The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) and the Louisiana Board of Regents today announced a joint initiative that will make it easier for Louisiana adults without a college degree to enroll at a Louisiana public college or university and earn a degree or other college credential. The Continuum for All Louisiana Learners, or CALL, will initially be piloted in the northern third of the state, a region with significant adult educational needs which hamper its ability to develop and sustain economic growth. CALL will be supported by grants from the two sponsoring organizations.

“Our state desperately needs more adults with college credentials,” said Louisiana Commissioner of Higher Education Joseph Savoie, “not only more four-year degrees, but associate’s degrees and other skills certification beyond the high school diploma as well. To address this need, the CALL initiative will target three distinct groups of adult learners: adults with no college experience; adults who attended college, perhaps earning significant course credit but stopping short of a degree; and those with college degrees who desire an additional college credential for career advancement.”

“It is no secret that Louisiana has a leaky educational pipeline,” said Bruce Chaloux, Director of SREB’s Electronic Campus and primary SREB liaison for the initiative. “The CALL initiative will establish a progressive set of strategies that build on a number of efforts planned or now underway across the state designed to address educational needs and to support economic and workforce development.”

Chaloux said the goal of CALL is to expand adult participation in postsecondary education by:

• better understanding the needs of adult learners in Louisiana
• establishing innovative programming to respond to those needs
• aggressively promoting adult learning services and programming
• creating convenient pathways to postsecondary certificates and degrees.

CALL will address several of Louisiana’s adult learning challenges detailed in the January, 2005, Adult Learning Task Force report. The initiative supports a connected system with multiple access points for multiple types of adult learners. Northwestern State University, Bossier Parish Community College and the Consortium for Education, Research, and Technology of North Louisiana (CERT), a partnership of institutions dedicated to educational and scientific endeavors intended to uplift north Louisiana and its workforce, are collaborating on the initiative.

For more information about CALL, the sponsoring organizations and the collaborating institutions, please visit the Board of Regents web site and click on CALL.

The CALL initiative is part of the Louisiana Board of Regents’ “Education…Go for more!” campaign, being implemented in cooperation with the SREB’s Adult Learning Campaign, supported by a grant from Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Go Alliance, a consortium of SREB member states chartered to cooperatively prepare for and launch media outreach campaigns that motivate all students to complete school at high levels of achievement. SREB established the Go Alliance to help states share expensive media materials and run more effective campaigns. The Go Alliance is supported by its member states and is sponsored by the College Board and ACT Inc.