Years ago, when I was teaching high school, one of my students loved all things related to computers and networking. By the time he was a junior, he was managing the school’s computer network. Outside school as well, he immersed himself in the world of computing. He enrolled at the local community college, earned Cisco certification (one of many valued credentials in information technology), and had a growing reputation for his expertise. At 19 he was hired as a network administrator for the city’s public-school system and was instrumental in helping to build one of the first wireless wide-area networks for schools in that region.
When I asked him whether he intended to continue with college, he said he could not afford to interrupt his career. He worried that by the time he graduated, he would have fallen too far behind in the rapidly changing industry. I don’t know whether he eventually earned a degree or not, but he earned his first job because he was an expert. He had a history of success, a solid reputation among peers in the field, and a respected certification.
His experience points to a reality that people inside and outside higher education are only slowly realizing: There are diverse pathways to success, and more ways to demonstrate competency than by earning a college degree.
Higher education certainly opens doors. Studies have found that college graduates are healthier, wealthier, even happier. Yet is the diploma really the cause? Does a piece of paper issued after completing a set number of courses or credits have some direct impact on a person’s well-being? Or might it have to do with the access and opportunity that society offers those who have earned that document?
Scan any listing of openings for skilled jobs and you notice a simple pattern: Many of the best-paying jobs require a college degree to apply, without even specifying that it be in a given field.
But suppose someone went to college to study computer science and, for some reason, was unable to complete the last credit required for that degree. Consider what opportunities would be closed off to this person but available to the candidate who had earned that one final credit (which could have been, say, an unrelated but required physical-fitness credit).
Now imagine a world where competence is documented in more discrete ways — a goal of the growing movement to allow students to earn microcredentials and digital badges. Consider the nanodegrees offered by Udacity, a MOOC provider, or the Colorado Community College system’s recent announcement that it would develop competency-based digital badges, in response to employers’ needs, that can be earned through either traditional coursework or on-the-job training.
A college diploma is not the only way to the good life, the intellectual life, the cultured life, or the American dream.
In Pittsburgh, schoolchildren are earning digital badges for skills mastered in summer learning programs, and the city is considering a digital-badge system aligned to work-force needs. Other initiatives include the University Learning Store, a one-stop online storefront of microcredentials that is being developed by a consortium of universities.
The badge system allows people to demonstrate competencies and skills they acquire as they progress through college, whether through self-directed study or through one of the growing number of free or inexpensive online programs offered by MOOCs and companies like Udemy. It is possible to set badges to expire, requiring holders to prove that they have kept skills updated.
Over time a person could acquire a collection of digital badges that verify a mastery of the skills required for the computer-science job that my student got. Rather than simply requiring a college degree, the job description would list the necessary skills and ask candidates to provide evidence of those skills. That evidence might include a diploma and a transcript as well as a set of microcredentials earned across organizations.
Such a system would begin to remove the age-old problem of credentialism, which has limited access to some jobs by requiring credentials that are not always closely related to the actual skills required for those jobs. This is one of the most promising possibilities of the growing movement to establish alternative credentials and multiple-learning pathways.
Some people will protest that I am ignoring the value of the liberal-arts education or the inherent benefit of a traditional, residential college experience. But the idyllic vision of moving away from home at 18 to go to college, live in a dorm, study, participate in extracurricular activities, and earn a diploma is not the standard college experience for many people today. It isn’t even a possibility for a significant part of the population, struggling to afford community-college tuition while working and raising children. Right now our higher-education system has a largely all-or-nothing mind-set. But imagine the possibilities for access and opportunity if we recognized that there can be many pathways to competence and mastery, and multiple definitions of what it means to be educated (as epitomized by Abraham Lincoln, a self-taught lawyer).
Colleges are not the only organizations that can help increase access and opportunity by providing alternative credentials, but they can play an important contributing role. They can willingly let go of the higher-education monopoly on many career pathways that are currently limited to people with traditional college credentials. They can accept that it is good social policy to welcome a greater variety of credentialing agencies. Focusing upon competence over credentials would create a system that recognizes the validity of different routes to the same destination.
There is ample room for colleges to contribute to this broadening of credentials. We see places like Loyola University of Chicago and Rutgers Business School experimenting with credentials like their mini-M.B.A.s, which, while less comprehensive than a full M.B.A., offer management and leadership skills that can help people advance in their jobs. Colorado State University Online’s digital-badge program allows students to demonstrate competency in gardening and sustainability by taking specific courses. Such efforts do not take away from the value of full undergraduate or graduate degrees, but they do model ways in which colleges are experimenting with other types of credentials.
Having worked as a schoolteacher, professor, university administrator, and consultant for more than 20 years, I am an advocate for the value of a college experience. The liberal arts have enriched my life. Traditional college has been a life-changing experience for countless people, and I hope to see such an educational pathway flourish long into the future. But I cannot, in good conscience, push to protect it by using it as the only gateway to the good life, restricting those who might choose another but equally rigorous pathway. A college diploma is not the only way to the good life, the intellectual life, the cultured life, or the American dream; and it is elitist to push for an educational ecosystem in which college is the only route.
