According to its vice president of academic affairs Kaari Casey, Campus — which launched its national community college initiative beta last year — offers an online, two-year degree program that costs half as much as many traditional two-year degree programs elsewhere. She said the startup, which recently secured $29 million in funding from investors to recruit professors and expand its academic offerings, is a “no-loan” school, and that many of its students can pay for tuition solely through federal Pell Grant funding.
“We cap our tuition at or below the [maximum] federal Pell Grant, so students never pay more than around $7,000 to go to school. Most of our students are full Pell recipients, meaning they don’t need to take out any loans, and they don't really pay anything out of pocket to get their two-year associate's degree,” she said, adding that Campus is set to graduate its first cohort of students in March 2024.
Casey said the company currently offers an information technology program, a nursing program and a paralegal program primarily out of its Sacramento campus, as well as an online associate’s program in business administration. While the only program being offered online through Campus’ “national model” is business administration, she said the startup plans to make its other programs available nationally moving forward, adding that they hope to create a model for others on how online classes can make community college affordable.
“We're only in our second year running courses and were intentional about scale for those first two years. We wanted to keep it small and hyper-focused, and now we're at a point where we are ready to grow. We just had our largest class of incoming students start with us in early October and had 200 new students join,” she said. “We're going to continue to expand our incoming classes over the next two years in order to reach thousands of students, so our big focus right now is on engaging more students and then expanding our degree portfolio.”
Unlike other schools that rely on learning management systems and platforms such as Canvas, she said, Campus built its own platform, Campuswire, to provide students with more customized academic support.
“Campus is probably one of the only schools that has built its own complete platform. What this allows us to do is capture the full student experience right on one platform ... so that they know where to go, where to find their people, where to find their teachers, where to find their grades. We know where to go to see how they're doing," she said. "We're also able to build what we need. If students need a different kind of engagement tool, we can build that. … Having full ownership over what that virtual school experience is allows us to really be an all-in-one spot for our students, and for our teachers, and to be able to track [student performance] on a much more granular level.”
Moving forward, Casey said, Campus plans to offer degree programs in full-stack engineering and other tech disciplines to give students access to lucrative careers where tech skills are in high demand.
“We’re going to add more tech-focused programs including one on full-stack engineering and a number of career-connected degree paths that will get students in with employer partners and get them employed after those two years,” she said. “Once we launch that [full-stack program] next spring or summer, then we'll explore other degree areas of focus. The goal here that guides us is they must be hyper-relevant."
