Sarah Roberts didn’t have to leave her hometown to earn her MBA. She had already gone to Southeastern Oklahoma State University in person as an undergraduate, came from a rural part of the state where price was a real constraint, and went straight to work afterward. When she decided to pursue a graduate degree, she did it online at the same university while working three jobs.
She is now in a management position at a large credit union in Oklahoma, helping other people strengthen their own financial footing.
“There’s all kinds of different situations that people are going through and this program caters to anyone and everyone,” she said. “I looked into other universities, as far as affordability and convenience goes, it wasn’t the same as Southeastern.”
A University Built to Serve Its Region
Southeastern Oklahoma State University is a regional public university in Durant, founded in 1909 as a teachers’ college. The campus sits in a region that is home to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations. Roughly a quarter of its students are of Native American descent, and the university ranks seventh in the nation for graduating Native students. More than a third are the first in their families to attend college, and 60% are working and paying taxes in Oklahoma a year after they graduate. The university was built to serve the local community.
But for a stretch in the last decade, the model that made that mission possible was under strain. In 2015, Southeastern was at risk of teaching out its master’s programs because enrollment had fallen too low to sustain them. The students it most wanted to reach, working adults across rural southeastern Oklahoma, needed a format the traditional campus could not offer them. The university tried to stand up online programs with internal resources and concluded it needed help to do it at the scale required.
Stabilizing Graduate Programs Online
In 2016, it partnered with education technology company Risepoint to build out online programs, beginning with an MBA and expanding into education, healthcare, and undergraduate degrees.
The growth since has been a clear success story. The university now offers 75 online programs and supports more than 3,000 online graduate students, up from roughly 200 in its master’s programs a decade ago. Overall enrollment reached a record 6,100 students in 2024, with nearly half coming from programs Risepoint supports.
“We’ve been innovative in a way that hasn’t gotten us away from that foundational core of really educating students and giving them the tools they need to be successful in life,” said Dr. Thomas Newsom, the university’s former president.
Southeastern largely educates community-serving professionals, teachers and healthcare workers in particular, at a moment when both fields face severe shortages. The national nursing shortage is acute in Oklahoma, which has one of the lowest nurse-to-population ratios in the country, and the U.S. teacher shortage has hit rural districts especially hard. Programs that keep working adults in their home region while they credential into those roles do double duty: they advance a student and they staff a community institution.
DEEPER DIVE: Arizona has 6 of the 30 happiest cities in America
INDUSTRY INSIGHTS: Want more news like this? Get our free newsletter here
Access That Pays Off
In an independent study conducted by Ipsos across graduates of Risepoint-supported programs, a majority finished without student debt, tuition payback periods averaged roughly a year and a half, and salaries rose meaningfully within a few years of completion. At Southeastern specifically, 89% of online graduates agreed their degree was worth the investment and 70% said it helped them advance their career. The point of the design is that affordability and outcome move together.
The structure underlying the results is straightforward. Southeastern controls admissions, curriculum, instruction, and financial aid; Risepoint supplies the initial student outreach, technology, and student support services that make a rural-serving regional university competitive online. The arrangement is built so the company is compensated as students persist toward graduation, which ties its incentives to the same outcome the university cares about.
Employers are woven in as well: local businesses that hire Southeastern graduates help inform the curriculum so coursework matches what local employers actually need. “One of the great things of being such a close partner with Southeastern is we actually have some of the professors that will come in to our company and we will sit down and say, ‘What kind of skills are you looking for? What can we do in the curriculum to continue to develop the leaders that you need?’” said Melissa Perrin, chief culture officer at First United Bank.
Lori White Buffalo, a communication graduate who is Chickasaw, described the effect in personal terms. Her degree, she said, made her “more confident,” helped her into a manager role, and let her tell younger people in her community “that you can be proud to be First American.” That is the version of access regional universities are trying to capture: not simply more enrollments, but more people from underrepresented and rural populations moving into roles their regions need filled, without leaving home to do it.
