“If Abe Lincoln were reincarnated,” education entrepreneur Steve Klinsky told Red Alert Politics in a phone interview, “there should be a way for that type of person to get an education.”
Pointing to the largely self-educated and rurally located Lincoln as an example, Klinsky noted that education should reach all who seek it. His newest innovation in the education sector, the online learning platform Modern States, seeks to do just that.
Klinsky and his team partnered with edX.org, a nonprofit online learning platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as IBL Education to build an open-access learning platform that provides full Advanced Placement and College Level Exam Preparation, or CLEP, courses free of charge. Modern States will even pay the $85 test fee for 10,000 students enrolled in their courses.
“We placed an ad in the Chronicle for Higher Education and sought out the most engaging teachers in each field,” Klinsky noted. “These people also shared our social mission of making education widely available.”
Modern States’ instructors are PhDs from some of the most competitive schools across the country — the former dean of George Washington University Law School, Paul Schiff Berman, teaches the platform’s introductory business law course, to name one.
The platform serves as an “on-ramp to college” rather than a replacement for traditional higher education; students who take the courses and corresponding exams can potentially earn one, or even all, of their freshman year credits for free. Moreover, each time a student takes a course and passes the CLEP exam, the average cost savings to taxpayers is a staggering $1,000.
After nearly 20 years of philanthropic involvement in education, beginning with the creation of the first charter school in New York in 1999, Klinsky said that his newest initiative is “getting tremendous support” from its partners in higher education, including New York state’s university system and the Tennessee state school network.
Interestingly, recent research from the College Board displays that students who earn credit through CLEP have better academic outcomes than their non-CLEP peers and also increase their likelihood of degree completion.
“We now have a course for every one of those exams,” Klinsky said. “Our biggest problem is people knowing that they exist.”
Klinsky hopes that more individuals like 17-year-old homeschool student William Rush and mom Holly Sorell, who earned her degree while taking care of her disabled son, will take advantage of the learning platform.
“Education is fundamentally important for having a full life,” Klinsky concluded. “We want Modern States to be thought of as just as public and free as a local library.”
