As more students, employers, and states look to nondegree credentials to prepare people for in-demand jobs, a common concern among educators and policymakers is a lack of information about outcomes.
The dearth of information is indeed profound at the national level, according to new research out of Rutgers University, but states are an increasing bright spot.
“The absence of consistent large-scale data means that policy decisions at the federal level are being made well in advance of the evidence base to support them or track their consequences,” says Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers and lead author on the research. “This is not necessarily the case at the state level.”
She points to states like Virginia, Iowa, and New Jersey, where education and workforce agencies are making a concerted effort to better understand the outcomes of non-credit and nondegree education.
These insights come from two recent analyses by the center: The first maps the landscape of stakeholders, from accreditors to unions, that are engaged in and responsible for determining nondegree quality. The second is a comprehensive review of the existing research on the outcomes of non-credit education and nondegree credentials.
The Definitions: Non-credit education encompasses a wide range of courses, including personal interest, short-term career training, adult basic education, and remedial courses for students who ultimately hope to earn a degree.
Nondegree credentials include industry certifications, apprenticeship awards, badges, licenses, and certificates. Some, like certificates, are awarded directly by colleges and come with college credit, while others do not.
A few findings jump out. Only 23% of students enrolled in non-credit courses have even earned a high school diploma, showing just how far these students need to go in their education. But among the subset of those students who are seeking non-credit credentials, about 71% have at least a high school education. And the vast majority of students in for-credit programs, including certificates, have a diploma.
- Perhaps as a result, completion rates in for-credit courses in fields like allied health and nursing were much higher than they were in comparable non-credit courses.
Broken Connections: Policymakers have been pushing for better connections between non-credit and for-credit education. But the research shows that despite that effort, the path from one to another remains largely broken.
In one study the Rutgers researchers reviewed, only 1 in 20 students who started in non-credit courses at a community college moved into for-credit education within two years.
Mixed Outcomes: When it comes to labor market outcomes, nondegree credentials generally deliver some economic boost above and beyond that of a high school diploma. But those gains vary widely by field, gender, and geography.
Certificates, certifications and other nondegree credentials in fields like early childhood education and allied health—which are dominated by women—offer particularly poor returns. This presents a particular challenge when income is used as the measure of quality, as these programs may be educationally sound but still deliver little economic boost.
That also underscores a larger societal challenge, Van Noy says. These workers are highly valuable, but remain poorly compensated.
Want to know more? Work Shift dug into the findings in a Q&A with Van Noy, which follows below.
Q: This is the first comprehensive look at the existing literature on nondegree education. Did any of the findings from across the studies jump out at you as surprising or particularly striking?
A: Three points on this. First, the lack of data differs sharply from the degree-seeking landscape, which often seems awash in data. Because of the lack of consistent data means, policy decisions are often being made with a limited evidence base to support them or track their consequences. This is not always the case as some states such as Virginia, Iowa, Louisiana and others are making an effort to better understand the outcomes associated with noncredit education and nondegree credentials.
Second, improving articulation between noncredit and credit programs has long been a goal at all levels, from federal policy to state policy to institutional reform efforts. But the available research suggests that very little articulation actually takes place. This could be because students who take noncredit courses are not informed, interested or well-positioned to enroll in credit-bearing coursework, or because institutions are not promoting and/or supporting articulation, or some combination of these and other factors. We need to know more about the obstacles to articulation to improve the handoff between systems.
Third, the difference in earnings income by gender, in particular, speaks to larger societal problems that are less apparent at the degree level. Female-dominated occupations, such as childcare workers and home health aides, are less valued in the market than male-dominated occupations at the same educational level.
Q: The research finds big differences in earnings gains across fields, gender, and geographic regions. As policymakers show increasing interest in nondegree hiring and training, what kinds of protections and policies do they need to be putting in place to limit inequities?
A: Interrogating the root causes of these variations is fundamentally key in making informed decisions about how to make informed protections and policies to prevent perpetuating inequalities in nondegree credentials. Variations in labor market returns by fields, gender, and geography point to broader structural inequities that are at play. Clearly, articulating those structural inequities is the first step.
In terms of policy, one common response is gainful employment-type protections, which withhold subsidies from programs that leave students in debt and without access to remunerative employment that enables them to pay off their student loans. Research into the nondegree field has found that for-profit providers who receive federal subsidies increase tuition to account for those subsidies, leaving students with less or no financial benefit. The federal short-term Pell bill has several protections along these lines.
However, protections that screen out providers of non-credit education below certain income levels—for example, average income of a high school graduate—risk unintended consequences, such as defunding societally important but undervalued occupations. As noted above, programs training people for female-dominated occupations such as early childhood education and direct care health professions are likely to fail income-threshold tests, but that does not mean that these programs are not valuable and that our society is better off without a skilled workforce in these fields.
Policymakers may consider subsidies within the context of the student’s total cost of enrollment so that students do not shoulder the cost and that industry absorbs the cost when possible, or the public sector does.
Policymakers and educators may also consider ways to place education and training in these fields as part of broader efforts to promote economic development and job quality in partnership with industry, labor, and community development organizations.
Finally, policymakers need to establish—or create a process for establishing—clear, research-informed definitions so that future researchers can aggregate relevant data across institutions and states. It is possible that K-16 databases now under development in most states could include non-credit and nondegree courses within the next decade.
Q: Are there states, regions, or college systems that you think are doing a particularly good job of tracking quality and outcomes of nondegree credentials?
A: Many states around the country are developing and improving their systems to collect data on noncredit education. We are working with many of them, including Virginia, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Tennessee, through our state non-credit data project and would find it valuable to examine in more depth their impact. Our colleagues through the Noncredit Research Collaborative have been conducting more research in this area.
An area of particular interest that connects with EERC’s prior work is to examine the linkages between non-credit programs and nondegree credentials and the occupations they lead to. It would help to be able to be more precise in the actual goals of the programs and credentials, and their eventual outcomes.