But actually, it is on the move:
- Credential as You Go announced today that 26 colleges and two credentialing organizations had joined the project after a competitive selection process. They’ll expand the group of 21 colleges in Colorado, New York, and North Carolina that are already collaborating on a variety of approaches for developing certificates and other microcredentials, and working them into the mix of offerings. The plan is also to study whether the new credentials make it easier for students to gain access to higher education and to complete their programs.
- The newly launched Learn & Work Ecosystem Library curates a wealth of information on policies, programs, definitions, and other resources on credentials. It also links to current and former projects. Zanville, a 15-year veteran of the Lumina Foundation and the force behind the library, calls it a digital and more expansive version of her network as a grant maker in this field. She hopes the library can help inform and connect practitioners and policy makers as the movement for incremental credentials grows, and the wiki-style format means anyone in the field can suggest additions. And Zanville’s team is eager for feedback. Consider this your invitation to give the site a once-over and share your thoughts here or here.
I know this whole credentialing thing can get a bit geeky — especially when it morphs into talk about digital credentials (and then tech standards and blockchain, etc.).
But bigger picture, I find this movement compelling for many of the same reasons that drive Credential as You Go. “Credentialing is a serious equity issue,” it noted in soliciting its latest collaborators. “A fair postsecondary education system is needed to capture uncounted learning and validate that learning to enable all individuals to be recognized for what they know and can do.”
Incremental credentialing is also a way for colleges — and faculty members — to put their educational values front and center as the needs of the work force gain influence and skills-based hiring gets more air time. Done right, incremental credentials can complement rather than threaten higher ed. (To wit: Read on about the State University of New York below.)
I’ve still got plenty of concerns about the proliferating number of educational credentials: more than a million by Credential Engine’s latest count. But I’m a fan of the approach Zanville and her colleagues are taking: recognizing people’s learning as it occurs, for its value at the moment. That could have particular impact for students who leave college before completing. “It’s not all about degrees,” she says. Ideally, students will layer incremental credentials over a lifetime of learning.
Zanville so believes in this that at the end of 2020 she left her strategy-director post at Lumina, where she oversaw a Credential as You Go grant to SUNY’s Empire State College, to work on it full time. In 2021 the project won a $3-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to build on that work. Walmart has also kicked in support.
One way Zanville has measured traction is by the hundreds of colleges and organizations that responded to the group’s most recent RFP. “I don’t know if we could have done this 10 years ago,” she says.
Through the Non-Degree Credentials Research Network, based at George Washington University, where Zanville is a research professor, and other groups, she hopes to see more studies of credentials to guide practitioners and build out the field.
One system’s embrace of incremental credentials.
SUNY is one of higher ed’s biggest players in this area, thanks in part to that Empire State College grant and also to a push from one of the system’s former chancellors, Nancy Zimpher. Back in 2015, that was an attempt to respond to all the hype about bootcamps and MOOCs. University leaders saw incremental credentialing as a tool to encourage student persistence, and then, after Covid hit, as a way to attract students to (or back to) college.
But even with that head start, progress seemed, uh, a bit deliberate. SUNY paints that as a feature, not a bug. Officials took pains to ensure that new credentials were adopted under the umbrella of faculty governance and, in most cases, with courses taught by regular faculty members.
The program began in 2018 with 21 credentials on two SUNY campuses. Today 35 campuses offer 519 incremental credentials at every degree level. They include certificates in sorting, grading, and classifying the wool of alpacas, goats, and sheep, at SUNY-Cobleskill; and in interdisciplinary physics and astronomy research, at SUNY-Geneseo.
And while I wondered whether the current enrollment — about 7,800 students — in microcredential programs was really significant, considering the system’s total enrollment of 370,000, Cynthia Proctor, director of communications and academic-policy development in the provost’s office, tried to convince me otherwise. She noted that 15 campuses started offering the credentials only 18 months ago, and systemwide promotion of the program didn’t begin until last February, with the launch of an online directory. The tracking system also wasn’t in place until then, and a few campuses haven’t reported their latest figures.
But 53 of SUNY’s 64 campuses sent representatives to a session on the program last fall.
For all the promise here, advocates need to make sure incremental credentials have real value to employers. Otherwise they’ll just add to the credential Tower of Babel. And they need to be affordable, so they are actually good on-ramps to higher ed. SUNY, for example, is using federal grants to subsidize the price of some credentials for now since they’re not always eligible for state aid and Pell Grants.
Those are two of my top concerns. How about you? What obstacles do you see for the incremental-credentialing movement? Does it really encourage enrollment and persistence? What might hinder it — or help it along? Please send me your thoughts, and I’ll share what I hear in a future newsletter.
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