“If I had had to be in a classroom every Tues­day night at 6 p.m., I nev­er would have made it,” she says. “I really felt like I needed something that would al­low me the flex­ib­il­ity.”

West­ern Gov­ernors Uni­versity is one of nearly three dozen col­leges and pro­grams—non­profit and for-profit alike—that are try­ing a fledgling mod­el of school­ing known as com­pet­ency-based edu­ca­tion. Its core idea: Stu­dents fare bet­ter if they earn de­grees based on their demon­strated know­ledge of a sub­ject in­stead of simply on face-time or per­form­ance in a tra­di­tion­al classroom.

“It ba­sic­ally means that we will meas­ure learn­ing rather than time,” says Robert W. Mend­en­hall, pres­id­ent of West­ern Gov­ernors Uni­versity. “Com­pet­ency-based learn­ing means stu­dents can learn at their own pace.”

West­ern Gov­ernors Uni­versity was one of the pi­on­eers. In the mid-1990s, a number of gov­ernors from West­ern states wanted to give res­id­ents bet­ter and cheap­er ac­cess to high­er edu­ca­tion, which can be daunt­ing in rur­al or less-pop­u­lated areas. The gov­ernors wanted to take ad­vant­age of tech­no­logy to cre­ate an institution of high­er edu­ca­tion that lets stu­dents ad­vance based on know­ledge and abil­ity, one that uses tech­no­logy to de­liv­er this edu­ca­tion in in­nov­at­ive ways. Grow­ing num­bers of res­id­ents who hold col­lege de­grees, they hoped, would attract busi­nesses.

The uni­versity opened its elec­tron­ic doors in 1999 and now teaches 60,000 students na­tion­wide in all 50 states; an­oth­er 50,000 have gradu­ated. The rates of com­ple­tion are one area in which uni­versity of­fi­cials would like to im­prove. Accord­ing to WGU, roughly 40 per­cent of its stu­dents com­plete their de­gree with­in six years. That’s only two-thirds as many as for stu­dents at four-year institu­tions, ac­cord­ing to fed­er­al Edu­ca­tion De­part­ment data.

These schools face a demo­graph­ic chal­lenge: Most of the people who en­roll are non­tra­di­tion­al stu­dents, like Thomas, who must also juggle the de­mands of work and fam­ily. Two-thirds of WGU stu­dents work full-time; their av­er­age age is 37. Al­most all of them went to col­lege earli­er but dropped out. Many are un­der­served stu­dents, Mend­en­hall notes—from minor­ity groups, rur­al areas, poor house­holds, or fam­il­ies new to col­lege—who face obstacles in earn­ing a de­gree. “We keep mak­ing changes in the mod­el and cur­riculum to make stu­dents more suc­cess­ful,” he says.

One of WGU’s tac­tics is to as­sign each stu­dent a ment­or, who checks in every week or two by phone or email and advises which classes to take. Each course also of­fers a ment­or for strug­gling stu­dents, in ad­di­tion to the fac­ulty mem­bers who grade pa­pers and tests. And, stu­dents learn on­line through a vari­ety of meth­ods: we­binars, mul­ti­me­dia present­a­tions, video lec­tures, and read­ings, with professors avail­able for ques­tions on­line and by email. Students take tests either in proctored test­ing cen­ters or on­line, with some tests mon­itored by web­cam.