WGU Academy is celebrating its sixth anniversary and the more than 70,000 students who have begun their WGU journey with us. Academy was created to assist an ever-increasing number of prospective students who need an academic credential for career progress but lack readiness for academic success. These students face a variety of barriers that prevent them from achieving their goals.

 As I reflect on the students we’ve served, I’m reminded of the leaders who understood the need to help these learners through readiness-focused offerings. WGU President Scott Pulsipher, the university’s former CMO and Academy’s first president Pat Partridge, and WGU Labs’ Jason Levin and Chelsea Barnett each played key roles in establishing WGU Academy, prior to my arrival in 2021.  

The College Readiness Dilemma

Let’s discuss the most acute and perhaps most uncomfortable challenge. Even among high school graduates, many prospective students are simply not ready for post-secondary learning. As the Public Policy Institute of California reported recently, despite the state’s four-year high school graduation rate of 86%, “almost four in five students are not academically prepared for college success.” Data from other states tells a similar story—graduating high school does not necessarily equate to college readiness.

These students have likely confronted a wide variety of roadblocks in their lives that have led to a lack of preparedness for college-level work. For many prospective students, these barriers include much more than knowledge or cognitive gaps. They often include meta-cognitive impediments like poor study skills and time management, and non-cognitive blockers like self-doubt, missing sense of belonging, and difficulty regulating their emotions, particularly about academic pursuits.

WGU Academy’s Expansion of Readiness Offerings

Since Academy’s launch, the need for readiness has only increased. The pandemic certainly magnified and exacerbated these challenges. Meanwhile, WGU’s model of attractively-priced, online, competency-based education has exploded in interest among prospective students of all kinds, especially first time post-secondary students – rapidly increasing the number of students seeking a WGU credential.

In these six years, WGU Academy’s readiness solutions have expanded significantly to include integrated academic coaches, expert instructors, and dozens of individual courses that can help students prepare for success in any WGU degree program. These college-level courses show as credit on a WGU transcript.

Among these courses, one holds special recognition as a key innovation of Academy. The course, “Program for Academic and Career Advancement” (PACA), offers credit as a general education communications course and builds non-cognitive and meta-cognitive skills that support greater likelihood of student success, particularly for our least-prepared student prospects. Thousands of students have now benefited from PACA.

Take Carissa Baca. Among WGU Academy’s first on-ramp completers, Carissa later graduated from WGU with a degree in business, has grown in her career as a customer support supervisor and is now enrolled in a well-regarded MBA program. She credits PACA for helping her prepare for a successful degree.

“PACA is one of the most useful classes that I’ll ever take,” she said. “It really kick-starts you into getting into a thriving mindset, and teaches you how to manage your emotions, your time, and your stress. I truly believe it changed my life in so many ways and enabled me a pathway back into education.”

The Growth of WGU Academy

Since its inception, WGU Academy has expanded dramatically in terms of the products it offers, its connectedness to WGU’s Schools and degree programs and the increasing number of students we serve. These photos of Academy’s staff from 2019 and 2025 give a glimpse of the growth in that capacity. And we are just getting started.