After 19 years climbing the career ladder in Fort Worth’s city government, Jolene G. Applegate was stuck.
She had risen as high as acting manager but kept getting passed over for promotions. She knew why. Even though she’d earned 90 credits (at three different colleges), she didn’t have a credential to show for it. Without an associate or bachelor’s degree, she rarely got a second look from hiring managers.
“I couldn’t go as far as I wanted,” she said, “because of that piece of paper.”
Last year a newspaper article caught Ms. Applegate’s eye. It described a new bachelor’s-degree program at Texas A&M University at Commerce designed for people who’d racked up college credits but no degree. By that time, she had earned 120 credits and an associate degree, but with this program, even while holding down a job and juggling family commitments, she could keep going.
Ms. Applegate liked that the degree would be inexpensive, as little as $10,000, but she wasn’t sure what to make of its being competency-based — that is, based on her ability to demonstrate her knowledge of material rather than on how much time she spent in class. Would future employers, she wondered, respect that?
Regard for competency-based education is a live question as programs spread across academe. While the model has been a fixture in some quarters of higher education for decades, it is now attracting substantial interest from policy makers, foundations, and think tanks. Many traditional universities have come to see it as a way to deliver, at lower cost and greater efficiency, high-quality degrees to adult students whose lives don’t conform to semesters.
But if a degree is currency, will this one convert? Ms. Applegate and 16 fellow students graduated from Commerce’s program on Saturday. As they look to get promoted or change careers, their experiences reflect the assumptions, promises, and questions — some of them achieved and answered, others still unresolved — of this new wave of competency-based education. While relatively inexpensive, the degrees earned by several Commerce graduates have been pricier than initially projected. Worries about academic quality or a narrow focus may not have taken hold, but how the degree will serve students is still unclear.
“When you challenge the traditional models, everything changes,” said Mary W. Hendrix, Commerce’s vice president for student access and success. “We’re all entering uncharted waters.”
Same Rigor, Different Method
The Commerce campus created its program in response to a directive by Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, for universities to develop bachelor’s-degree programs that would cost students $10,000 each.
Led by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, faculty members and administrators at Commerce collaborated with their peers at South Texas College, analyzing labor-force projections and interviewing local employers. The data suggested that the state would see growing demand for midlevel managers with bachelor’s degrees in manufacturing and the service industry.
So the professors and administrators designed a bachelor of applied arts and sciences in organizational leadership, with a largely standardized series of courses and a competency-based model. The development phase attracted money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Educause, and the program is now delivered in hybrid form, in person and online, at South Texas and entirely online through Commerce.
Students pay $750 each for a seven-week term, during which they complete as many “competencies” as they can. That means mastering skills like problem solving and applied research, as demonstrated on written assignments or video presentations. The competencies are woven into courses for the major as well as general-education requirements.
The biggest stumbling block for faculty members was terminology, said Ricky F. Dobbs, a professor of history at Commerce and dean of its University College.
“You can make the word ‘competency’ mean just about anything,” he said. As part of a team of faculty members and administrators that was creating the program, Mr. Dobbs and his colleagues used learning outcomes defined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities to develop a set of broad competencies in areas like change management, organizational behavior, and information literacy.
The group of instructors across campuses arrived at a common understanding: Their task was to think about how their various disciplines helped students develop skills.
To use quantitative data to make decisions, for example, students must read a paper on data analysis in government and watch a video on big data in corporations. On discussion boards, the students answer questions about the material and respond to their peers.
To finish off that particular competency, students write at least 250 words describing the utility of statistics, offering three examples of how the field “makes a difference in all our lives, all the time.” Incorporating personal examples, they must explain how translating data into information can help in making decisions.
The program design is not well suited to traditional-age students, Mr. Dobbs said, because those enrolled must complete assignments largely on their own, often applying material they’ve learned in the workplace. “It’s the same rigor,” he said. “It’s simply a different method of presenting it to a different population.”
New Perspectives
Among the new graduates, several found the experience academically challenging, even occasionally overwhelming.
R. Michael Hurbrough Sr. said that it was one of the most difficult things he’d undertaken, and that he often felt like giving up. But he stuck with it, crediting help from Commerce faculty members.
