WGU sees potential to positively impact over a million lives in next decade.
WGU Accelerates Work-Based Learning Pathways
SALT LAKE CITY, Sept. 05, 2024 – Western Governors University (WGU) announced today the acquisition of Craft Education Inc. and the acceleration of its endeavor to develop, launch and scale work-based learning pathways, a vital next phase in its mission to change lives for the better by transforming education to better serve untapped talent and meet employer needs.
Craft Education is the leading education technology company focused on apprentice-based programs with a first-of-its-kind platform for establishing, monitoring, reporting and facilitating on-the-job training aligned with degree programs and work-ready skills. With this acquisition, WGU fast-tracks its ability to innovate and scale work-based curriculum and new student experience designs. The combination accelerates the expansion of apprenticeship and other embedded job programs alongside WGU’s existing degree and certificate offerings across education, healthcare, technology and business.
“Combining Craft with WGU represents a step-function advancement in our mission and pace of innovation to improve quality, access, equity and outcomes in education relevant to the world of work,” said Scott Pulsipher, president of the national nonprofit university. “While WGU’s current model serves many, there are so many more who are acquiring knowledge and skill through work. Work-based learning, leveraging our competency-based approach, is the future of pathways to both activate talent from everywhere and meet the strategic workforce needs of the future.”
Of the 167 million people in the U.S. workforce, 62% do not have a postsecondary degree–meaning that 103 million people are not being fully recognized for the talent and skill they’ve already developed through work. While employers struggle to find skilled talent, and as many as two-thirds of roles in the future are expected to require postsecondary credentials, a large pool of underserved and untapped talent already exists within their organizations to meet their needs. With work-based pathways, WGU and Craft will take the lead in helping employers activate talent into opportunity.
“We are seeking to build the best work-based learning pathways in the country, modeling for other higher education institutions how to connect learning and work at scale,” said Courtney Hills McBeth, chief academic officer and provost. “Our investment will turbocharge this initiative and extend our innovative approach to linking students to careers and improving student outcomes, while demonstrating our leadership at the frontier of creating more pathways to opportunity.”
Acquisition of Craft Education; establishment of new WGU academic department
With the acquisition of Craft Education, Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, CEO and founder of Craft, and its employees will join WGU. As part of the acquisition, WGU intends to retain the Craft Education name and will establish a new, nonprofit operating division. Dwinal-Palisch will serve as executive director of this division, leaving her role as chancellor at Reach University. The Craft division will focus on developing the ecosystem platform for enabling work-based pathways across higher education and employer partners, including WGU.
“Craft unlocks in-demand careers for America’s frontline workforce. By automating the necessary data collection and reporting, this platform allows organizations to braid federal funding and postsecondary training together with on-the-job pathways that fill skilled labor vacancies,” Dwinal-Palisch said. “As a part of the WGU ecosystem, Craft will create a win-win for the tens of millions of American workers seeking affordable, job-embedded training solutions and the employers that need their skilled talent.”
In addition, WGU will establish an academic department inside the university to focus on the design, development and scaling of work-based programs across its schools of education, health, technology and business. This organization will define and provide differentiated and consistent tech-enabled learning, instruction and student-experience models across WGU’s program portfolio and build the presence and partnerships necessary to scale enrollment locally and nationally.
Providing new pathways to opportunity
WGU expects that this new endeavor will allow it to serve as many students in the coming decade as it has since its founding nearly three decades ago.
“Work-based pathways to learning have demonstrated significant advancement of opportunities for diverse and underrepresented students in a way that few other academic pathways can, driving better student outcomes, affordability and employability,” Pulsipher said. “Version 1.0 of our competency-based, tech-enabled model fit education into students’ already busy lives. Version 2.0 of our model brings work and learning together.”
WGU has an established track record of scaling clinical experiences for teaching and nursing. WGU’s School of Education, which confers 5.2% of all K-12 education degrees in the nation, is currently working with several “Grow Your Own” and apprenticeship partners to address teacher shortages. To date, this includes programs for aspiring teachers in 12 states, serving more than 650 students. WGU’s Leavitt School of Health provided 26,000 clinical placements in academic year 2024 and projects it will do 36,000 in 2025.
WGU has more than 300 employer partners as well as partnerships with more than 4,000 school districts. The university will work with current and future partners to create new work-based pathways and accelerate degrees and certificates gained in earn-and-learn settings, equipping students with verified in-demand skills and knowledge that are aligned with work experience.
National impact of work-based pathways
Apprenticeship and on-the-job training programs have strong, bipartisan support in Congress and among political leaders across the country, opening avenues to additional state and federal funding for earn-and-learn programs in postsecondary education.
“WGU’s expansion into broader work-based learning pathways positions us to have a transformative impact in shaping the future of education and work as we become the epicenter of designing and delivering earn-and-learn opportunities that increase equity in access while solving critical workforce needs,” said Joe Fuller, chair of WGU’s Board of Trustees and a distinguished management professor at Harvard Business School and co-director of Harvard’s Managing the Future of Work project.
Earlier this month, WGU announced it had reached a historic milestone by conferring 50,168 degrees, earned by 49,564 students, in academic year 2024. Significantly, 67% of those graduates were from one or more underserved populations — students of color, first in family to attend college, rural residents or low-income earners — a demonstration of WGU’s ability to impact the economic and social mobility of its students with an open-access model. WGU currently serves over 175,000 students, which includes more than 126,000 new students over the past academic year — up 28.2% over the previous year.
“We are helping our students improve their lives, on a personal and a professional level,” McBeth said, “and this has generational and community impacts that ripple into the future. We also are providing employers with the highly skilled, work-ready and diverse talent desperately needed to maintain America’s prosperity and its competitive edge.”
