CLASP Senior Fellow Evelyn Ganzglass recently authored a paper on emerging innovations in postsecondary education. The paper identifies five strategies several states and community colleges and their partners are using to create "stackable credentials." The four states featured-Kentucky, Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin-are members of the Alliance for Quality Career Pathways, a state-led, CLASP-facilitated initiative to develop and implement a framework of criteria and participant metrics for quality career pathway systems. Students can accumulate stackable credentials over time to build up their qualifications and help them move along a career pathway or up a career ladder to different and potentially higher-paying jobs.
The paper discusses policy and institutional barriers these states and colleges have been working to overcome as they create a transferable currency of credentials that has value in both the labor market and postsecondary educational credit and credentialing systems. LINK
This study provides a window into developments in a number of diverse states, as well as emerging approaches to stacking credentials and associated implementation challenges. I find this excerpt defines the issue at hand quite well...
"...While the dynamism in educational options and credentials creates many new options, it also results in too many dead ends for people as they try—and often fail—to navigate through this complex system. People have trouble moving from noncredit occupational training, which makes up more than half of postsecondary enrollments,ix to credit-bearing programs and from short-term certificate programs that may help them gain a foothold in the labor market to longer-term degree programs that generally have a higher economic payoff. When experienced workers return to the education system to learn new skills, either to advance in their current field or switch to another field, they have trouble earning credit within the educational system for knowledge and skills they have gained at work through formal training and/or informally through work experience. Students, who have to stop out of postsecondary education because of life circumstances, are often forced to start over when they return to continue their studies."
The paper lays some implementation strategies as well as major policy issues, if you are interested in creating stackable credential pathways in your program. Have you heard about "lattice credentials"? Read this paper to find out more about them.
Priyanka Sharma
SME, Postsecondary Completion