As Colin Mathews, President of the technology company Merit, remarked in an excellent little article in Inside Higher Ed a few weeks ago, credentials are a language. One with limited vocabulary, sure, but a language nonetheless. Specifically, it is a form of communication from educational institutions to (primarily) the labour market to convey information about their possessors. There has been a lot of talk in the last couple of years, however, to the effect that the current vocabulary of credentials is inadequate and that change is needed to promote better labour market outcomes for both firms and graduates. What to make of this?
The complaints about credentials basically come in two categories. The first has to do with what I call the “chunking” of credentials. At the moment, we essentially have two sets of building blocks: “Credits” (or “courses”) and degrees. One is very short, the other often quite long. Why not something in-between, which indicates mastery over a body of material which might be of interest to employers but is less than a full degree? These shorter, more focused credentials like Coursera’s “specializations”, or Udacity’s “nanodegrees” are meant to supply labour market skills more quickly than traditional degrees.
Then there is the issue of how to interpret the information conferred by a credential. A bachelor’s degree mainly tells an employer that the bearer has to stick-to-it-iveness to complete a four-year project (commitment means a lot to employers). If the employer has hired graduates from a particular university or program before, then they might have a sense of an individual’s technical capabilities, too. But beyond that, it’s blank. A transcript might tell an employer what courses a student has taken, but unless the employer is going to take an inordinate amount of time to scrutinize the curriculum, that doesn’t really help them understand what they’ve been exposed to. Marks help in the sense that an employer can get a sense of what a student has achieved at school, but increasingly, employers are finding that this is irrelevant. What matters in many fields are the “soft skills” or “fuzzy skills”: on these nearly all credentials are silent.
Enter the idea of “badges”, digital or otherwise. A solution half-inspired by competency-based education principles and half by Girl Guides/Boy Scouts. The idea here is to give learners certificates based on particular skills they have demonstrated just as the Guides and Scouts do. The problems with this are manifold. First of all, unless a particular skill can be demonstrated through standardized testing, certifying skills is actually a fairly time-consuming and therefore costly activity. This is why many of the emerging badging systems actually measure achievements and activities rather than skills (one badging system recently profiled in Inside Higher Education, for instance, hands out badges for attending certain types of meetings. Your typical employer could not care less).
But even if you buy the Guide/Scout analogy, badges quickly run into the same problem as transcripts. Say you have a knot-tying badge. Unless an employer is intimately familiar with the Guide/Scout curriculum, s/he will have no actual idea what the knot badge actually signifies in terms of practical skills. Can they do Zeppelin Bends? Constrictor Knots? Do they understand ambient isotopy? Or can they just do a slip knot? And badges for soft skills are still pretty sketchy, so that part of the equation is still a blank.
All these moves towards what might be termed “microcredentials” are well-meaning. Degrees are a pretty blunt and opaque way to express achievement and ability; it would be better if we could find ways of making these more transparent. But the problem here is that all these solutions are being tested largely without talking to employers. Badges, or whatever new microcredential solution we are talking about here, are all new languages. Employers understand the language of degrees. They do not understand the language of badges and see little benefit in learning new languages which seem to bring little additional benefit. For most, the old language of degrees is good enough – for now. And so the spread of badges and various types of skill-based certification is so far pretty limited.
But it’s early days yet. My guess is we’re in the first stages of what will likely be a 20- to 30-year shift in credentialing. As Sean Gallagher notes in his excellent new book The Future of University Credentials, the general trend is going to be towards demanding that individuals be able to demonstrate mastery of particular skills and competencies. Partly, that can be done through changes to assessment and reporting within existing degree systems; but it may also come through the regularization of certain new credentials, some of which may be issued by existing institutions and others from new providers. I don’t think the final form of these credentials are going to look anything like the current fashion of badges; they are frankly too clumsy to be up to much. But the push in this direction is too strong to ignore. Expect a lot of very interesting experimentation in this field over the next few years.
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What about co-curricular records? I feel like you missed a significant piece of non-credentialling that universities do these days.
I’ve often thought that if employers knew how to interpret transcripts, they could learn a lot about their candidates for jobs.
We know that first semester results can be a dramatic dip for many new admits from their high school outcome. Many bounce back in semester 2. If they don’t, as a reader of transcripts, that tells me something about the learner (where that ‘something’ is contextualized to the rest of the transcript, the eventual outcome and other variables). Likewise, looking at ‘W’s and changes in programs as well as academic ranking (that is, did the applicant stay in good standing) and number of courses done per semester (and any done in ‘intercession’ or spring/summer) all tell a lot about the person as a learner. I think that may reveal a lot about the person as a worker.
I wish more employers looked at the details.
I thought that the metadata that’s baked into the badges provided links to evidence of the student’s learning, which to me gives them a leg up on existing transcripts. As I have read it, badges can have links to an eportfolio for example or a more elaborate description of the learning activities that were required to obtain it. If this is true, then they needn’t be limited to skill-based certification. But just because we can do things doesn’t mean we will….
Years back I taught in the Economic History program at Portsmouth University. Typical British program: 3 years, lots of mandatory courses, a few electives, external markers keep grade inflation and gatekeeping at a minimum, and the student receives at the end one (1) grade at the end — a 2.2, a 2.1, or a 1st, mostly. The core elements were much the same in every economic history program across the country. An employer who cared to know about the program content could readily find out without spending days trying to decode the meaning of opaque things like “Directed Studies in New Ideas.” And the 3 year degree indicated stick-to-itiveness. And the final grade was pretty definitive. (I could say more about that process, but I’ll resist the urge.)
The point is, an Economic History degree of this kind did actually mean something. Teaching back home in Canada, I saw students going through Economics and History programs like diners at a smorgasbord — no two have the same things on their plate. If there are commonalities — with the exception of something like a graduating paper — they occur in first or second year, mass-lecture classes like Macro-Economics 200 or Canadian History 100. The longer they’re in uni, the less alike the Econ grads become.
This won’t change. The freedom to handpick one’s program is what many folks think puts the “liberal” in “liberal arts.” The British degrees have themselves changed over the intervening years and have become less clearly defined in many cases. There is, somewhere, a middle ground on this issue and, I agree, we’re heading slowly towards it.
Program level learning outcomes are relatively easy for an employer to interpret. They occupation specific and includes technical skills/competencies, personal competencies and professional competencies as well as evidence of civic education (e.g sustainability, diversity, indigenous awareness). They are written from the perspective of what every graduate is able to demonstrate upon graduation. Every program should have program level learning outcomes.