College, on Your Own

Nichele L. Pollock felt like she was moving through college in slow motion. In seven years, she had gotten about halfway through her bachelor’s degree.

But recently she’s been racing forward, racking up 50 credits in just eight months at Northern Arizona University, more than most full-time students earn in three semesters. She’s done it while holding down a full-time job coordinating clinical trials at a medical-research facility in Tucson. She has no classmates, no classroom, no lectures, and no professor-led discussions with fellow students.

And she’s the model for how competency-based learning could transform higher education.

For decades, competency programs have served a niche market of adults seeking credentials to help them advance in their careers. Now, they are attracting broad interest and making forays into the liberal arts. Competency programs are going mainstream.

The approach has emerged as the educational disruption of the moment because it appears to solve many of the challenges facing higher education. Colleges’ core market of traditional-aged students is declining, costs keep rising, a national campaign is pushing for increasing the number of graduates, and the value of a degree and what students are learning are under growing scrutiny.

The buzz among policy makers, think tanks, and foundations is spreading to colleges, which see competency programs as a way to tap, at lower cost and with greater efficiency, into a growing market of adult students whose lives don’t follow rigid semesters.

Although massive open online courses have generated far more public fascination, competency-based learning may transform higher education more. For a century, degrees have been built on how much time people spend sitting in class. Competency shifts that. It redefines academic progress according to the learning that students demonstrate. It also puts them at the center of the educational experience, placing much of the burden of learning on them. In the process, it takes faculty members out of their role as teachers, turning them into coaches, curators, and graders. Colleges risk becoming little more than credential-stampers.

Many professors prize their relationships with students and see education as a shared journey. Competency programs can make these things feel obsolete. After all, if Ms. Pollock can finish as much of a bachelor’s degree as quickly as she has, and mostly on her own, what does that say about the value of exchanging ideas with professors and other students, or the role of time in fostering intellectual growth? Are these parts of a college education as vital as we thought they were?

Ms. Pollock enrolled in Northern Arizona University’s competency-based program in the liberal arts after doing a Google search for online programs in her state. A grant to that program from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation persuaded her that it was legit. The program would more quickly get her where she wanted to go.

She expects to earn her degree in August, to pursue a graduate program in psychology, and, eventually, to work as a child psychologist or play therapist.

“I didn’t feel like I’d have to start all over again,” says Ms. Pollock, 25, who transferred to Northern Arizona 50 of the 90 credits she had earned from Pima Community College and the University of Arizona. “I could apply my past education and see the immediate rewards.”

Northern Arizona started its liberal-arts program with people like her in mind. It is one of three competency-based offerings there, and it has about 70 active students.

The competency-based program is an outgrowth of Northern Arizona’s distance-learning program and the public university’s mission of making an affordable education accessible in even the farthest reaches of the state. The liberal-arts program was designed to span disciplines and serve as a vehicle for students to capitalize on the significant numbers of credits they may have earned from other institutions.

Northern Arizona’s program began in June 2013. Other competency-based programs with a liberal-arts emphasis have also sprouted.

The University of Wisconsin’s extension program began in January to offer competency-based degrees that include an associate in arts and science.

Brandman University, a private, nonprofit institution that offers classes online and on more than 25 campuses in California and Washington, will begin in August to offer a competency-based bachelor’s in business administration. It will include general-education competencies in creative and critical thinking; oral, written, and interpersonal communications; and quantitative reasoning.

Students in DePaul University’s competency-based programs in business, computers, and education have to complete about half of their credits in the liberal arts.

The number of institutions developing competency-based programs in general has grown markedly since the fall, says Michael J. Offerman, a higher-education consultant who is monitoring interest in this mode of learning on behalf of the Lumina Foundation, which is advocating for its use.

The most surprising development, he says, is the growing curiosity about it among liberal-arts colleges. For example, at Westminster College, a residential college in Salt Lake City, the president has encouraged faculty members to create competency-based versions of the college’s existing humanities, social-science, and natural- and physical-science courses.

Competency-based education covers a wide swath of approaches, a factor that some experts say comes from a lack of conceptual agreement about what competencies really mean. The mode of learning can be delivered online or in person. Its principles can be used in conventional classes led by professors over a semester, or competencies can entirely replace a traditional course, requiring students to demonstrate at their own pace their mastery of a list of skills and content. Some forms also award credit for what students have learned already, in the military or workplace. The programs have been offered for decades by a few specialized institutions like Charter Oak State, Empire State, and Excelsior Colleges.

New liberal-arts programs like Northern Arizona’s mark a significant development. Historically, competency programs have been heavily tilted toward practical and applied fields, many of which are guided by standards set out by industry or state licensing boards. Such a focus fits well with the model’s approach, which relies on clearly defined outcomes students must demonstrate through assessments.

The emphasis also reflects the interests of the students whom the model has served. Adult students often have little time to attend class and want to earn a credential to quickly improve their job prospects. Many policy makers, like those who founded Western Governors University, which is perhaps the best-known provider of competency-based education, see it as an effective way to meet work-force needs.

