The New Transcript

College transcripts can seem pretty bare-bones, even cryptic: Typically they’re limited to a list of courses taken and grades earned, with little detail on what the courses involved and no sign of what else the students did during their time on campus.

But more and more colleges are giving their staid transcripts a makeover. They’re using them as a place to list “learning outcomes” of courses and to log how many hours students spent on extracurricular activities and internships, and they’re jazzing up the presentation with pie charts and infographics.

Those may sound like cosmetic changes, but making them requires soul-searching by college officials about what counts as meaningful learning. And the changes could have big consequences. Transcripts embody the cultural currency of a college. They’re a ticket that can grant admission to jobs and graduate schools, and, by extension, a more prosperous and fulfilling life. With the right upgrades, proponents believe, a New Transcript could help graduates better convey to employers their qualifications, including soft skills like communication and teamwork. Plus, it’s a chance for colleges to better demonstrate their worth to the growing chorus of those questioning the value of a degree.

Elon University is one institution at the forefront of the trend. In addition to its standard transcripts, it creates an “Experiences Transcript” for each student that includes activities in five areas — leadership, service, internship, study abroad, and research. Various campus organizations report student activities to the registrar or other designated campus offices, so that they show up in the digital record that’s certified by the university. For instance, fraternities submit their leadership rosters, companies that host interns submit a record of the number of hours that students worked, and professors report substantial student research projects.

“One thing the students say more than anything is, Wow, I had no idea I was doing all this at Elon,” says Rodney Parks, the registrar. “We’re reminding them of all of those experiences that they had.”

The effort began back in 1994, in the student-affairs office, but few students requested the Experiences Transcript until the registrar’s office recently took it over and made it an option with any standard transcript request. Now the university is working to improve the document’s appearance, turning it into what Mr. Parks calls a “visual transcript,” with a timeline of a student’s major extracurricular activities, a map highlighting her study abroad, graphs of hours she spent doing volunteer and service work, and the logos of companies where she had internships.

Students can also share these new transcripts digitally, by dropping them into LinkedIn profiles or personal websites.

The visual-transcript project is supported by a grant from the Lumina Foundation as part of a $1.3-million effort to modernize credentials. The university plans to release a tool to help more colleges adopt the idea.

Other institutions looking to bolster their transcripts are adding portfolios to give employers a more detailed look at student projects. While such portfolios are not new, colleges are trying them to help bridge the perceived divide between what colleges teach and what employers want.

The move to improve transcripts is part of a broader push toward what some are calling the “quantified student,” meaning that students begin to see the New Transcript as part of a record that helps them better understand their own educational development and communicate it to employers. The buzzword alludes to the so-called quantified-self movement, epitomized by fitness trackers like Fitbit, which allow people to analyze data on their own physical activity and other habits (such as the number of footsteps walked, calories consumed, and hours slept).

“Quantified Students will be able to map current skill sets against the requirements of target careers, evaluate the gap, and then select the educational program or path that gets them to their destination quickly and cost effectively,” wrote Adam Markowitz, chief executive of Portfolium, which sells a student-portfolio tool, and Ryan Craig, an investor in the company, in an article in Forbes magazine this year.

Some academics worry that a Fitbit approach to educational data represents a dystopia in which colleges view career readiness, rather than the expansion of students’ minds, as their main function. “This is an incredibly depressing view of education,” Jason B. Jones, an editor of ProfHacker, argued in a recent blog post on The Chronicle’s site.

And not everyone thinks the upgraded transcripts and portfolios will catch on with employers. “Employers don’t want to take time to go through your portfolio — they just don’t,” says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. He argues that most companies want to make their hiring processes for entry-level jobs as efficient as possible, and that they are looking for simple, stark signals — like whether a person graduated, and from where — to decide whom to spend more time interviewing. “They’re not looking at transcripts now; why are they going to look at more later?” he adds.

He does think that the New Transcripts — which are digital rather than in paper form — will lead to revolutionary changes for colleges, because of their potential as an accountability metric for higher education. By making it possible to look at aggregate transcript data, digitization allows colleges to tell which majors most consistently lead to jobs, and at what pay scale.

And if such information is shared with consumers, as some state and federal efforts hope to require, that will provide a powerful new way to compare colleges. “If you look at higher education as an investment,” Mr. Carnevale says, “you want to know what the return is going to be.”

Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.