On July 2, while most of us were distracted by holiday plans, Roanoke College quietly rewrote the rules of the American bachelor’s degree. The announcement may have gone unnoticed by many in the Roanoke Valley and across Southwest Virginia, buried as it was in the news cycle of the 250th. But the news itself was anything but small: Roanoke College is now enrolling students in a novel form of college degree — a three-year Bachelor’s in Public Administration, offered fully online, the first program of its kind in this region. It would be easy to dismiss this as routine academic news, the kind of item that runs once and is forgotten. It is not routine. It is a transformative moment for higher education in the Roanoke Valley and Southwest Virginia.
I have a personal stake. Last year, Lisa Stoneman and I met with Joe Mills to begin discussing what a public administration degree built for this region could look like. Lisa is a professor at Roanoke College and Joe is a retired lieutenant with the Salem Police Department and now Director of Campus Safety at Roanoke College. Joe introduced us to Gary Moore, then the executive director of the Cardinal Criminal Justice Academy, now retired, and David Scott, the then-deputy director and now executive director. What began as a conversation among local people who understood both the classroom and the courthouse developed into something substantial. Ideas about coursework in team management, public policy and data analysis gradually took the shape of an actual program. Watching that process and seeing it become the degree that is now enrolling its first students has been among the most rewarding endeavors of my professional career.
To understand how unusual that achievement is, it helps to understand where the traditional four-year, 120-credit-hour degree actually came from. It was never handed down on stone tablets. In the early 1900s, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching created what became known as the “Carnegie Unit” — a means of measuring how much classroom time a student had logged, originally so the foundation could determine which colleges qualified for a new faculty pension program. That pension program is now the modern TIAA-CREF, a vendor that serves most institutions of higher education. That accounting device, born of an actuarial problem, hardened over the following decades into the load-bearing wall of American higher education. Regional accreditors adopted it as a proxy for rigor. The federal government tied financial aid eligibility to it. By the middle of the twentieth century, “120 credit hours over four years” had stopped looking like a convenient administrative unit and started looking like a law of nature.
It was never a law of nature. It was a bureaucratic convention that outlived the reasons for its creation, and for a long time almost no one questioned it — because almost no institution could afford to. Accreditation, for all its value in protecting students from diploma mills and guaranteeing that a degree carries meaning, has also functioned as an effective brake on experimentation. That is beginning to change. Virginia’s own State Council of Higher Education has started working with colleges to ascertain models for three-year degrees. What looked immovable for a century is finally bending toward the people it is meant to serve. Roanoke College’s accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, has affirmed the need for change, particularly in exploring innovative pathways such as the three-year degree model to meet evolving student and workforce demands.
And the people it is meant to serve in this corner of the state need it to bend. Southwest Virginia is not short on capable individuals who never finished a degree, or who finished one and need another to advance, or who are working full time in public service and cannot spare four additional years of time and four additional years of tuition to reach where their careers actually require them to go. A traditional residential bachelor’s degree assumes a traditional eighteen-year-old with the time and financial means to spend four years on campus. That was never the whole of the workforce, and it is an even smaller share of it now. A 90-hour, fully online degree aimed at working professionals in government, public safety and the nonprofit sector is not a shortcut. It is an honest recognition of who is actually seeking this kind of education — and a wager that Roanoke College can serve them without lowering the standard that has always defined a Roanoke degree.
None of this occurs without individuals willing to treat “the way it has always been done” as a starting point for conversation rather than its conclusion. Joe Mills, Gary Moore and David Scott brought the practitioner’s perspective — an understanding of what a public administrator in Southwest Virginia actually needs to know from day one. Lisa Stoneman and Roanoke College brought the institutional will to build something new within an accreditation framework that does not always reward innovation. The result is a degree that a public servant in Salem, Roanoke or elsewhere can complete while retaining the position that made the degree necessary in the first place.
Southwest Virginia does not often receive genuinely new tools for building its own workforce. This is one. It arrived quietly, on a Thursday before a holiday weekend, with little fanfare. It merits far greater attention — because a century from now, when someone writes the history of how higher education finally caught up with the people it was always meant to serve, a small liberal arts college in Salem, Virginia, will be part of that story. This will be a transformative program for Southwest Virginia. It already is.
Steve Capaldo is a former longtime attorney for Virginia Tech, a professor of practice at Roanoke College, and an attorney in West Virginia.
