MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — In the July 2024 edition of “Out of the Blue,” the television magazine program of Middle Tennessee State University, viewers will learn about how the Graduate MT program helps guide former students back to campus to complete their degrees.

Betty Rinaudo, coordinator of the University College initiative, sat down with program host Andrew Oppmann, vice president for marketing and communications, to discuss how the program reaches out to former students and incentivizes them to return to the university through services like the Prior Learning Assessment, which can give working adults credit for their professional experiences.

You can watch her segment below:

Rinaudo shared that the program originated as “a call to action” as part of then Gov. Bill Haslam’s “Drive to 55” initiative several years ago to increase the percentage of Tennesseans with a college degree to 55%. University College’s robust Adult Degree Completion Program is among the state’s largest and set out to meet that challenge, with Graduate MT helping 1,272 students graduate to date.

“So we’re a pioneer in adult degree completion,” Rinaudo said. “We have a large population of adult learners, and they come to us because the Adult Degree Completion Program has really made it easy for them to connect with the university and get this done while they’re accomplishing full-time jobs or whatever family obligations.”

Graduate MT targets those former adult students who made significant progress toward their undergraduate degree while enrolled, typically 90 credit hours plus toward the 120 required hours and a minimum 2.0 GPA, she said.

“Those are the students that are really close and may have stopped out for a variety of reasons. In short, life happens and it happens to a lot of people when they’re going to college,” she said. “So my job is to look at those students and see what the best path, and the shortest path oftentimes, to graduation could be. I’ll reach out to those students and work with them and try to get them across that finish line.”

“Out of the Blue” is available anytime on the university’s YouTube channel, the True Blue TV channel, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. It also airs on Murfreesboro cable Channel 9 daily at 6 a.m., 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.; NewsChannel5+ at 3:30 p.m. Sundays; and streamed on the MTSU Jazz Network through WMOT.org at 7 a.m. on the first Sunday of each month; and on other cable outlets in Middle Tennessee, so check local listings. 

It is also available as a podcast on iTunes and Google Play and as individual interview segments on Spotify at https://spoti.fi/453hxg3. 

Watch previous episodes of “Out of the Blue” at https://mtsunews.com/out-of-the-blue.

— Jimmy Hart (Jimmy.Hart@mtsu.edu)