graduates by 2025.

ACTION PLAN:  Building on previous efforts to deliver innovative onsite and online baccalaureate degree programs for adult women, Bay Path University will further work to expand accelerated baccalaureate programs designed to give low-income and underrepresented adult women the confidence and opportunity to pursue an affordable college education, even if they are employed full-time, juggle responsibilities as a single parent, struggle financially, or were unsuccessful at prior attempts to earn their degree.

The American Women's College at Bay Path University was launched during the 2013-2014 academic year. This unique college is developing and deploying a revolutionary approach for delivering online accelerated baccalaureate degree programs tailored solely to adult women that incorporates an innovative adaptive learning platform known as Social Online Universal Learning (SOUL). SOUL creates a customized learning environment that leverages learning analytics, educator coaches, virtual learning communities and other wraparound support to shorten time to degree completion, increase affordability and improve degree attainment.  Bay Path University is announcing a new institutional commitment of $84.8 million through FY2020 to scale up capacity to serve adult women online through the American Women’s College.

Given the significant investment commitments made by the University to develop new career-focused baccalaureate degree programs delivered through the SOUL platform and to develop greater capacity to serve large numbers of adult students online, the University fully anticipates significant scale-up in enrollment and acceleration in the number of graduates produced each year as SOUL is fully developed and deployed. This will lead to calculated cost savings as enrollment builds and economies of scale are achieved.

The University is also exploring exciting opportunities for collaboration with community colleges to employ the SOUL model to streamline the transfer of adult students from associate’s to online baccalaureate degree programs. The University anticipates working with community colleges to enable their adult students, men and women alike, to test-drive the experience of online learning by making the SOUL model’s online Bridge Course available for free to adult students who would benefit from online learning. A mentor would be available at the community college, onsite where feasible, to support cohorts of students taking the course and to facilitate transfer to online baccalaureate degree programs, including The American Women’s College. This mentor is in addition to the online educator-coaches who provide comprehensive support in the SOUL online environment. 

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