Six years and several fast-food jobs after graduating from high school, Erin B. Chavez was a single mom seeking a better life for herself and her daughter. She liked taking care of people and thought she’d make a good nurse, but a four-year degree was both academically and financially daunting.
So Ms. Chavez did what a growing number of people are doing: She broke a degree into small steps that provided momentum along the way.
The first step was a certificate in basic health-care foundations, which she earned last summer at Ashland Community and Technical College, in Kentucky. That led to the associate degree she’s working on, which she hopes to build on further with a bachelor’s degree in nursing.
So-called stackable credentials are gaining popularity around the country as a way to ease people back into college while providing on- and off-ramps for students who may need to stop to care for family members or to earn money. Colleges are meeting that need by slicing credentials into smaller and smaller pieces that provide evidence of skills students acquire as they move in and out of college.
One form of stackable credential, the short-term, work-related certificate, is increasingly being sought by students hoping to land jobs or get promotions. Fueling the trend is employers’ expectation that new workers arrive with evidence that they’ve mastered specific skills that years ago they would have learned on the job.
Noncredit continuing-education classes have long attracted people looking for a quick entry into the work force. Stackable credentials, too, have been around for some time, as students have progressed from associate degrees to bachelor’s and master’s. What has changed is the growing emphasis on awarding credentials for incremental advances in skills on a path that can lead to a degree. Ideally, students seeking credentials would attend college full-time and graduate in two or four years — but for first-generation and low-income students in particular, that rarely happens.
Ms. Chavez hopes to beat the odds and remain in college until she becomes a registered nurse, but she already has a backup plan. “With the experience and courses I took last summer,” she says, “I’m already qualified to be a certified nursing assistant.”
Her intensive certificate program at Ashland immersed her in medical terminology, CPR certification, and clinical rotations in a nursing home, where she monitored residents’ vital signs and helped lift and bathe them. During the past academic year, she tackled her basic education courses while working 20 hours a week in the college’s advising office.
And this month, while her 4-year-old daughter is attending Head Start, Ms. Chavez is diving into anatomy and physiology, psychology, and other nursing prerequisites.
Awarding certificates at various points along the degree pathway can motivate students like Ms. Chavez to continue, says Maria K. Flynn, senior vice president of Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit group that helps underserved students earn college credentials and land decent jobs. Certificates, which can take anywhere from a few months to two years to complete, provide milestones that make an associate or baccalaureate degree less daunting, particularly for students who have struggled in school.
Luke Sharrett for The Chronicle
Erin Chavez adjusts a microscope during a class at Ashland Community and Technical College, in Kentucky. She attends part-time while working at the college.
Jobs for the Future runs Accelerating Opportunity, the program Ms. Chavez started out in. It creates career pathways for low-income students whose academic skills are especially weak. Job training and adult basic-education classes are integrated in a course sequence that leads to certificates recognized by various industry and business groups. The program is similar to the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-Best) model, developed in Washington State and replicated around the country.
“We want to make sure folks have a credential to fall back on in the event that they have to stop out of their pathway for a family or other emergency,” says Ms. Flynn. “Having stackable credentials enables them to stop out but then come back in without losing any ground.”
Someone working on an accounting degree who drops out before completing it might, for instance, earn a certificate in banking for finance courses taken along the way.
“Having stackable credentials enables them to stop out but then come back in without losing any ground.”
From 2000 to 2014, the number of sub-baccalaureate certificates awarded by two- and-four-year colleges increased 150 percent, compared with a 59-percent increase in associate degrees and a 47-percent increase in bachelor’s degrees during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Since then the trend has intensified.
For community colleges under pressure to increase their completion numbers, the proliferation of certificates helps them show that students are gaining marketable skills. But some skeptics question whether breaking degrees into a sequence of certificates does little more than make the colleges look more productive.
Some studies, for instance, have raised questions about whether a certificate that takes less than a year to complete really leads to an increase in earnings. A recent study conducted by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that students who spent more than a year earning a certificate or associate degree earned more money afterward. But that wasn’t necessarily the case with short-term certificates, the report said.
Ms. Flynn, of Jobs for the Future, doesn’t dispute that students would be better served if they used their certificates as springboards toward degrees and not as terminal credentials. Her organization is examining ways to motivate students to continue their education, even if a certificate lands them a job.
Among the challenges educators face in trying to devise stacked credentials is making sure that course sequences line up, and that the skills being taught are what employers need. Some colleges embed industry certificates in courses or work directly with local employers to design courses.
Coming up with national standards, which some industries are trying to do, would ensure that credentials are portable when students move from state to state.
Another problem: Breaking courses into modules risks making them ineligible for financial aid, which requires a certain number of credit hours or clock hours. And there’s the question of which credentials are recognized by state lawmakers in the growing number of states with performance-based funding.
In Kentucky, growth in the number of short-term certificates awarded over the past decade has far outpaced growth in associate degrees.
“Our industry partners are demanding this, and it’s an important part of our mission,” says Rhonda Tracy, chancellor of the state’s system of community and technical colleges. While they still recognize the value of an associate degree, “they’re telling us, ‘We don’t need a full degree for this particular job — just this bundled set of skills.’”
When employees are ready to climb the career ladder, she says, “they can come back and add on another layer of coursework.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
