Opportunities in Alternative Higher Ed
An Interview with Michelle Jones, Founder & President Wayfinding Academy
Early on in our project, we interviewed some great people who are working in a variety of the topic areas we're highlighting in this project. It seemed fitting to highlight one organization doing work on the vanguard of transforming higher education, Wayfinding Academy.
Wayfinding Academy is a Portland, Oregon-based college that was founded on principles meant to counter traditional higher education. In their creed, you can get a sense of their essence and their focus on creating an experience for the whole student through an experiential learning model. With the pandemic shedding light on the challenges of traditional higher education models, I thought to speak to Michelle because Wayfinding’s model seems designed to adapt to a changing world. It's also much less expensive than traditional college and their funding model is more flexible for a student's needs. Not to mention their recent addition of free tuition for Black and Native students in Oregon.
I originally spoke to Michelle back in October 2020—before we knew who won the election and while they were in the middle of the academic year. This interview was edited for length and clarity and we included components we discussed more recently. However, even though the original interview was several months back, it was a surprise to both of us that a lot hadn’t changed.
Pre-pandemic, what issue were you trying to address?
The original mission of starting Wayfinding Academy was to change the way we do higher education so that it is more student centric and treats students as whole humans. Focusing on purpose-driven work and helping young adults navigate this transition in life and come out the other end with a path towards purpose-driven work. They have a thing that they can then do that brings meaning and value to their life.
After all the years I spent in higher education, it seems like that's not what traditional college does. College is about giving you a credential and giving you a piece of paper and get you a job. It's become a transactional thing and not about creating purpose-driven humans who know what it's like to be engaged in the community.
It feels like that's what got us into the mess we're in now. The whole education in a transactional way. My whole mission is to create a new college is to provide an alternative option for people who are curious and love learning, but don't want that kind of transactional college experience.
What Does the Future Look Like of the Issue You're Working?
I feel like, for me, there are stages of thinking about this. When we have the first shockwave of the pandemic, we saw a lot of college thrown into a bit of existential crisis mode. All the things we take for granted. They couldn't do it that way. All of the media that I'm following, they had to start changing things—like how they do admissions because they could no longer require standardized tests because the testing agencies can no longer administer those tests.
At Wayfinding, because of how we're already structured (no grades, no test scores), we didn't have to go into existential crisis mode. We did have to figure things out, but students could tap into their Guide for support (a mentor who works with the student throughout their entire two years at Wayfinding). We already had those systems in place, but other colleges did not.
So during that first wave of shockwaves I felt relief and gratitude that we didn't have an existential crisis on our hands. Because we're so small, we adjusted and adapted and did a little coursework online, but we were very quick to be able to go back to what we did before and return to fully in-person learning.
But what did put us into an existential crisis was the second shockwave: racial inequality and racism. I think our team has really had to dig deeper. The pandemic didn't really make us dig as deep and make us question the reason for our existence in the way that the movement towards racial justice and the upending white supremacy.
What did you end up doing in response?
Initially, we sat down as a team to discuss next steps. The first thing we did was pause everything and made it the focus of our weekly conversations. We were in the middle of our summer term. Faculty and students are doing what faculty and students do. But our crew just sort of paused. At the time, we paused all of our external communications, media, newsletters, until we could all be on the same page on how we want to respond as an organization and individuals.
It brought us together as a team closer together. We decided we didn't want to be one of those organizations that put out a well-crafted statement that sounded beautiful but had no action behind it. So we generated a lot of actions we could take. We all individually committed to actions and then we crafted a statement on what we wanted to say and how we wanted to be held accountable by the community. (You can find their anti-racism actions here).
We tried to start with actions rather than just words. At the time, most of our team was white. I guess one-third of our crew was BIPOC, now they make up about half, maybe more. I personally started reading really dense, boring books about challenging racism in higher education (you know things that are out of print, but they're still important). Each individual, one of us, would go to webinars or seminars related to our own area of focus. One of the things we found in this, while we have a lot of room for improvement, we found that we're not doing as much nearly as wrong as traditional higher education.
We don't assume that the written word is the end-all be-all way of learning. We treat students as whole students, we let students show up as they are. We were doing these things, but we weren't thinking about things, and we weren't paying attention to it. Now, not a day goes by when we don't think about how we can be an antiracist institution. Our mission now includes dismantling white supremacy institutions. (You can read more about Wayfinding's anti-racism journey in this blog post)
It has changed the way we have formed partnerships and it has changed where we spend our time and energy and financial resources.
