Lindsey Reichlin Cruse is one of the most thoughtful analysts of noncredit and nondegree education, with a perspective enriched by her experience in studying student parents. This fertile mix of experience has given Reichlin Cruse unique insights into the ways in which students in nondegree programs encounter issues of credential quality.
As part of The Real Deal series, I spoke with Reichlin Cruse to get her perspective on the role that quality nondegree credentials can play in promoting economic mobility and equity in education.
Reichlin Cruse is a leading researcher and advocate on noncredit education. She serves as director of research at the National Skills Coalition, a national organization fighting for inclusive, high-quality skills training, and formerly led the Student Parent Success Initiative at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. She is co-author of “The Non-Degree Credential Quality Imperative” and “Charting a Course to Quality: A Navigator’s Handbook to a Robust Non-Degree Credential Ecosystem,” among many other studies and white papers.
During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the connection between quality nondegree credentials and the pursuit of educational equity; the complexities of providing actionable information on quality to learners and advisors; state policymakers’ creative strategies for developing quality standards; how state and federal funding can support those strategies; and more.
Tom Hilliard: What makes nondegree credentials important for learners and for our economy generally?
Lindsey Reichlin Cruse: The traditional higher education system and traditional degree pathways just don’t work for everybody who wants to advance their education. Nondegree credentials can provide relatively fast, affordable opportunities to gain skills and competencies that are often linked directly to a job or a career path. Ideally, they can get someone into a job relatively quickly, while also providing opportunities for building on that credential through additional education. Shorter-term credentials can provide opportunities and gateways to further educational attainment that can often lead to a degree, but they also don’t have to.
People have different intentions and goals when they go into postsecondary education. And for a working adult who’s earning minimum wage and has to support their kids – and childcare is expensive, housing is expensive, and inflation is increasing – getting a credential that can get you into a job pretty quickly where you’re making a little more money might be enough.
Hilliard: How do nondegree credentials help to build an inclusive economy?
Reichlin Cruse: That’s certainly a north star at National Skills Coalition: ensuring that all people, regardless of background, have an opportunity to earn a family-sustaining wage and enter quality jobs that offer benefits and pathways for career advancement. Nondegree credentials give people options that work for their lives, so that they can take advantage of postsecondary education as a way to advance their careers and become economically mobile.
In my perfect world, you can make choices between quality, short-term nondegree credentials and quality degree pathways, and all of those choices are affordable and adaptable to your life. And they’re not all going to be right for you, but you have choices in a different way than you do now. Now, to get a bachelor’s degree, for example, you have to go for four or five years and invest a lot of money – and potentially take on a bunch of student debt – right? That is just a closed door for a lot of people. But wouldn’t it be nice if there were multiple entry points that could lead to educational attainment and economic mobility, regardless of your starting point and what your preferred path is?
Hilliard: How do the ways in which we collect data influence student equity?
Reichlin Cruse: We have to have good information to make good choices at the end of the day, whether that’s policymakers making choices about how they invest public dollars into different postsecondary pathways, financial aid, and holistic supports, or people who want to advance their careers through education who want to know what’s going to work for them or not. Data is required to inform those choices. At the end of the day, if we’re hoping to give people a broader array of quality choices for advancing their education and careers, how do we know what’s quality? How do people know that their investment of time and resources will pay off? You have to have data to be able to answer those questions.
From an equity perspective, understanding how people like you fare when they go through these different pathways and earn different credentials is a big part of how people are going to make decisions. Not only that, we know that the labor market operates differently for different types of people in different communities. Women, women of color, and people of color in general earn less, right? Women of color need to attain higher levels of education, typically, to earn what men make with lower levels of education. These trends of occupational segregation and gender and racial pay gaps are important contexts to keep in mind. We need data so that we can work to reverse them and make sure we’re not deepening those inequities.
This point about occupational segregation connects a little bit to why data is important for equity. In the context of nondegree credential attainment, we’re reproducing those same labor market trends that you see across credential types. Women are going into the medical field or early childhood. Men are earning commercial drivers’ licenses (CDLs) or going into construction and manufacturing. We know that there are distinct pay differentials between those career types, which of course, contributes to those pay gaps.
Hilliard: So how can we use this information on pay differentials in meaningful ways?
Reichlin Cruse: We have to make sure that people have their eyes open when they’re making these choices; that what they can expect to earn at the end of the day is at least a data point they’re keeping in mind when they’re making choices about their education. It’s not the only thing that’s going to change occupational segregation, but if we want to create more equity across our labor market and across socioeconomic strata, we have to make sure that we understand how intersectional groups fare with different types of credentials and how we can provide them with the information they need to make informed choices at the start of their journey. That just feels like something we need to be talking more about.
And it comes up with skills-based hiring. Skills-based hiring is a theory still. We don’t know if it works for improving equity, but we hope it does. But if you’re a woman coming from a female-dominated occupation, which is valued less than male-dominated occupations, and you had to earn more education in the first place to be making what you’re making, to be supporting your family, how will skills-based hiring work for you? Having the data to be able to tell some of those stories is going to be really important. In many ways, we’re still learning about whether or not these innovative new strategies around hiring and quality work the way we want them to, and data is critical to being able to answer those questions.
