Beginning in fall 2026, Delaware State University will open enrollment in 25 online degree programs built with the education technology company Risepoint. The idea behind the expansion is that, following a broader demographic trend in U.S. education, many of the university's next students will be working adults who are not building their educational plans around on-campus learning.
The portfolio spans business, healthcare, public service, and the social sciences, with bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Specific offerings read like a map of regional labor demand: accounting, management, psychology, public health, social work, nursing, and leadership, along with several Master of Business Administration concentrations and Master of Public Health tracks. Applications are open in the states where Delaware State is currently authorized to enroll online students, and the university notes that program availability remains subject to accreditor approvals and state authorization.
A land-grant research institution founded in 1891, Delaware State University enrolls more than 6,600 students, holds an R2 "high research activity" Carnegie classification, and is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. It ranks among the top 10 HBCUs in the country in U.S. News & World Report and placed among the publication's Top 100 Performers on social mobility for 2026.
The national backdrop is a pool of adults who started college and stopped. As of the beginning of the 2023-24 academic year, 43.1 million Americans had some college experience but no credential, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Of those, 37.6 million are working-age adults under 65. The group has continued to grow and now stands as one of the largest potential enrollment pools in American higher education.
The trend lines are turning, though slowly. In 2023-24, more than 1 million adults who had previously left college without a credential re-enrolled, the most the Clearinghouse has recorded, and the number of students leaving college prior to attaining a degree fell for a second straight year.
Doug Shapiro, who directs the research center, called the return the "most we've ever recorded." Two findings in the same body of research speak directly to what Delaware State is attempting. Primarily online institutions account for a disproportionately high share of returning students relative to their share of the stopped-out population. And Black, Hispanic, and Pacific Islander students, who are overrepresented among those without a credential, re-enrolled at higher rates than they had two years earlier.
The picture is not uniformly encouraging. Nearly two-thirds of stopped-out adults last attended a community college, and the overall some-college-no-credential population kept growing even as returns rose, because new stopouts still outpaced re-enrollments.
"While it's encouraging to see over a million SCNC students re-engage with higher education, the continued growth of this population reminds us that re-enrollment alone isn't enough,” said Matthew Holsapple, senior director of research at the Clearinghouse.
The students who do come back tend to need what a working adult needs, namely a schedule that bends around a job and a price that does not require new debt. That is the specific demand an online completion program is built to meet.
Delaware State's existing role in its state supplies the logic for the expansion. The university describes itself as a leading producer of Delaware's nurses, social workers, teachers, and accountants, including a substantial share of the state's professionals from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Those are the same fields the online portfolio targets, and the same populations most represented in the some-college-no-credential numbers. A campus that already trains a large share of a state's public-service workforce is a plausible place to try reaching the workers who could not attend in person.
The university is not approaching online delivery alone. Delaware State is a founding member of the eHBCU Consortium, a group of historically Black colleges, including Alabama State University, Pensole Lewis College, and campuses of the Southern University system, that pooled resources to build a shared online platform with support from Blue Meridian Partners and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. The consortium is not itself a degree-granting body; students earn credentials from the accredited member institutions.
Terry Jeffries, a Delaware State assistant vice president, is the consortium's executive director. "Since 1837, HBCUs have served as beacons of hope and bastions of historic excellence," Jeffries said when the platform launched. "With eHBCU, we're extending this distinguished academic tradition into the digital future."
The consortium platform gives a sense of the model's ambition. It lists roughly 10 undergraduate degrees, 13 graduate degrees, and 35 certificate programs across member institutions, lets a student apply once for access to all of them, and is aimed explicitly at working adults, career changers, and returning learners, with a heavy emphasis on digital-skills fields such as web development, cybersecurity, and information technology.
Delaware State's Risepoint-supported online portfolio is a distinct effort, one university building out its own 25 programs, but it runs on the same premise: that the demand for an HBCU education reaches well beyond central Delaware, and that the barrier has been delivery rather than interest.
DSU President Tony Allen framed the partnership in the same terms. "As a proud HBCU, Delaware State University is grounded in a tradition of belonging, opportunity, and community impact with a deep commitment to serving historically underrepresented students," he said. "Expanding access to our online offerings allows us to reach more learners and extend that impact even further."
Any partnership between a university and an outside company invites a fair question: how much of the academic enterprise does the school hand over?
Risepoint describes its role as support rather than control. The company works with more than 100 universities, many of which are regional institutions, and the way responsibilities are divided is what keeps the academic side with the school. Faculty teach the courses. The university sets admissions criteria and confers every degree. Accreditors and state regulators, not an outside provider, still govern how many programs a university can offer and what each must demonstrate to operate. Support from Risepoint sits outside those responsibilities: in supporting faculty, reaching prospective students, providing the technology, and offering the retention services that adult learners juggling jobs tend to require. The fall 2026 timeline is itself a marker of where authority sits, because the launch is conditioned on the accreditor and state-authorization approvals the university has to clear on its own.
"Delaware State University has a strong legacy of preparing graduates who go on to lead and serve in their communities," said Fernando Bleichmar, CEO of Risepoint. "We are proud to partner in expanding access to programs that support career advancement while helping strengthen the workforce."
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