Examples of things we're doing differently now include paid internships for all our students and free tuition for Black and Native Oregonians.
As a white woman I have a lot of privilege and I started looking into how I could use my privilege to partner with other communities and people to redistribute some resources I have access to just because of the position I'm in. In particular, we've been working with Self-Enhancement Inc (SEI) which is based in Portland's historically Black Albina neighborhood. They're a community resource organization for the Black community and have programs that go all the way up through high school. We're working with them now to start up a college program through a new major called Social Change and Civic Action which is launching this year. (Editor's note: when we spoke in October, the conversations were still underway, but as of this publishing, they have fundraised for the initial amount to support this program which you can read about on their blog here).
We also hired a Director of Equitable Learning and her job description is to take a look at everything we're doing as an organization and whatever we need to do to be more equitable. With her, we've looked at each aspect of the work we do, she’s interviewed every member of our team, faculty, and Board, and our entire community meets monthly to work on assessing the equity and inclusion language we use. The goal is that at the end of this project we all have a shared understanding of what this means and how we show up with it.
Do you think we're upon a cultural shift in higher education? Is change coming and what could that be?
I think so, I hope so. Some things right now aren't looking good—like enrollment is down in colleges and that started because of the pandemic. Everybody kind of held their breath to see what it would look like once we got farther along. There's frightening trends. For example, enrollment in community college is very low. Which you wouldn't expect.
On one side, there's something positive happening. The societal trend that's happening right now is that given these shockwaves we're all facing and these things that are raising major issues about how our society systems and structures work, a lot of young people are asking "why even bother going to college?" It costs so much money when all I'm doing is making other people rich. They're questioning capitalism. So I think all of those things are great. And those are the questions that people should have been asking all along: what is the purpose of college? Why should I go? Is there a better way to get to where I'm trying to get to in my life?
AND...there's an element of privilege to ask those questions. What we're seeing recently is that just as we are seeing with the pandemic, things related to higher education access are most negatively impacting lower-income students and communities. The most likely person to attend local community college is probably a low-income first generation, or a person of color. Those enrollments are down. The early indicators about whether communities of color will stop having access to higher education is FAFSA applications and those were significantly down.
That accessibility gap is getting bigger. So wealthy white families that have family histories that have generations of going to college, they're just waiting it out or they're doing their online program or whatever it is they're doing, they have the resources. There are societal patterns of inequities that are getting worse right now. So that's the negative side.
The positive side is that the people who are civically involved are asking what the priorities should be in their life and making more informed and intentional choices. They're questioning everything in a much deeper way than they were before. What we're seeing here at Wayfinding is a weird intersection of those things. I can think of several of our students who are low-income and first generation and BIPOC and they're super involved in the protests and having those responsibilities and they're involved in Wayfinding. They see Wayfinding as a way to find community at the same time while they're experiencing challenge.
How do you as an individual maintain resilience amidst the transition?
It feels like we have early indicators of [potential for growth], but we have to hold them lightly. We just had our best recruitment cycle that we've ever had in 5 years of existence. It's somewhat surprising given that we had to do that within a pandemic and uprisings for racial and social justice.
Whether that continues or not we don't know. But what I'm also sort of seeing out there is that the small colleges and especially the small alternative colleges already kind of had a whole-person perspective, experiential learning elements, are doing fine through this. For example Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. We have an alumnus who's now there so I hear things from her. Goddard College which was struggling is actually doing fine. So the small colleges that really are student-centric have figured out--maybe they didn't have to go through an existential crisis.
The places that seem to be suffering are the things that are doing things in volume and scale. If they have a small drop in enrollment. Six months or a year from now when that has gone away and they're still suffering from low enrollment.
I'm also hearing from a lot of smart people who I know that what we're going through [in the higher education landscape] is good. It seems bad in a lot of different ways and when you look at it on an individual and a societal level. What we're going through is good because this is long overdue and things that have needed focus, attention, and rethinking are finally getting it. Things related to healthcare, things about education, things related to systemic racism in all of our institutions and systems. So a lot of people whose opinions I care about and listen to, have a lot of hope that things will never be able to go back to the way we were before. These are all a part of that process to get where we go.