Credentialing in Higher Education: Current

Credentialing in Higher Education: Current Challenges and Innovative Trends

Although colleges and universities are the beneficiaries of a growing credential society, they communicate only a fraction of the educational experience that happens on their campuses. Higher education must find ways to credential better—with more information and in more accessible ways—using the transformative technology we now have available.Matthew Pittinsky is CEO of Parchment and Assistant Research Professor, School of Social and Family Dynamics, at Arizona State University.

If we think about what colleges and universities do, there are very few things that technology has not fundamentally either transformed or begun to transform. Yet for all of the ways in which technology is changing teaching and learning, research, and services, there is one area that has not been affected much at all: the transcript.

One could argue that the transcript—that is, credentialing—is the only nonnegotiable service of a higher education institution. At the end of the day, we credential. Indeed, America today is a credential society. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that one in two U.S. adults has some form of postsecondary credential; one in four has some form of certification or license independent of his/her postsecondary credential. But higher education does not hold a monopoly on credentialing. It is happening in the labor market as well, with certifications and licenses that make a significant difference for workers. For example, the BMO Education and Training Report 2012 highlights that someone with an associate's degree plus a certification or license experiences a 15 percent earnings premium when compared with someone holding only an associate's degree. And that premium changes depending on the certification and license and depending on the degree (e.g., a two-year degree or a four-year degree).

For many students, the credential is the coin of the realm. After completing a two-year or four-year program or a continuing/executive education program—whether brick and mortar, online, or hybrid—students leave with a credential. It's their currency for accessing opportunities as a function of the educational investment that they've made.

Students then take their credentials—transcripts, diplomas, certificates, assessments—and move into a world where they continue to get more certifications and licenses. Their academic credentials may be stacked into those certifications and licenses, often as a prerequisite. Indeed, certifications are part of many higher education programs. If I were to go through a teacher education program, for example, my certification or license isn't going to happen later. The program is specifically designed so that I will graduate not just with a diploma but with that certification as well.

Colleges and universities are the beneficiaries of this growing credential society because they are the gatekeepers of many of those credentials. But that is a curse as well as a blessing. The curse is the expectation that higher education must find ways to credential better—with more information and in more accessible ways—using the transformative technology we now have available.

What's driving this demand for more credentialing from higher education? Academics will likely disagree. An economist might argue that credentials are measures. Since we can't put an instrument into people's brains to figure out what they know and how well they know it, we trust higher education and other institutions to measure learning. Can a graduating student write well? Speak well? Think analytically? Is the student comfortable with and skilled in using numbers? As jobs have become more technically complex, we need more information about and higher standards around how we measure productive human capital or the use value of the credentials. The transcript communicates this information.

A sociologist, however, might argue that something else is going on. The workforce hasn't become that much more complex. Does the coursework completed for a bachelor's degree correspond with the requirements of many of the jobs in the labor market? Does someone really need a bachelor's degree to be a firefighter, for example? What is probably happening, according to this view, is credential inflation. When very few people had a high school degree, that degree was the currency used to "purchase" a job. Now that everyone has a high school degree, the bachelor's degree is the ticket. As more and more people get bachelor's degrees, a graduate degree will become the employment differentiator.

Then, somewhere in the middle of these two arguments is the notion that credentials are signals. With the competition over scarce opportunities in the labor market, credentials become a way of filtering people. True, credentials may not fully communicate needed information. The fact that I have a bachelor's degree in sociology says very little about what I know and how well I know it. Nevertheless, one can make certain assumptions about my knowledge and skills from the fact that I went through that degree program and graduated from the institution I attended.

Whether measure, currency, or signal, credentials are at the center of a new debate in higher education, with rising expectations from both students and employers for more comprehensive credentialing that documents knowledge and skills throughout a lifetime of learning. I would argue that unfortunately, most colleges and universities have not begun to come close to meeting those expectations. The truth is, we communicate only a fraction of the educational experience that happens at our institutions: the leadership experiences and competency achievements that are a result of those programs. For employers, these are some of the most valuable skills and represent the type of information that they are looking for regarding potential first time hires.

The way higher education institutions communicate the information of student achievement is still very much in paper-based ledger form, for example. We're still printing and mailing. To receive a transcript from many institutions today, a student must fax in the request, mail a check, and wait in a line to receive an envelope inside an envelope inside an envelope.

Today, students live much of their lives online. That is where they are establishing professional identities and getting jobs. When they graduate, they are given beautiful paper diplomas, framed to put on a wall for perhaps ten people to see. What are also needed are digital diplomas to be placed into online profiles for everyone to see.

In addition to the lack of digital formats, higher education credentials are very fragmented, with dual enrollments, study-abroad programs, badges, and various certifications. Often these certifications or additional programs are simply listed at the bottom of the transcript instead of being treated as a full-market-value credential.

Institutions also need to find ways to transfer this information not just to and for students and employers but also among themselves. With the current trends in terms of institutional pathways, this need for collaboration is becoming more pronounced.

In my home state of Arizona, for example, Arizona State University (ASU) is working with a number of community colleges so that two-year students, while they're still at their home base of the two-year institution, can have their transcript data sent to ASU and put through a degree-audit program, MAPP, to make sure that the courses they're taking are going to maximize their transfer and completion on time to that four year degree.

This requires an institution-to-institution exchange of data around courses, grades, and similar information. To print and mail that information and then open, scan, and index it would be absolutely unscalable. However, even though ASU has had a long relationship with Maricopa Community College, for example, and many colleges and universities probably have a similar point-to-point relationship, for the most part that doesn't generalize across multiple institutions.

In Colorado, a statewide reverse transfer program, Degree Within Reach, is the direct opposite: students have the ability to leave the two-year program without getting an associate's degree. In their four-year program, on the way to a bachelor's degree, if they earn enough credits to get that two-year degree, they will earn an "associate's in passing," which means that even if they don't ultimately complete the four-year program, they will still have that foundation of a two-year credential. This requires institution-to-institution collaboration and exchange of student records and student performance data.

Thus the rising expectations of the credential society, the fact that our paper-based approach is not meeting those expectations, and policy drivers about how colleges and universities are expected to move student record data within and among institutions are all creating significant challenges. The good news is that several innovative trends—including co-curricular experiential transcripts, microcredentialing, and the electronic transcript—have the potential to satisfy these expectations.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I feel that the digital credential is key to addressing many of these challenges. It can break down the barriers of communicating fifteen to twenty pages of information that doesn't scale well. If the information is electronic, and if it's available as machine-readable data, we can begin to communicate more information, and we can count on the information systems at the other end to be able to take out exactly what they're looking for.

Yet these trends do pose a risk. One thing that we may not fully appreciate until it's gone is how well established the academic transcript is as a standard. We know it is two or three columns. We know it shows courses and grades. We know that it contains letter grade assessments and/or numeric grade assessments. And we know what to do with that information. As colleges and universities begin to issue more experiential and/or co-curricular transcripts, if each institution does so in its own way, we could create a Tower-of-Babel problem that will make the exchange of credentials even more challenging.

Perhaps the best example of this is Western Governors University, an innovator that completely rethought its program, resulting in a completely different transcript. The number-one complaint that the university received was from other institutional registrars saying: "I don't know how to articulate this transcript. I don't know how to give students credits, because I can't find the basic information that I need to make sense of the transcript." As a result, Western Governors University now provides a traditional-format academic transcript as well as a competency-based transcript that reframes the traditional information.

Likewise, as institutions start to use transcripts with machine-readable data rather than paper with the look-and-feel that we take for granted, we will need technical standards for that electronic credentialing.