That legacy has led some professors to argue that competency programs are a poor fit for the often contested and ambiguous nature of the liberal arts, and the humanities in particular. You can’t stamp a certification on the suppleness of one’s intellect. Many faculty members would also prefer to evaluate students in more-nuanced ways, on the basis of class discussions and open-ended assignments.

Such criticism is familiar to Corrine J. Gordon, the lead faculty member in the Personalized Learning program in the liberal arts at Northern Arizona. Her program seeks to demonstrate its rigor. Each lesson has a “pretest” to gauge students’ level of familiarity with the topic and allow them to advance to the next lesson if they have already mastered it. Few do, she says.

Pretests, assignments, and the post-lesson test all involve writing, in part because it is the best form of communication for faculty members and far-flung students. A lesson might have five writing assignments, each of which is an essay of between 500 and 1,000 words. It is more writing, she contends, than most traditional courses require.

“We know the deck is stacked against us,” said Ms. Gordon. “I don’t necessarily think the microscope is pointed at traditional education as much as it should be.”

Distilling an education to a set of demonstrable outcomes that students master on their own can have value, say some of competency-based learning’s skeptics. But the model overlooks key ingredients that make an education worthwhile, like the intellectual maturation that comes with the passage of time and the mind-enhancing experience of grappling with the diverse perspectives of students in a classroom.

“The purpose of liberal education—unlike vocational education—is not to train but to change people, and this takes seat time,” wrote Johann N. Neem, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University, in his essay, “Experience Matters: Why Competency-Based Education Will Not Replace Seat Time.” It was published in Liberal Education in the fall by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Mastering a competency, he said in an interview, is like acing a driver’s test. “Becoming a driver and passing a driver’s test are quite different.”

That analogy raises questions about the function colleges should serve in a competency-based model. Should they play the role of the Department of Motor Vehicles, certifying a set of skills? Is the goal to be driving instructors that prepare students for their test? Or should they be more like the parent of a student with a learner’s permit, coaching her in the passenger’s seat as they log hours together on roads in all kinds of weather?

For Mr. Neem, the role that colleges play should serve the goal of a truly liberal education, which is often idiosyncratic, reflective of the people involved, and resistant to standardization.

To advocates of competency programs, such arguments can seem squishy. “You can turn that on its head,” says Clara M. Lovett, a historian, president emerita of Northern Arizona, and founding trustee of Western Governors University. “If ultimately you can’t tell me what the value-added is of the liberal arts, you don’t know if it’s made any difference in students’ intellectual abilities.”

Ms. Pollock says she has been changed by her experience as a student at Northern Arizona. The best example, she says, came in a course called “Ethical Obligation.” Her assignment was to read Plato and Socrates and write a 500-word essay applying the philosophers’ ideas to a news clip or to faculty-selected excerpts from documentaries. She wrote about morality and illegal immigration.

Growing up in the South and now living near the U.S. border with Mexico, Ms. Pollock said, she used to see the issue only as it affected her; it was a costly burden to rescue immigrants in the desert and treat them in local hospitals. After thinking about morality in its individual, social, and national contexts as informed by Plato, her mind changed. While still frustrated by the cost, she also recognizes immigration’s benefits to the country, and the motives of those who come here.

“It really made me think about what is ethical,” she said, and it “opened my mind to what’s moral for a nation as a whole rather than just myself.”

Making sure that competency-based learning serves broader civic purposes instead of chiefly students’ career aspirations is one of its main challenges, says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, which advocates for liberal education.

“The goal is to provide students with opportunities to tackle problems with people whose experience and views are different from their own,” she says. “If the entire experience is privatized, something fundamental to liberal education is being lost.”

The association has been keeping close tabs on competency-based learning, describing it as less heralded but more consequential than other innovations, like MOOCs.

Ms. Schneider’s group has also been seeking to influence the development of competency-based models to make sure they align with the traditional values of the liberal arts. The creators of several programs say they are basing their work on Liberal Education and America’s Promise, the association’s effort to stake out a common set of learning objectives and methods of assessment. The association is also working with the University of Wisconsin to develop its competency-based program for students across the state’s system of two-year colleges.

The vision of higher education as a vigorous meeting of minds with different views is an ideal that is not always realized, says Ms. Gordon, of Northern Arizona. She recalled what she described as a spectacular residential experience at Indiana University at Bloomington, where she spent time after class in coffee shops talking with her fellow students about what they were learning. Not everyone did, though. She had plenty of neighbors in her dormitory who failed to even show up for lectures.

“There are some ways that we talk about higher education that are a little bit utopian,” Ms. Gordon says.

She acknowledges that utopia, in the form of a residential experience that unfolds over four years or more, may in fact be better for the traditional-age student. But adults may not need it.

“I’m a different student than I was at 18,” she says. “A more mature student is able to retain and conceptualize information differently.”

Professors offering competency-based courses sometimes find the experience disconcerting because they can have little contact with students.

The faculty roles in many competency-based systems are divided. Regular interactions with students happen with an academic coach, who checks in through email and phone calls, and makes sure students stay on track. Many times, these advisers have earned master’s degrees in the subject matter.

