Credit for What?
What does traditional college credit measure? If you answered, “The duration of physical contact between a student’s butt and a college’s chair,” you earn partial… well, credit. Sure, for each course there will be an exam — maybe even a term paper or two. But without that butt-in-seat time, you ain’t graduating, kid.
It doesn’t have to be like this. For example, if you’ve been working for a number of years, you should get credit for experience you gained outside the classroom. If you’ve studied outside the college setting, you should get credit for that, too, assuming the course was well taught and properly assessed. There are sound ways of recognizing these achievements. Organizations like the American Council on Education (ACE) have perfected the art of prior learning assessments, which convert workplace learning into college credit, while companies like StraighterLine offer aspiring college students what amounts to the general education component of a college degree for a fraction of the cost.
Theoretically, these developments could give working adults and others a leg up toward a college degree. The trouble is, traditional colleges have typically been reluctant to recognize non-traditional credits. StraighterLine, for example, only guarantees credit transfer to around 100 of over 4,000 U.S. colleges. Granted, a lot of the apprehension stems from questions about the quality of education received by these non-traditional methods. That is legitimate. But it is not an insurmountable obstacle; indeed, it is why assessment organizations like ACE exist.
My own concern is that, by insisting on the old model of credit, colleges may be shooting themselves in the foot. Out in the real world, employers don’t care how much time you spent sitting in a classroom; they just want to know whether you can do the job. More and more are deciding that college degrees are no longer the best barometer of a person’s skills. By sticking to their traditional ways of doing things, colleges may simply be pushing more people toward other types of credentials.
There is one huge exception to this insistence on butt-in-chair credits — and by huge, I really do mean massive. With around 130,000 students, the non-profit Western Governors University in Utah is the largest college in the country, and its approach to credit is completely different. For the past 20-plus years, WGU has pioneered a competency-based approach, according to which it doesn’t matter how many hours you sat in that seat — if you show you have the requisite skill, you get the credit. (Of course, this cuts both ways: if you can’t show that you have the skills, you don’t get to advance, no matter how long you parked your behind.) Students and employers (and Bill Gates) seem generally happy with the results.
Rather than viewing non-traditional credit as a threat, colleges should take it as an opportunity to rethink how college credit works from the ground up. I’m not saying that every institution needs to ape what WGU has done. But they owe it to themselves and their students to take another look at ways they might rejig the credit system to put skills gained ahead of time served.
