Lorena Ortiz was working full time when she enrolled in the online MBA in Healthcare Management program at Fitchburg State University, a regional public university in North Central Massachusetts whose online programs operate in partnership with education technology company Risepoint.

She had a specific career goal: qualify for a leadership role in healthcare. Ortiz had worked full time as a healthcare technician at Boston Children’s Hospital while finishing her bachelor’s degree, then built a career on the business side of medicine, rising from field representative to regional account executive at Cardinal Health. The next step required skills her experience alone hadn’t supplied: change management, data-driven decision-making, and budgeting. She enrolled while employed full-time, took two courses each term, and moved through coursework on the margins of a life that left little room for it.

Ortiz finished her program in a single year and earned an MBA. She is now a healthcare strategy manager at CVS Health, her first major leadership role, with a stated goal of improving health outcomes for people in underserved communities.

Her story points to the question that matters most in a serious analysis of higher education affordability: not only what a degree costs, but what it returns for a working adult who spent time and money on it. Lorena’s story is not what every student experiences. She is just one student. But the university where she earned her degree offers one of the most complete data-backed answers to the online education affordability question in the country.

A Top-5 Massachusetts MBA at $13,000

Massachusetts is the most competitive higher education market in the country. More than 100 colleges and universities compete within a 50-mile radius of Fitchburg State for the same pool of working adult graduate students. The institutions that dominate that market — Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Babson — carry endowments and alumni networks that regional public universities don’t.

Fitchburg State was founded in 1894 to serve North Central Massachusetts and its surrounding communities. Its online MBA program now ranks fifth in the state for 2021 degree conferrals, per Lightcast workforce and education data. Total tuition is approximately $13,000. The program holds accreditation from the International Accreditation Council for Business Education (IACBE). Overall online enrollment at Fitchburg grew fivefold between 2017 and 2022 after the university entered a partnership with Risepoint.

Under that arrangement, the university retained complete authority over admissions, curriculum, financial aid, instruction, and graduation standards. Risepoint supplied the operational infrastructure: prospective student outreach, student retention support, technology implementations, and analysis of how program offerings align with regional labor market demand. Building those capabilities internally would have required years, plus funding that the university didn’t have. Forgoing them would have kept the institution dependent on a declining local enrollment base.

Persistence Rates

Student withdrawals are often preceded by detectable patterns of low engagement. Students don’t usually make a sudden decision to leave. They fall behind, lose contact, and stop returning. Persistence is a design problem before it is a motivation problem, and students who want to finish may drop out because the retention support services didn’t reach them in time.

The third term is the point in adult graduate education where working students are statistically most likely to stop: it arrives after the initial commitment has worn off and before students have built the routines and institutional relationships that carry them through the harder stretches. Third-term persistence rates across Risepoint-supported programs at Fitchburg averaged 78.3%.

National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data puts Fitchburg’s performance in context. Nationally, second-fall persistence was 53.2% for students who began part time.

Does an Online Degree Pay Off?

The affordability debate in higher education has centered almost entirely on tuition price: Pell Grant expansions, tuition freezes, and income-based repayment reform. These are price interventions. They address what a degree costs to complete, not what it produces for the person who spent years earning it. Meanwhile, public confidence in higher education has been declining for years: 57% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in colleges and universities in 2015; by 2024, that figure had fallen to 36%, according to Gallup.

The erosion tracks a real pattern: programs charging substantial tuition while failing to deliver salary outcomes that cover the investment, on any reasonable timeline.

An independent study Ipsos conducted on graduates of Risepoint-supported programs provides one of the more complete datasets on the other side of that ledger. The survey covered more than 4,400 graduates from universities that partner with Risepoint, fielded in mid-2025, the third consecutive year Ipsos has run this research. Among graduates who had completed their degrees between 9 and 23 months before the survey date, the average salary had risen 19% within one year of earning the degree. At the three-year mark, that figure climbed to 34%. The average time for a graduate’s salary lift to cover the full cost of the degree came in at 18 months. In these programs, affordable tuition and workforce-relevant learning combine to create rapid impact for the students who complete them.

Just over half of students surveyed funded their programs without taking on any student loans, while 90% were employed full-time throughout enrollment. The average tuition they paid was approximately $19,800.

“Learners today are rightfully weighing the cost of education more carefully than ever,” said Fernando Bleichmar, Risepoint CEO, in a statement accompanying the study’s 2025 release. “The findings prove that higher education still works when it’s designed to meet the needs of the modern learner.”

How Does the Risepoint Partnership Model Work for Regional Universities?

Regional universities have faculty expertise built over decades, institutional accreditation, community trust, and the legitimacy that comes from having served regional students for generations. But companies like Risepoint that work across many university relationships develop what most regional institutions lack: the capacity to recruit broadly, support online students at scale, and read labor market signals across a wide range of program types and regions.

The most persistent concern about university-edtech arrangements is that commercial incentives compromise academic standards. The Fitchburg case doesn’t dismiss that concern, but it does speak to the governance conditions under which it doesn’t apply. A university that maintains full control over who gets in, what gets taught, and who graduates has not ceded the decisions that determine whether a degree means anything.

The contracting model adds a second layer to that argument: Risepoint uses what it calls a “fee-for-persistence model,” under which the company earns revenue only as enrolled students progress through their programs. A company not compensated on enrollment volume has no financial incentive to push institutions toward lower admissions standards. Its revenue depends on students who were prepared to succeed in the first place.

Rethinking Higher Education Affordability at the Regional Level

Ninety-two percent of graduates in the Ipsos dataset reported that their degree allowed them to continue living and working in their local communities. For a regional public university, that is part of the institutional mission.

The nurse practitioner who earns an advanced credential in Minnesota and stays at CentraCare strengthens the healthcare system she trained to serve. The supply chain manager in Massachusetts who earns a promotion and remains in the community where she grew up pays local taxes, builds a career in the region, and makes graduate school a more attainable option for the next cohort of working adults watching her trajectory. Regional university success compounds in ways that salary data doesn’t fully capture.

The programs with the strongest outcomes in the Ipsos dataset share three characteristics: they serve working adults who stay employed throughout enrollment, they align with labor markets where demand is active, and they price programs at a level that doesn’t require graduates to carry debt for years after finishing. Fitchburg State’s MBA fits all three. The same model has produced comparable results at regional universities in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Florida, and elsewhere.

Higher education affordability is often discussed as if price were the only variable that matters. Price is the most visible variable, and it is a real one. But Fitchburg State’s MBA costs roughly $13,000, and its graduates averaged an 18-month payback period. The question worth asking is not just what a program costs, but what it produces for the person who worked through it on the margins of a life that demanded most of their time. Lorena Ortiz has an answer for that, and so does the data.