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Transparency by Design

College Choices for Adults - Transparency by Design Logo

The College Choices for Adults website is powered by the Transparency by Design (TbD) initiative which seeks to assist adult learners in becoming informed consumers of higher education. Participation in TbD also promotes greater transparency and accountability among regionally-accredited, adult-serving*, distance higher education** institutions.

* enroll students 23 years and older.
**distance higher education encompasses online, hybrid, competency-based and other flexible learning formats.

College Choices for Adults, and the Transparency by Design initiative have three key differentiators from other college search sites or voluntary systems of accountability:

  1. We provide program-level learning outcomes (aka what students are expected to learn in each program of study), measures of those learning outcomes, and how well recent students have performed. This type of data is rarely shared publicly, but our partner institutions chose (completely voluntarily!) to share publicly on the web. This allows adult learners to align their personal and professional goals with educational opportunities which have matching program-level learning outcomes.
  2. All of the data on this site goes through a third-party quality assurance review by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET). Other sites post data without any review by an outside party. Transparency by Design institutions voluntarily submit to this review to ensure quality data to help adults make their college choice.
  3. Institutions involved in Transparency by Design provide distance learning** options for adult learners*, thus our primary focus on adult learners. Other sites often focus on the priorities of traditional-aged students, such as campus life. College Choices for Adults concentrates on informing adults on how they can progress toward personal goals.

* enroll student 23 years and older.
**distance learning encompasses online, hybrid, competency-based and other flexible learning formats.

 

"Adults make up nearly 85 percent of all higher education enrollments today. Our goal with the initiative is to enable adults to make informed choices about higher education options by providing them with program-level learning outcomes, measurements and results that are difficult to find elsewhere."

Michael Offerman, President Emeritus, Capella University

 

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