College for America

Focused on “unconfident learners”—those who are familiar with educational failures, unsure of their abilities, or balancing the demands of work and family—the College for America program of Southern New Hampshire University is a self-paced online associate’s degree program with no courses, no credit hours, no traditional faculty, and no grades, offered at a low student cost. The program encourages mentors in the workplace or the local community, uses a set of key competencies defined, in part, by employers, and connects each student to a coach who helps chart their path through the competencies.

The two-page grantee profiles from Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) provide factual information about the secondary school and postsecondary degree program designs awarded grants under NGLC's third wave of funding, which focused on two areas, "Breakthrough Models for College Readiness" and "Breakthrough Models for College Completion." Each profile describes what makes each model "breakthrough" and offers important information about the instructional and financial models, student demographics, hardware and software choices, and contact info. These profiles serve to illustrate the innovations of these new blended and online models, with practical details of interest to those starting a new school or degree program.

NGLC accelerates educational innovation through applied technology to dramatically improve college readiness and completion in the United States. To learn more about NGLC and the grantees it supports, visit nextgenlearning.org.