Hilliard: What are state policy makers discussing about the quality of nondegree credentials? What states are really leading in this area?
Reichlin Cruse: The places where we’ve seen success are states that have been really intentional about engaging a diverse range of stakeholders in conversations about what quality means to them and how quality standards and metrics need to be written to advance those shared goals and priorities.
We’ve seen that in Minnesota through their P-20 Education Partnership. They developed a quality assurance framework through this work group, which included folks from community colleges, four-year institutions, employer groups, and state government, including the Office of Higher Education and the Department of Employment and Economic Development. They worked for over a year to put this framework together and are now working to build out the data foundation that can inform how they measure and track progress. It’s for both degrees and nondegree credentials, credit and noncredit, and it looks at the quality of programs, providers, and credentials, understanding that there are similar but slightly different criteria that may hit on all three of those areas and that all are relevant to how we think about quality postsecondary opportunities. It was really comprehensive, and having that diverse stakeholder group helps with buy-in over time, as they start to think about different use cases that they can apply it to.
New Jersey is another strong example that did something similar. Leaders in the state’s Department of Labor have implemented a quality framework for their Eligible Training Provider List (ETPL). They had convened a working group of ETPL providers to inform the development of that framework over time, which helped build understanding of why it’s important and buy-in for the process. So when they implemented it, they were bringing everybody along with them. Ultimately what they’re doing is using ETPL reported data to understand, “from the composition of your particular program, what might we expect your success rates to look like?” Taking into account the mix of people a program is serving, they use past data to create expected success rates and then set that as a benchmark to measure whether or not that particular program is performing the way the state hopes.
Hilliard: So states are getting actionable information on what quality looks like. How do they communicate it to the learners?
Reichlin Cruse: States are building consumer information tools, data dashboards, and things of that nature to get information on nondegree credentials into the hands of consumers. Whether or not the average person can go on to a state data dashboard and create meaning for themselves is a question. It’s important for labor market information and information on different career options and stackability, and things like that, to be available. But it may be hard for people to make that mean something for their lives, particularly without person-to-person interaction and guidance. Coaching and advising, career navigation, meeting someone where they are so that they can interpret that information in a way that means something to their lives, that’s critical.
I think about my niece and nephew, who just went to college in Texas. I sent their parents the MyTexas Future website that the state is building out to help people make choices about their career and education. And it’s a great resource. But I also didn’t know if sharing it with them was going to help my niece and nephew. They’re 18, they’re out skateboarding and having fun, and at the start of college, I don’t know that they’re looking at this website to help them make choices about what degree they’re going to get.
Hilliard: One theory is that you should drive this information to intermediaries, because they do this for a living and will be able to commit more time to extracting the meaning which they can communicate to the students. But students in nondegree programs at a community college don’t necessarily have access to advisors.
Reichlin Cruse: We need to change how we think about supporting students on college campuses. That dividing line between degree, nondegree, credit, noncredit needs to go away because we’re losing opportunities to retain and recruit students for additional education. We want people to be able to make these choices and to have the information and support they need to be able to move on, move through credit to noncredit, or make whatever choice they want.
This assumption that college advising is only for degree seeking students is cutting our nose off to spite our face. It’s working at cross purposes with the priorities we say we hold as a higher education system. That drives me nuts, and it’s something that we’re talking a lot about at National Skills Coalition right now: The uneven, patchy access that folks get to coaching, advising, navigation services, and holistic supports when they make choices to go into shorter term programs. It feels like an equity issue and also something that I would define as part of how we need to be thinking about quality.
Hilliard: What kind of resources do states need to build up their data infrastructure, and how do they go about marshaling those resources?
Reichlin Cruse: That’s a really important question, and it differs depending on the state. Is there a political will to invest in getting the data your state needs to answer some of these questions and put these quality frameworks in place?
I remember talking to our colleagues in New Jersey about the work they were doing with the ETPL. They said, “we’ve got this sophisticated methodology now, but we need more data analysts who have the skills to do regression analysis. We don’t necessarily have the staff with those skills that can put this into practice in a regular way.” I don’t know if that’s still the case, but I thought it was a great point. It’s a beautiful thing they’ve built, but to put it into practice you need people who can do some statistical analysis that not everybody has the skills for. And then, of course, there’s all the work that goes into building state longitudinal data systems and all the different ways you marshal data and put it together to answer questions, that takes time. It takes a lot of will across different agencies, offices, and systems. And of course it takes funding.
Some ways we’ve seen states fund these efforts are through federal grants. Arkansas is using Workforce Data Quality Initiative grants to integrate nondegree credential data into their longitudinal data system. I believe Minnesota has a grant also connected to its longitudinal data system that they’re using to explore a data foundation to apply to their quality assurance framework. So some of those federal funding streams are really important for states to have dollars needed to invest in the systems and capacity building that makes this a reality. But at the end of the day, you have to have a state legislature or a governor who cares about data and understands its importance and is willing to invest state dollars and attention and resources into this issue, which is arguably pretty wonky and perhaps not as sexy as some of the many other pressing issues vying for space on the state budget.
Tom Hilliard is research engagement manager at the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations, which focuses on better understanding how education intersects with the labor market.