Western Governors University Texas (WGU Texas), where the author is chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe. It just does not fit the profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a competency-based…

Evolve or dissolve. That advice, from a recent report on virtual universities, played out in two news stories last May 2009. The University of Texas' online division is staring down a deep budget hole as it loses a longtime subsidy. In Utah, budget cuts have killed a 10-campus online consortium. Those and other predicaments reflect the growing…

In the first decade of the 21st century, the nation, the states, and colleges and universities began to grapple with the challenges of globalization, changing demography, the implications of the digital era, and of a less expansive public sector. Although not a transformative period for higher education, the decade saw significant innovations in…