As part of our ongoing coverage of successful higher-education distance- learning providers, this month’s issue of Educational Pathways takes a look inside Excelsior College.

Excelsior, as many readers might already know, is primarily an outcomes-based assessment institution that operates out of two office buildings in Albany, New York. It confers 33 regionally accredited degrees in nursing, liberal arts, business and technology. It awards credit from "widely scattered sources," including what some institutions might consider a liberal policy of accepting previously earned higher-education credit.

"We are able to take past credit and past learning and aggregate that to fit against our degree requirements," says Chari Leader, vice president for enrollment management. "Our degree requirements are fairly traditional, but the way students are able to meet those requirements is where all the innovation comes in. As a distance-learning college, we are not confined to offering just online courses, or having just specific ways you can meet those degree requirements. We work with students to help them pick the way that works best for them." That can include, in addition to applying previously earned higher-education credit to a student’s degree plan, a combination of online courses, traditional on-campus courses, telecourses, print-based courses, CD-ROM-based and/or video-based courses, independent-study courses with an exam component to document college-level learning, or earning credit for corporate or military training. "We put that all together."

In many ways, Excelsior can be considered the adult learner’s dream come true, especially for those seeking degrees in Nursing, which accounted for 70 percent of all 27,000 Excelsior students in 2003. Simply put, the prime order of the day at Excelsior centers on providing flexible and affordable methods to enable its students to earn their degrees in an efficient, student-service-oriented manner.

Excelsior, which was formerly Regents College, has been around since 1971. Up through 1998, it experienced some growing pains when it was under the auspices of its founder, the New York State Board of Regents. In 1998, it separated from the Board of Regents and became an independent college with its own charter and Board of Trustees. Since gaining independence and changing its name in 2000 to Excelsior, which is Latin for "ever upward," and a theme in many of the college’s collateral, the college has grown substantially, increasing total enrollments from 16,395 students in 1999 to 27,005 students at end of 2003 (see page 3). A very large enrollment leap of 6,420 students came last year - after it achieved a 10-year reaccreditation by the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. (The college has been regionally accredited since 1977.) The vast majority of students come into Excelsior with prior higher-education credit. The average age of Excelsior students is 40.

Over the course of its history, Excelsior has graduated more than 100,000 students. For most of its existence, Excelsior awarded only associate’s and bachelor’s degrees. In 2001, it added two graduate-level degrees, a master’s in liberal arts and a master’s in nursing.

A look at Excelsior’s open admissions process reveals a service-oriented system for students to quickly find out what will be required of them to earn a degree. Often, before officially enrolling, prospective students will quickly send in their application for admission with unofficial transcripts attached in order to have an admission counselor provide them with an unofficial read on how many credits Excelsior will accept and how many credits a prospective student will need to earn in order to obtain a degree.

Once a student officially enrolls, academic advisors take over, helping to approve courses for credit and recommending courses for students to take that meet degree requirements. Essentially, advisors develop an official "status report" of accepted credit a student has already earned, along with an "academic evaluation summary" that details what a student needs in order to graduate.

Not surprisingly, the admissions and advisement processes require a lot of telephone communication. "Our admissions department handles an average of 11,000 calls per month," says Leader. "The telephone is still our most popular method of communication," adds Betsy DePersis, director of advisement and evaluation.

Advising, in general, is a challenging occupation. As the gatekeepers of transcripts, says DePersis, Excelsior advisors (45 in all) "have to be very detail-oriented when evaluating every transcript that comes into the college. They have to troubleshoot a lot because all schools are not the same; they all look very differently. On the other end of their job they have to be very good in terms of relationship building with students. So it seems like advisors must have two diametrically opposed personality traits."

DePersis explains that it is not uncommon for an advisor to be forced to switch from doing detailed research on a transcript to suddenly talking to a student on an entirely different level.

All counselors and advisors go through an intensive training program, adds Leader. "It generally entails going through our catalogue of information on academic degree requirements, learning how to use our Web site as a resource tool, and listening in on phone calls." Overall, counselors and advisors "must have a lot of information at their fingertips and be able to respond."

A very creative and professional Fall 2003 Excelsior publication titled "Live and Learn," which is published twice yearly by its Office of Institutional Advancement, has a revealing story about Excelsior’s 2003 graduating class, which consisted of 4,773 graduates. They represented all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Twenty five countries were represented. The average age of these graduates was 37.5, the oldest being 76 years old and the youngest grad 17 years old. Just under eight percent of all graduates were from New York State, and 33 percent of all graduates self-identified as members of minority groups.

Brief profiles of some of these graduates presented in "Live and Learn" reveal a wide range of student backgrounds, including a mother of two teenage children who earned a BS in Accounting while holding down a full-time job; a licensed psychologist who entered the Associate in Applied Science (nursing) degree program as a step toward her goal of earning a psychiatric nurse-practitioner certification; and a supervisor of a radiation protection operation, with 27 years of experience in the nuclear industry, who earned a BS in Technology.

