It is time for colleges and universities to give college credit for skills and coursework. This is a pivotal moment in higher education.
Enrollment has been falling for more than a decade and skepticism about the value of higher education has been growing. In fact, more than 39 million Americans started a college education but never finished a degree or other credential. Many of them have developed knowledge, skills, and career-relevant behaviors on the job, but they don’t have a good way of translating those into a credential that would help them advance in their career. Millions more Americans have earned bachelor’s degrees but are underemployed—often because they lack critical knowledge and skills needed for higher-paying jobs or their degree doesn’t do a good job of showing that they actually have those competencies.
All this exists at a time when there are 10.7 million jobs—many of them good jobs—going unfilled. And women, Black, and Latino workers are especially likely to be locked out of those jobs and the opportunities they open up.
Against this backdrop, the good news is that we already know what to do in tailoring education to what people need to achieve economic mobility. For years, competency-based education (CBE) has been enabling a broader swath of learners—especially people of color, working adults, and first-generation college-goers—to tap into opportunity. Colleges and universities are using CBE to personalize learning, leverage experiences, and meet the needs of all learners.
Competency-based education defines and measures what a person actually knows and can do, rather than focusing on where or how they learned it. That enables people to get credit for competencies—knowledge, skills, and behaviors—they’ve already learned on the job or on their own, and to focus their education on the competencies they still need to develop to earn a credential, unlock a better career, and advance economically.
Done well, this educational approach can make credentials more flexible, relevant, and valuable while boosting completion rates. We are truly meeting learners where they are.
About 600 two-and four-year institutions already offer competency-based programs—and more are looking to do so. Recent research from the American Institutes for Research found that 82% of colleges and universities expect CBE programs to grow over the next five years.
Competencies could soon become the currency of learning and work. They should and the moment is upon us.
But far too many barriers—in policy and regulation, in our institutional structures and practices, and in how we incentivize and fund education—currently stand in the way. Some of the needed changes are relatively straightforward. Governments and philanthropies, for example, could quickly increase support for information sharing around best practices in competency-based education.
Other shifts will take much longer but are already underway. Companies are already remaking their job architecture, for example—moving toward using job descriptions that are based on competencies and skills, rather than solely degrees and other credentials. And a number of states have begun working to create data systems that will allow worker-learners to carry documentation of their full education and work experience with them, rather than relying on transcripts and other circumscribed measures.
And then there are much-needed changes that have long been stymied. Chief among them is the need to move beyond the “credit hour” as the sole measure of learning in higher education. The credit hour measure relies on time spent in a course, rather than on learning for distributing aid to students—and while that approach has well-documented limitations, it has proven very hard to replace. We need to redouble efforts to find an alternative now.
These and other action items are outlined in a new CompetencyXChange Agenda, developed by a team of national leaders who share both deep expertise and an unwavering commitment to equity. The agenda focuses on six core areas—philanthropy, policy, providers, quality assurance, research, and ed tech—and altogether it creates a plan for action.
It is a vision not just for where we can be in a decade or two, but for what we all can—and must—do now. We must take advantage of the urgency this moment provides along with the innovation of the past decade to continue to better turn education and experience into outcomes. With new policy, investment, and growth, competency-based education can meet that need.
Truthfully, though, we’ve been saying that for years. Now, we’ve got to be more assertive and move beyond the talk—we’ve got to compel coordinated and clear action now.
Derrick Anderson is Senior Vice President of the Learning and Engagement Division (LED) at ACE and Deborah Santiago is Co-Founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education.