Mr. Hurbrough enrolled in the program after losing his job selling insurance, a field he’d worked in for more than 30 years. Without a bachelor’s degree, he said, prospective employers weren’t interested in him. But with Texas A&M at Commerce on his résumé, he got a job at another firm, he said, even though he had yet to graduate.
The program changed his perspective, he said in an interview with The Chronicle. Learning about organizational dynamics made him less tolerant of ineffective or autocratic leadership, he said. He’s now considering sales or marketing work in other fields, like oil or gas.
But an education can take you only so far; Mr. Hurbrough’s newly minted degree has yet to build that bridge. “I’m not sure if anyone would take a chance,” he said, wondering if his age, 51, could hinder him. The degree may not have opened the way to a new career, he said, but “I know it’s not going to hurt me.”
For Ms. Applegate, the experience meant relying on herself more than she had to at community college. While she enjoyed interacting with faculty members, one on one, and having to draw on what she knew to complete open-ended assignments, she missed learning alongside classmates.
The work could be daunting, she added, because it often required her to acquaint herself quickly with unfamiliar material. For one assignment, an analysis of the video-game company Zynga, she remembers pulling an all-nighter. “That’s really what the world of business is like,” said Ms. Applegate, 59. “You have to figure out how you’re going to deliver.”
Before starting the program, she had left the city government and gone to work as a buyer in the purchasing department at Weatherford College, where she got her associate degree. Now, rather than go back to the city government, she hopes to work in nonprofit management.
“It’s really about, at the end of the day, liking what you do,” Ms. Applegate said. “I’m hoping the door I’m supposed to walk through will open.”
Unrealistic Expectations?
The frequently cited premise of many competency-based programs is that they will draw legions of adults to low-cost degrees that will mesh seamlessly with work-force needs. So far, the reality in Texas seems more complex.
Start with the price. The target of $10,000 for four years of college has been difficult to hit. In their first year, students at Commerce paid an average of just over $4,000 in tuition and books, Ms. Hendrix said. That would be $16,000 over four years, though credits earned for prior learning could decrease the time to degree. Still, she added, $4,000 is a bargain: It’s about half of what a traditional student would pay for a comparable number of credits.
And enrollment has hardly surged. The programs at Commerce and South Texas were originally slated to enroll a total of 6,000 students by 2018, but published figures have put the first-year enrollment at 215.
Devising a new business model, financial-aid system, and student-support services has been difficult, Ms. Hendrix said. “Innovation takes time,” she said, including getting “your market to catch up.”
More closely syncing higher education and the work force is a well-documented problem, with colleges often characterized as haphazardly churning out graduates with ill-defined or irrelevant skills. But the landscape is more nuanced, according to a recent study by the consultants Parthenon-EY, conducted on behalf of the American Enterprise Institute.
Competency-based education won’t fix the mismatch as long as employers remain largely unaware of it. About a third of 479 hiring managers responding to a survey said they had never heard of competency-based education. Just 45, or less than a tenth, reported a “strong understanding” of the concept.
But most surprising, said Chip H. Franklin, an author of a report on the study, was that nearly 80 percent of employers said they hadn’t formally identified what competencies they required for a given job. “Without a defined list, it is practically impossible,” the report says, for a college’s competency-based program “to align program competencies with the targeted skills an employer needs.”
Colleges are far ahead of businesses in thinking about competencies, Mr. Franklin, a vice president in Parthenon-EY’s education practice, said in an interview. For now, hiring managers favor traditional markers of “fit,” like institutional prestige, he said, to fill entry-level positions. Meanwhile, employers complain that good applicants are hard to come by, their qualifications difficult to judge.
Eventually, said Mr. Franklin, as more graduates of competency-based programs are hired, companies may grow more receptive to the idea of evaluating candidates by their demonstrated skills. At least three-quarters of survey respondents described themselves as interested in the educational approach after they heard a description of it. But only so interested. Fewer respondents thought competency-based approaches would be good for their own hiring.
“When you ask them to put their money where their mouth is, they’re dedicated to traditional hiring practices,” said Mr. Franklin. That won’t help competency-based education fulfill its promise. Getting there will require employers and colleges to have different sorts of conversations, and people to start bucking convention. “Employers,” Mr. Franklin said, “will have to start to change.”
Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.
Correction (5/21/2015, 11:15 a.m.): The photo caption originally referred, incorrectly, to the University of Texas. It has been corrected.
