The Week in Review (November 11, 2023)

1. Quite a significant week for Campus Edu and perhaps for higher education. Our partner, Oklahoma Baptist University, launched Raley College at OBU with us. The concept is fairly simple:

• You live in the dorm and participate in campus life. You go to chapel. You eat in the cafeteria. You can't play intercollegiate sports, however, because you're in an associate degree program (AA in Interdisciplinary Studies).
• You take one face-to-face class, but the other four are online classes partnered with Campus. They are, in effect, OBU classes with OBU professors in OBU's catalog. Campus Edu is like a really fancy textbook with a professor inside.
• The tuition is $10,000, making this the least expensive tuition of any CCCU school. The goal is to serve as a junior college. Why go to a secular community college, sometimes with less equipped instructors?
• Someone could of course commute. Room and board is $8400.

This is like a Priceline model. Sell the empty rooms in your dorms at a special rate. Why let them sit empty? Most students will still want the classroom experience if they can afford it. But this just might get some to come who can't. And they get a Christian perspective with courses designed for digital natives. Then you can try to upsell them into your bachelor's programs.

OBU has been a model partner. They are motivated, willing to take calculated risks, willing to change when it is reasonable. They have really helped us refine the model. Rarely have we found such a nimble partner. We have talked to other potential partners whose fear of cannibalizing students who might pay full price undermined the project. 

The key is that virtually no student actually pays full sticker price at any private college. By the time scholarships and such are added, the average tuition a student pays is usually about half of the sticker price. It's a game. And the amount a college wants to make on a student from tuition is perhaps half of that. In the end, colleges won't actually make much less on a student with this program. And if it gets or retains students who wouldn't otherwise have attended, it's gold.

2. The rest of my week was spent working on church history courses. On Wednesday, Bud Bence and I met on the campus of Anderson University where the Wesleyan Church was founded. We did some bantering about the merger. This will become a Wesleyan Church History and Discipline course toward ordination, largely with Kingswood, with some other surprises in store. Kingswood has also proved to be a model partner.

The rest of the week I was putting together the micro-course version of Bud Bence's full church history course. A Bud Bence legacy course already exists through Kingswood. As part of the Kingswood Learn project, we will be rolling out over fifty free micro-courses for the Wesleyan Church. One of them is a crash five Lesson course in church history, featuring some videos from Bud's broader class.

The church is going to love what Kingswood is providing as a service, for free. What an incredible discipleship tool for the church!