Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
News

Competency-Based Education Goes Mainstream in Wisconsin

By Scott Carlson September 30, 2013
Aaron Apel, who has an associate degree, works full time, and is raising a family, is the kind of student that leaders of competency-based programs have in mind.
Aaron Apel, who has an associate degree, works full time, and is raising a family, is the kind of student that leaders of competency-based programs have in mind. Narayan Mahon for The Chronicle
Madison, Wis.

Twenty years ago, Aaron Apel headed off to the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, where he spent too little time studying and too much time goofing off. He left the university, eventually earning an associate degree in information technology at a community college.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Twenty years ago, Aaron Apel headed off to the University of Wisconsin at Platteville, where he spent too little time studying and too much time goofing off. He left the university, eventually earning an associate degree in information technology at a community college.

Now, as a longtime staff member in the registrar’s office at Wisconsin’s Madison campus, he has advanced as far as his education will let him. “I have aspirations to climb the ladder in administration, but the opportunity isn’t there without a four-year degree,” he says.

Spending months in a classroom is out of the question: In addition to his full-time job, he helps his wife run an accounting business, shuttles three kids to activities, and oversees an amateur volleyball league. Now he may have another option. Later this year Wisconsin’s extension system will start a competency-based learning program, called the Flexible Option, in which students with professional experience and training in certain skills might be able to test out of whole courses on their way to getting a degree.

Competency-based learning is already famously used by private institutions like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University, but Wisconsin will be one of the first major public universities to take on this new, controversial form of granting degrees. Among the system’s campuses, Milwaukee was first to announce bachelor’s degrees in nursing, diagnostic imaging, and information science and technology, along with a certificate in professional and business communication. UW Colleges, made up of the system’s two-year institutions, is developing liberal-arts-oriented associate degrees. The Flex Option, as it’s often called, may cost the Wisconsin system $35-million over the next few years, with half of that recovered through tuition. The system is starting with a three-month, all-you-can-learn term for $2,250.

If done right, the Flex Option could help a significant number of adults acquire marketable skills and cross the college finish line—an important goal in Wisconsin, which lags behind neighboring states in percentage of adults with college diplomas. There are some 800,000 people in the state who have some college credits but no degree—among them Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who dropped out of Marquette University. He had pushed the university system to set up the Flex Option early last year, when he was considering inviting Western Governors to the state to close a statewide skills gap in high-demand fields like health care, information technology, and advanced manufacturing.

“Students in general are learning in very different ways,” the governor, a Republican, says in an interview. The state’s population of adults with some college but no degree constitutes “a target-rich environment for us to find the new engineers, health-care professionals, and IT experts that we need to fill these jobs, so we don’t have to recruit them from elsewhere and we don’t have to wait for years for undergraduates.”

But if it’s designed poorly, the program will confirm perceptions held by some faculty members, who already thought that the governor’s policies were hostile to higher education. They worry that the Flex Option will turn the University of Wisconsin into a kind of diploma mill or suck resources from a system that is already financially pressured. Faculty at the Green Bay campus passed a resolution to express “doubts that the Flexible degree program will meet the academic standards of a university education.”

“It’s an intriguing idea, but I think the questions that need to be asked are what are the serious limitations of it,” says Eric Kraemer, a philosophy professor at the La Crosse campus, where faculty members were also highly skeptical of the Flex Option. Mr. Kraemer wonders whether there actually is a significant group of Wisconsin adults who have the initiative and ability to test out of big portions of degree programs. And, particularly in a squishier subject area like the humanities, he wonders whether testing can adequately evaluate what a traditional student would glean through time and effort spent in a course. “I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of simply doing a competency test to determine whether someone can actually think on their feet.”

Certainly, there are a lot of details to be worked out, even as the Flexible Option prepares to enroll its first students. Some of the challenges are technical or logistical: Wisconsin’s extension program will have to spend millions to create a student-information system flexible enough to work in a new environment, where student progress is tracked not by course time but competencies, and where instruction and assessment are decoupled.

