CLASP Senior Fellow Evelyn Ganzglass recently authored a paper on emerging innovations in postsecondary education that we thought you would find interesting. 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.