Don C. Brunell: Trailblazing Educator Retiring

Keys to fulfilling President Donald Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” are well-prepared people who employers can hire to run our factories and businesses.

Jean Floten, who is retiring as chancellor of WGU Washington at the end of January, is one of those trailblazing leaders who has been an innovative educator with vision, drive and tenacity. People like her are vital to accomplishing the president’s aspiration.

Floten has been an accomplished education leader for 53 years. Most of her career has been in Washington as a highly-regarded community college president. In 2011, Floten, then president of Bellevue Community College, was appointed as WGU Washington’s first and only chancellor.

WGU stands for Western Governors University. Founded in 1997 by 19 governors, it came to Washington in 2011 after Gov. Chris Gregoire signed authorizing legislation.

The university serves working adults and the 950,000 state residents who have started – but not finished – their college degrees. The average age of the WGU Washington student is 36. Students come from urban, suburban and rural areas, but unlike traditional colleges and universities, there is no campus.

Under Floten’s guidance, WGU Washington’s annual enrollment surpassed 10,000 students. These students work in 3,800 businesses across the state, many of them in full-time jobs.

The university has awarded bachelors and masters degrees in business, teaching, information technology and health fields, including nursing, to more than 7,100 students.

WGU Washington uses competency-based instruction that measures learning rather than time in a classroom. In other words, you need to know the information thoroughly before you move to the next level.

It is a pass-fail system with no letter grades. The important thing is the student masters his or her work, so potential employers know they can do the job.

It doesn’t matter if you miss a class where important information was covered because WGU Washington is self-paced with mentors tracking progress and assisting students to master the materials.

And there’s another difference.

Typically, after the graduation ceremony euphoria wears off for graduates of traditional colleges and universities, students are faced with starting a new life away from campus, finding a job and starting to repay their student loans.

The cost of a college education is staggering these days, and 71 percent of grads are leaving college with loans averaging almost $30,000 – and the Federal Reserve reports that student loan debt has nearly tripled over the last decade.

That heavy debt weighs on students long after they leave college.

Pew Research reports that households headed by a young (under 40) college-educated adult with no student debt accumulated seven times the net worth of households headed by a similarly situated person carrying student debt. And Pew found that student borrowers carried almost twice as much other debt (car loans, credit cards, mortgages) than non-borrowers.

“Our priority is to help you graduate with less debt – or none at all,” Floten tells students and families.

It is affordable because tuition is charged at a flat rate of approximately $6,000 per 12-month term for most programs. Rather than paying per credit hour, students may complete as many courses as they are able during a term without incurring additional costs.

“The more courses you complete each term, the more affordable your degree becomes,” she adds.

Floten retires after five years at WGU Washington, 22 at Bellevue College, 15 at Edmonds Community College and three at Mt. Hood Community College.

Simply put, “Making America Great Again” requires a new crop of visionary and innovative educators like Jean Floten. Hopefully, she will become a tutor for that next generation of education trailblazers.

(Don C. Brunell is a business analyst, writer and columnist. He retired as president of the Association of Washington Business, the state’s oldest and largest business organization, and now lives in Vancouver. He can be contacted at theBrunells@msn.com.)