Another important factor to consider is that 25 to 30 percent of all Excelsior students come from the military, with the Army and Navy leading in numbers. In 2001, Excelsior was named a Navy Distance Learning Partner, becoming one of 18 institutions officially endorsed by the U.S. Navy to offer degree programs to Navy personnel wherever they are stationed. Excelsior also has an alliance with the education divisions of the Army National Guard and the Coast Guard to provide educational services to more than 400,000 personnel. Plus, Excelsior is an eArmyU provider for its two master’s programs, although this is not a big source of enrollments for the college. To possibly increase the potential of obtaining students from the eArmyU program, Excelsior is developing online programs at the undergraduate level, where the bulk of eArmyU students enroll.

Interestingly enough, students outside of the Excelsior niche nursing-industry and military markets typically find out about the college through word-of-mouth referral from other adult learners, says Leader. "Our students tend to be career-oriented and very focused on completing their degrees. Excelsior isn’t really the place you come to start a degree; it is where you come to finish your degree. They are always working full-time, juggling family, community and work commitments. Typically our students are also sending their kids to college, so they have a lot of competing demands and are looking for an efficient way to complete their degrees. So, what we do is try to provide as many choices as possible to the student in how they can get that degree."

As aforementioned, the basis of these choices come from "widely scattered sources." Leading the way of credit-bearing sources, outside of what’s transferred in from previously earned credit, are a battery of exams that Excelsior has developed over its history and continues to fine tune, along with traditional on-campus courses that students enroll in at colleges and universities across the country. The preponderance of examinations is due primarily to the fact that nursing students are required to take plenty of exams that measure a wide variety of skill and knowledge levels in order to earn their degrees.

Close on the heels of exams and on-campus courses, distance-education courses are the next largest body of credit sources. "More and more of our students are taking distance-education courses and learning online," says Leader, adding that "for some courses the classroom seems to work better, and those generally are your science courses, where they would have a lab experience, or in math courses, where adults need more interaction with a faculty member. However, as more and more opportunities become available, and as online support services become more standardized, online learning becomes more useful to our students."

Students can find thousands of distance-education courses that are offered by 180 institutions through two Excelsior-grown searchable database services, one called DistanceLearn®, and another, which is a subset of DistanceLearn, called the Preferred Provider Catalogue.

Excelsior also hosts what’s referred to as the "Electronic Peer Network," which provides numerous online services to students.

Basically, Excelsior College has built a model framework for outcomes-based assessment that is steeped in history and respected by its accreditors, which in addition to the Middle States Association, includes the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLNAC), the Technology Accreditation Commission (TAC), and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). Additionally, Excelsior College examinations are recognized by the American Council on Education (ACE) Center for Adult Learning and Educational Credentials for the award of college-level credit.

"In the Middle States Association and region we have been at the forefront of helping to develop a framework for academic-outcome assessment," says Leader. "As a distance-learning provider over the past 30 years, we have had to provide the research and documentation that our students are meeting the same academic rigor and have accumulated the same college-level knowledge as someone sitting in a traditional class. So, we have put the framework together by being an assessment-based institution for many years, long before it had really become popular. And we have helped other institutions with their frameworks for outcomes assessment by making our’s available to them and by answering their questions."

The entire Excelsior system is managed and maintained by 250 employees in Albany, NY. In addition, Excelsior has regional performance assessment centers located throughout the country that service its nursing students. There’s a team of military consultants who travel to military bases throughout the United States. There’s also a team of faculty consultants who regularly meet with Excelsior administrators.

"Our faculty (consultants) tend to be tenured senior professionals at other institutions, and they come here and serve on the faculties that are overseen by the deans of each school," says Leader. They meet about three to four times a year for a couple of days to discuss program requirements. It is really quite a unique model in that they are able to leave the academic politics behind and come in and focus on our unique students and our unique mission and design programs around that without having to worry about if they are going to meet their case or course load for the semester. Additionally, we have faculty who serve on our examination-development committees, where we build our exams, and they come and make sure that the exams we are preparing are equivalent to the end-of-course exams in their classrooms. And we have faculty members that serve in our nursing school in examining students at our performance assessment centers."

Excelsior’s biggest challenge deals with effectively handling the large number of prospective and current students who are constantly seeking information via telephone, e-mail, snail-mail and the Excelsior Web site. The Excelsior Web site, in particular, although loaded with valuable information, looks to be, in this author’s opinion, in need of a major overhaul. (By the way, this is not an unusual set of circumstances for many distance education providers.) That’s why, coming in July 2004, Excelsior is planning to roll out a new "Web portal," says Leader, "where we hope to serve up customized and individualized information to our students and make more information available to them online 24 by 7.

"The portal will be database-driven. When you log in, we will serve up the information that is tailored to what you are interested in. So, if you are a nursing student, what will come up for you is nursing information and program updates and things that would be of interest to you as a nurse.

"We have a large technical team along with consultants, and then of course, every piece of the college is being touched by the portal. There are a lot of meetings going on about what information needs to be there and how that information should be distributed. It is a huge step in the right direction for us in terms of providing better information and hopefully some scalability to our operation. It’s a huge endeavor."