The other faculty job is a subject-matter expert, who often holds a doctorate. In traditional courses, such faculty members would spend hours preparing for and teaching classes. Freed from that work in the competency-based model, they create the curriculum, assignments, and assessments, and evaluate students’ work.

Jennifer Heinert, an associate professor of English at Wisconsin’s campus in West Bend, says her new work as a subject-matter expert is a big adjustment from what she had come to appreciate about being a faculty member. “There’s a part of me that feels like it’s going against what I love and value and why I went into teaching,” she says. “If I did this with my usual students, I wouldn’t feel that I was doing my job.”

Other faculty members have had a different experience. Ms. Gordon, in Northern Arizona, says students in her programs receive in-depth feedback, often pages of it, on their writing assignments—far more than they would get from rubrics of the sort Wisconsin’s competency program uses, in which students’ work is evaluated according to a grid or checklist. She adds that her interactions with students tend to be more substantial than those she has had with a classroom full of students, when she truly connects with only a few.

The process of developing competency-based versions of courses at Wisconsin enriched the traditional curriculum, says Ms. Heinert. She and her colleagues translated learning outcomes from their existing courses into competencies. For example, a traditional English 102 course might require students to write research papers, tailoring them for specific audiences and purposes.

Translating learning goals into competencies means accounting for the absence of a professor, and the tasks become more clearly spelled out. To demonstrate competency, students must create multipage texts that use sources. The papers must be sufficiently complex and provide context that is appropriate to various types of writing. Students will also have to make the right choices about form and structure as they relate to different disciplines and readers, and use language that fits various writing situations.

At first, Wisconsin’s faculty members were supposed to develop enough competency-based courses to allow students to satisfy general-education requirements for the baccalaureate degrees offered in the competency program. Professors did more than that, and administrators realized they could offer an entire associate degree in arts and science through the competency-based model.

The experiment has produced both pride and ambivalence.

Wisconsin’s program is being marketed as equal to its traditional in-person or online offerings, and many faculty members are persuaded that the competency version is as rigorous. They worry, though, about the stakes for students. Since financial aid is still rarely available to students in competency-based programs, those in Wisconsin’s are on the hook for the full cost.

Administrators in Wisconsin say they are screening applicants for those who are likely to succeed in the largely self-guided model of learning: students who are highly motivated, self-disciplined, and mature. Wisconsin is also starting slowly by design, accepting 10 new enrollees each month in each of its five programs. Students can take the equivalent of one course at a time, or they can pay $2,250 for a kind of educational buffet in which they can tackle as many competencies as they want during a three-month period.

Still, some professors in Wisconsin wonder whether there’s really a big market of people who can benefit from the competency-based model. How many autodidacts are there who can read Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and think about it from different perspectives without listening to other students or engaging in give-and-take with a professor?

“Most people need teachers,” says Holly J. Hassel, a professor of English and women’s studies at the campus in Marathon County. “That’s just reality.”

Even if they are not in a classroom or moderating a class chat, some professors in Wisconsin see themselves as present in the educational process. “We’re still there,” says Kim Kostka, a chemistry professor on Wisconsin’s Rock County campus and coordinator of the competency-based program in arts and science. “We’ve baked ourselves into the curriculum.”

Whether or not that role suits her as a professor is beside the point, she says. “We’re here to make sure the students have a good experience,” she says. If her job in this program means she needs to grade papers and provide feedback by checking boxes in a rubric, so be it.

“It’s not the same, but do students learn this way?” she says. “That’s what we really want to find out.”

Who, exactly, those students are and how many of them can learn a liberal-arts curriculum in a competency-based model remains to be seen.

Ms. Pollock, for example, is something of an anomaly at Northern Arizona. Most of the students have earned about the same number of credits in six months in the competency-based program as they would attending a traditional program part time. Wisconsin’s experience has been similar.

There may not be many students who can complete a liberal-arts curriculum by essentially teaching it to themselves. But they deserve a shot at earning a diploma, say advocates of competency-based learning.

This group of students, however small, may also represent a new market for competency-based learning. If so, it could mark an important moment in the process of disruption.

That word gets thrown around a lot in higher-education’s leadership circles, and it tends to provoke eye-rolling among faculty, whose roles promise to be disrupted more than anyone else’s. Some professors, like Mr. Neem, of Western Washington, don’t believe competency-based learning will turn out to be a disruptive innovation. It may remain one mode of education among many, a prospect he favors.

The disruption of higher education has long been under way, says Michelle R. Weise, a senior research fellow who studies higher education at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. The process began in the late 1980s with the founding of large online colleges like the University of Phoenix.

Disruption often begins simply, with programs or products that are a bit clunky, proponents of the theory say. But those products are good enough to appeal to people whose alternative is nothing at all. A key moment is when the good-enough product starts to improve and appeal to people with more choices.

Competency-based liberal-arts programs may eventually be able to compete with expensive private colleges that have little brand-name cachet, Ms. Weise says. Students seeking an affordable liberal-arts option will be among the first to grasp competency-based learning’s possibilities.

“It’ll start with the nontraditional students,” Ms. Weise says. “It can’t compete directly with traditional students, but it can create something that works around the margins. I do see great potential here.”