Paul Carr was just one semester shy of finishing his degree at Morehouse College when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant. So he decided to stop out, to get a job to support his budding family. He told himself he’d go back soon to finish.
That was more than 25 years ago.
Carr always intended to return. In fact, he made a promise to his father on his deathbed that he would finish his college degree.
So when he saw an announcement that Morehouse was starting an online program designed to help older students with some college credit finish their degrees, it seemed the perfect fit. He applied and joined the program’s first class of students in 2021.
Carr was one of the students we followed in a podcast series two years ago called Second Acts, which looked in depth at the challenges returning adult college students face in finishing their degrees.
As our series wrapped up, Carr still hadn’t finished that degree. Even after taking courses for a year in the online program, he wasn’t sure when Morehouse would be satisfied that he had taken enough additional credits to give him a degree — or if he would ever finish. He was, he said, in “limbo.”
And it turns out he wasn’t alone in hitting roadblocks in the new program.
As he described in our final episode, he had become a student leader in an effort to raise student concerns with administrators after he heard many classmates with similar struggles navigating the program.
An investigative story in USA Today last year detailed more of the “pitfalls” students in the program have faced.
“There were not enough slots for students to take the classes that they needed so they were sent off to take classes at other colleges online,” says one of the USA Today reporters, Chris Quintana. “They wanted a sense of when things would be done. When would these classes be available? And it was especially frustrating to these students because it’s a degree-completion program.”
For this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we checked in with Carr to hear what happened next.
Carr made clear that he and other students were reluctant to talk with reporters about their complaints because they feared any resulting article would be a “hit piece” that would make Morehouse look bad.
“And we weren't going to allow that,” Carr says. “Because while there were some issues, Morehouse is a really, really important institution. It is a beautiful institution. It is imperfectly perfect.”
Morehouse is the only all-male HBCU, and its alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. “And the Black community historically, it's had to always do more with less,” Carr says. “And so always Black people say, ‘OK, nobody's going to help us. We'll have to fix it.’”
But he and a few other students decided to participate in the USA Today story after they learned that the piece was moving forward with or without them. “So we made it a point to give our honest experiences, but also make sure that it’s clear we're here to protect our school,” he says.
Carr liked the way the article turned out, and he says it helped “light a fire” and spur the university to make improvements to Morehouse Online more rapidly. That happened not because of pressure from the media spotlight, he says, but because the article surfaced stories of challenges students were facing that he thinks administrators had not previously been aware of in detail.
It turns out that some of the challenges for the budding Morehouse Online stemmed from its arrangement with 2U, the online program manager that the college worked with to help it build the online degree program. The college originally announced plans to offer up to six majors within the first two years, including one in computer science. But now, more than three years after launch, it offers just one major, in business administration.
2U issued a blog post pushing back on some of the article’s reporting, though Quintana says he and the paper stand by their work and have issued no correction. When EdSurge invited Morehouse to comment for this story, Kendrick Brown, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs, said that the institution remains “dedicated to expanding” the online program.
"With an enrollment of 245 students and 42 graduates over the past two years, the program continues to offer exceptional value to the men who seek to become part of the distinctive Morehouse experience,” he says.
Carr says he was on the verge of giving up, and posted a note to an online discussion forum for students in the program saying as much. He soon got a call from a classmate he had never met who urged him to stick it out.
Listen to the episode to find out what happened next. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player below.
