Solution
Looking for a creative solution, Dr. Bedsole investigated ReUp Education, intrigued by a partnership model with no upfront costs. He describes how this approach fit their desire to impact students without needing any additional resources to get started: “The way ReUp’s partnership is structured, we get to work with this population, we get to find out what their concerns are, and we get them back into classes — and then we settle the financials on the back end. That was the main reason we were able to pursue the partnership.”
While it was important for the stopout approach to work well for the University, ultimately it had to work well for the students themselves – by addressing their specific obstacles to access. Dr. Aulgur explains how this happens: “I think sometimes once people stop out along their journey, they just get it in their minds that it’s difficult to return. Or that there are too many barriers to overcome. What this partnership has allowed us to do is to assist those individuals in seeing that the barriers in most cases are surmountable. There are ways to go around them, under them, through them, or over them. ReUp is assisting us in allowing people to see that there is an opportunity to return, and there are viable pathways to degree completion.”