In time, Wisconsin will also have to hire an army of “success coaches,” who will be far more involved with students than the usual academic adviser. They will be expected to know the subject material, each student’s academic department, and the students themselves. There will be one to every 85 students, a far higher ratio than the one-to-hundreds ratio of most advisers.

ADVERTISEMENT

Other challenges are pedagogical and philosophical: Faculty members, who are in charge of designing the assessments for the Flex Option, are grappling with how students can show mastery of a subject—and even pondering what “mastery” means.

Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor of information studies at the Milwaukee campus, says that in traditional courses, if a student is struggling but shows up to class and makes progress, he might give that student the benefit of the doubt and a passing grade.

“With Flex I don’t have that—I just have this assessment,” he says. So he and his colleagues have discussed setting a high bar for passing the assessment—students might need a solid B to show “mastery.” That approach carries its own risks: If the Flex Option is designed to help people in Wisconsin quickly get degrees by merely taking exams, what happens to the program if only a few people can pass the tests?

In any case, Mr. Zimmer says his dean and other administrators have supported him. “There is the rhetoric of what the governor wants,” he says, “but my job here is to make sure that people are getting the right kind of education.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Chad Zahrt, assistant dean of the School of Information Studies at Milwaukee, says the best thing the Flex Option has done is promote a deep discussion about rigor—in the traditional classroom as well.

“It has really gotten people to analyze what they are teaching and what they expect at the end of the process,” he says. “Are you really measuring something that is an outcome or a deliverable or mastery, or are they saying, You were here, you showed up? I think there is a false assumption in higher education that rigor is built into every academic experience.”

The speculation, scrutiny, and setting high standards are all good for the Flex program, says Aaron Brower, interim provost and vice chancellor of Wisconsin’s extension program. There will be no distinction between a traditional degree from the system’s campuses and a Flex degree, he says. “There is no asterisk.”

Mr. Brower, a professor of social work at Madison who studies education innovations and advises Wisconsin’s president on education strategies, understands the skepticism about testing students to determine if they have gotten the deeper knowledge that some believe comes only through seat time in a classroom and interaction with peers. But he believes that test can be designed.

ADVERTISEMENT

Many people mistakenly believe that the traditional way is the only way, he says. “Why is there an assumption that four years of college leads to that kind of maturity?” he says. “You and I both know people who go through our most elite institutions and they say, I don’t know what I got from that.”

The other mistake, Mr. Brower says, is thinking that a competency program signals the end of traditional education. “We need to resist the either-or here,” he says. “We need to provide lots of options. This really works well for some students, and it doesn’t work well for other students.”

And if it does work, he says, “What is so bad about it?”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Scott Carlson
About the Author
Scott Carlson
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who explores where higher education is headed. He is a co-author of Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025). Follow him on LinkedIn, or write him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

Learning How to Bring New Models Into the Mix
The Proof Is in the Portfolio

More News

PPP 10 FINAL promo.jpg
Bouncing Back?
For Once, Public Confidence in Higher Ed Has Increased
University of California, Berkeley chancellor Dr. Rich Lyons, testifies at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism, in Washington, D.C., U.S., on July 15, 2025. It is the latest in a series of House hearings on antisemitism at the university level, one that critics claim is a convenient way for Republicans to punish universities they consider too liberal or progressive, thereby undermining responses to hate speech and hate crimes. (Photo by Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)
Another Congressional Hearing
3 College Presidents Went to Congress. Here’s What They Talked About.
Tufts University student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested by immigration agents while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, talks to reporters on arriving back in Boston, Saturday, May 10, 2025, a day after she was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center on the orders of a federal judge. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi)
Law & Policy
Homeland Security Agents Detail Run-Up to High-Profile Arrests of Pro-Palestinian Scholars
Photo illustration of a donation jar turned on it's side, with coins spilling out.
Financial aid
The End of Unlimited Grad-School Loans Could Leave Some Colleges and Students in the Lurch

From The Review

Illustration of an ocean tide shaped like Donald Trump about to wash away sandcastles shaped like a college campus.
The Review | Essay
Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump
By Jason Owen-Smith
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a pencil meshed with a circuit bosrd
The Review | Essay
How Are Students Really Using AI?
By Derek O'Connell
John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin