Online Degree

time developing his spoken English by listening to the radio.

Like many of his generation he left school at 15, getting himself a job as a porter. He returned to education some years later to study drama (he'd been smitten by acting after attending a drama class at Stockton and Billingham College) at the Manchester Polytechnic School of Drama (see HERE).

After graduating Griffiths was lucky enough to find a variety of acting and stage-managing parts with the last dying remnants of regional rep.

He was eventually discovered by the RSC, where his 1983 portrayal of the King in Henry VIII (alongside John Thaw as Cardinal Wolsey) was rightly received with great acclaim.

Although Griffiths had appeared in a string of TV series, such as The Sweeney and Bergerac, throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, it would be as a result of the high profile acclaim he received for his RSC work, and his iconic portrayal of Uncle Monty in the film Withnail & I , that pretty much ensured an eventual TV series of his own. This materialised in the form of the mid 1990s Pie in the Sky, where, as Henry Crabbe, he appeared as an ex-copper-cum-chef who, when not running a restaurant was still solving crimes. The BBC series ran for three years and undoubtedly brought Griffiths wider attention that has resulted, in the last few years, in many major film roles, not least as Vernon Dursley in the Harry Potter series, and Hector in Alan Bennett's award winning The History Boys - a role he made his own in both the West End and Broadway productions.

Ross tested its team interview concept in Beijing, Shanghai, and Ann Arbor in January and February, and the admissions committee will spend the summer determining how to formally organize and begin group interviews, said Soojin Kwon, director of admissions at the Ross School. The logistics of bringing together applicants and evaluators might make a global roll out difficult, she added. “We want to implement this more broadly next year,” says Kwon. “How broadly is the question.”

For the pilot, some of the people who had been invited for the traditional one-on-one interview were highly encouraged to participate in the group exercise. The admissions committee told them that it would not be part of the evaluation of their application. About 110 applicants in all participated in the three locations. Alumni and second-year students served as evaluators (see HERE).

The applicants sat at tables in groups of four to six with at least one evaluator. First, they were given two random words and 10 minutes to prepare an individual presentation that connected the words in some way. They could take any direction, from serious to humorous, from analytical to opinionated, says Kwon. Next, the group was given a set of random words and 20 minutes to prepare a team presentation that used the words to address a problem and solution.

“Different things come out in a group interview,” says Kwon. “It creates a more complete picture of what the applicant will be like in a classroom and in our community.”

Kwon consulted the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which launched its team-based interviews in the fall. The Ross School’s process is slightly different. Wharton sends candidates a question ahead of the interview and then puts them in groups of no more than six to prepare and present their conclusions and recommendations. The group has 35 minutes from start to finish. Either second-year students or admissions committee members evaluate the interviews.

At Ross, Kwon chose to use random words to ensure that applicants could not prepare much ahead of time, she says. The traditional one-on-one interview has become stale, says Kwon, because many applicants see the questions online ahead of time, get the aid of admissions consultants, and over-rehearse.

Indeed, the Wharton and Ross schools turned to the group interview to see how applicants react on their feet, work in teams, and speak in public. Ankur Kumar, Wharton’s director of MBA admissions and financial aid (see HERE), says it’s also an opportunity for applicants to get a window into the culture at the business school, where students are expected to participate in about 15 to 25 teams during their two years in the program.

“We’re not trying to pull any punches or trick applicants,” says Kumar. “We’re trying to get to know the applicants in a multi-dimensional form.”

St. Louis Community College (see HERE) is among 60-plus schools in six states taking what seems like an obvious but little-used step to boost college graduation rates: scouring campus databases to track down former students who unknowingly qualify for degrees.

That effort, known as Project Win-Win, has helped community colleges and four-year schools in Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia and Wisconsin find hundreds of ex-students who have either earned enough credits to receive associate degrees or are just a few classes shy of getting them.

Backed by financial support from the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education, the pilot project began several years ago with 35 colleges in six states. As it winds down, some participating schools plan to continue the effort on their own.

Ricotta said at this point, she's not sure if getting her two-year degree is all that necessary.

"It's a pain," she said. "I don't feel like going down to the college to take a test I don't need. Yeah, I don't have the degree, but I still took all the classes."

Her seeming indifference to retroactively obtaining her degree points to just one of the challenges facing two-year schools in particular as they strive to fulfill President Barack Obama's challenge of raising college completion rates to 60 percent by 2020: convincing not just the public, but even some of their students, of the value of an associate's degree (see HERE).

At central Missouri's Columbia College, the hunt for students on the verge of graduating worked so well that the school plans to broaden its efforts to find bachelor's degree candidates who are just one class shy of donning the cap and gown. The private liberal arts college has already awarded nearly 300 retroactive degrees, including one given posthumously to the mother of a deceased former student. Another two dozen students returned to campus to finish up after hearing from the school.

"If this was being done nationwide, it could make a difference," said Tery Donelson, Columbia College's assistant vice president for enrollment management.

Like his counterparts in St. Louis, Donelson and his team of transcript detectives also encountered skepticism, if not outright disbelief, from some of the prospective degree awardees.

"If you received a letter saying, 'Congratulations, you've earned a degree,' what would you be thinking?" he said. "That this is a scam. We had to get beyond them.

"We told them they earned a degree, and all they had to do was acknowledge it," Donelson continued. "We didn't want to send a degree to anybody who didn't want it."

Participating schools pared down their initial lists by eliminating students who received degrees elsewhere or were currently enrolled. Expired addresses or disconnected phone numbers eliminated many more.

The Institute for Higher Education Policy (see HERE), which oversaw the project, initially estimated a potential increase of 25,000 new degrees if its efforts took hold nationwide. But most schools found the exercise more difficult than expected, said Cliff Adelman, a senior associate with the Washington-based policy group.

"It ain't as easy as you think," he said. "You can't use a magic wand and have this kind of thing happen."

In Oregon, a review of more than 6,000 students' academic records at the state's 17 community colleges found 109 degree-eligible students and another 905 who might qualify. Virginia's Tidewater Community College awarded 34 degrees and convinced 15 more students to return to campus from its initial pool of 651 prospects.

Four-year schools could follow the lead of the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which used the program to connect with dropouts who might still be interested in a two-year diploma. Or they could link up with neighboring community colleges in what are known as "reverse transfer" agreements.

Those agreements allow students to receive their associate's degrees if they earned enough credits toward them but didn't actually obtain them before heading to a four-year school. The two-year schools, in turn, can boost their completion rates — a critical measure for accrediting agencies and lawmakers looking for results.

One student happy to hear about what amounts to a free degree is Corey Manuel, 34, an Air Force veteran who expects to receive a bachelor's degree in management information systems from Columbia College. He took his classes at a Denver-area branch campus.

Manuel said his educational journey includes nearly 200 credits from five different schools, including a one-year stint straight out of high school playing basketball at Missouri Valley College in Marshall, Mo., and a pair of stops at Louisiana State University's community college in Eunice.

Now an information technology manager at defense contractor Raytheon, Manuel nonetheless still craves the credential he was too busy to pick up along the way.

"I wanted to make sure I had that box checked," he said.