Innovative Companies | Nonprofits
College Unbound’s story began in 2009 as an initiative of Big Picture Learning, a nonprofit with more than 20 years of success building and sustaining a network of more than 150 high schools spread across 27 U.S. cities and around the globe.
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“We originally set out to reinvent college for 18-22-year-olds,” said Dennis Littky, College Unbound president, “But when we posted on Facebook asking for new students, 75 returning adult learners responded, and a new model for adult learners was born.”
College Unbound enrolled a cohort of 25 adult students in the fall of 2011, and in 2015 the R.I. Council on Postsecondary Education granted approval for the school to offer the Bachelor of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership and Change.
Currently pursuing regional accreditation with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, College Unbound has graduated more than 100 students through its partner institutions, and this spring graduated its own first independent cohort of students.
“Our mission is to reinvent higher education, using a model that is individualized, interest-based, project-driven, workplace-enhanced, cohort-supported, flexible, supportive and affordable,” said Littky.
College Unbound has been active in forwarding its mission with the creation of several innovative programs, including CU@Work, in which the school partners with employers to offer one year of college within the workplace. The relationship, which benefits both the employer and the student, is not an internship or tuition-reimbursement program but an education plan embedded directly within the organization.
“College Unbound exists because a decade ago adult learners showed up and demanded a better option for college,” Littky said. “When our students identify a barrier, we work with them to remove it. We disrupt the traditional model of education, even disrupt current innovative models of adult education. Our goal is to have a College Unbound cohort in every small and medium business across the state of Rhode Island.”
