Arkansas, with the help of forward-thinking collaborators, is knee deep in fine-tuning and promoting nondegree credential quality. Notably this work is happening across many realms. To capture the action, we connected with academic and workforce professionals in Arkansas involved in the Education Design Lab’s Community College Growth Engine Fellows Program, collaborators from the Burning Glass Institute, and data maestros from the Arkansas Department of Shared Administrative Services (SAS).
But before we can dive into the insights from these nondegree credential quality influencers, we need to start with some background on workforce policy and practice in the state of Arkansas.
Developments in state workforce policy and practice set the stage. Two of the key developments in the Arkansas workforce space are the Arkansas Workforce Challenge Scholarship, established in 2017, and the Arkansas LAUNCH platform, which debuted this year.
The scholarship supports credit-bearing and noncredit workforce training in high-demand fields like healthcare, information technology, and manufacturing. The scholarship initially topped out at $800 but will cover up to $3K starting in fall 2026.
Arkansas LAUNCH, a Walmart-supported collaboration between the state and Research Improving People’s Lives (RIPL), is a skills-based career matching platform. The platform has two modes, one for employers and one for jobseekers; leveraging state administrative data to facilitate connections to job candidates with well-matched skills and connecting job seekers to career, educational, and social service resources, respectively.
Amid those policy developments, the state has been refining its nondegree education policies and programs, better leveraging labor market data, and improving its outcomes reporting. We talked with quality influencers involved in all three streams of work.
Fine-Tuning Nondegree Education Policies and Programs
Noncredit advocates from the state’s higher education division and the community college system’s Center for Workforce are participating in the first two cohorts of Education Design Lab’s fellows program, learning how to use the organization’s framework and program development processes. The higher education division has been using this experience to refine policy and practices around program approval, while the state’s community colleges have been working to develop “micropathways,” or short-term training programs for non-traditional students.
“We learned as we went through there that it’s not necessarily appropriate for the state to, top down, develop these credentials and pathways. That’s the work of the institutions,” says Mason Campbell, assistant commissioner of academic affairs and an EDL fellow. “But we learned a lot…the benefit there was that we learned about their process, all of their resources and tools, and we leveraged it to inform our program approval process.”
Identifying “Jobs that Mobilize”
Northwest Arkansas Community College, located in the fast-growing Bentonville area, which is home to Walmart headquarters, worked with BGI’s “Job that Mobilize” framework to develop a prioritized list of roles and programs, a promising strategy for promoting NDC quality. The “Jobs that Mobilize” framework has four pillars—employers, strategy, equity, and workers—and is intended to guide various stakeholders on using data to meet common workforce, business, and economic development goals.
Arkansas SAS has also been leveraging a partnership with the Burning Glass Institute to fill data gaps in regions where their state labor market information is less comprehensive. “They have data that we don’t have, but they also have a methodology,” says Robert McGough, chief data officer for Arkansas SAS. “And I love standards. I love anything where we can talk apples to apples.”
Supercharging Workforce Outcomes Reporting
Arkansas also has been working to streamline workforce data reporting, especially following a change to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in 2018 that required states to provide data on all participants in programs on their eligible training provider lists, not just those receiving WIOA funds. This increased the reporting burden, causing trepidation at some institutions across the state.
Leaders at Arkansas SAS realized they could use the state’s developing longitudinal data system, or SLDS, to help meet these new reporting requirements, saving institutions time and money while also highlighting the utility of the SLDS. This work was supported by federal grants from the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Statistics and the Department of Labor. New relationships between institutions and state agencies and systemic changes to data culture and policy across the state helped SAS to successfully revamp workforce reporting systems.
SAS also is developing a nontraditional student information system. Jake Walker, the state’s chief research officer, emphasized the need for such a system. “We realized that, while we have a very robust K-12 data system and a pretty robust higher ED data system for for-credit programs, the noncredit data is kind of here and there,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of consistency in what’s being reported.”
The nontraditional student information system will serve as a centralized location for student and program information for noncredit offerings across the state and will allow SAS to support outcomes reporting.
All of these efforts in program development, reporting, and data systems mark Arkansas as one to watch in the nondegree credential quality space. With the work of education, workforce, and data experts across the state government, collaboration with organizations like BGI and EDL, and philanthropic support from Walmart, Arkansas is developing a playbook for promoting quality in nondegree education.
Eliza Peterson is a research analyst at the Education and Employment Research Center (EERC) at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, which focuses on better understanding how education intersects with the labor market.