In the years since the COVID pandemic, public debate about the value of higher education has intensified. With middle-class jobs no longer guaranteed for college graduates, students, educators, parents, and policymakers are increasingly worried about the return on investment of a college degree. However, college degrees continue to pay off for graduates. In just the last few years, several highly visible reports have reaffirmed that postsecondary education still provides social mobility and employable skills.
Despite this evidence, a subset of policymakers and researchers continues to suggest that employers (and students) should give college degrees less weight. One such approach—the skills-based hiring movement—advances a laudable goal: hiring employees based on skills rather than credentials. In practice, researchers often assess employers’ commitment to skills-based hiring by examining whether they remove degree requirements from job ads and whether they fill positions with a higher proportion of individuals without college degrees.
Why, then, is there such a large disconnect between empirical evidence showing that college degrees provide employable skills and a public discourse seeking to minimize the value of a college degree precisely because commentators believe it does not provide such skills? One problem, and potential solution, lies in translation. Too many parents, employers, and policymakers fail to recognize the large bundle of skills that many college graduates leave school with. To some extent, higher education can do more to signal those skills to employers and a concerned public. Three strategies may be particularly effective: incorporating microcredentials into college degrees, mapping skills across the curriculum, and placing greater emphasis on work-based learning.
Embedding Microcredentials into Degree Pathways
One way in which institutions can equip their graduates with better signals of skill is to provide opportunities to earn different types of microcredentials, such as certificates and badges, embedded in their degree programs. Institutions can develop their own certificates, which may be described as badges, and other forms of recognition that can be listed on transcripts or diplomas to recognize students who complete courses that represent skills demanded by employers. To some extent, four-year institutions have always done something like this by allowing students to earn “minors” recorded on diplomas in secondary areas of study, though historically minors have been closely aligned to existing fields of study.
Institutions that have launched their own skill-based microcredentials embedded in bachelor’s degree programs range from private liberal arts colleges such as Allegheny College to large for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Phoenix’s embedded badging program is particularly notable for its breadth, consisting of 381 unique skill-based microcredentials as of 2024, and for recognizing skills demonstrated both through the completion of sequences of courses and through performance on individual assignments and exams.
Mapping Skills
Institutions can go even further than the University of Phoenix does in telegraphing skills to employers. Interest is growing in producing personalized skill maps that will exist alongside, or potentially be embedded in, academic transcripts. Commercial platforms for mapping skills associated with degrees are rapidly coming to market. For instance, Ellucian Journey produces ratings of student proficiency in specific skills based on the number of courses that students take with relevant content, though in published documentation it appears to struggle to differentiate between basic and advanced skills. George Washington University’s LAiSER project offers an open-source approach to skill mapping, extracting skills from course documents and syllabi and aligning those skills to recognized international taxonomies—though the software is still not advanced enough to automatically produce skill maps that students could use to support applications for jobs or further study.
Interest also is growing in mapping skills gained from learning activities that occur outside the classroom, such as internships, study abroad programs, and co-curricular or extracurricular activities, with vendors such as Suitable offering technology that helps track skills gained through non-course activities. (It’s worth noting, however, that such platforms come at a cost to institutions, which could indirectly be passed along to students in the form of higher tuition or fees.) And we can imagine that platforms also will eventually map skills gained from work experience before and after a student attains a degree, allowing learners to demonstrate how their degree complements skills gained through work experience.
Growing Work-Based Learning
We also see growing interest in equipping learners with hands-on opportunities to demonstrate skill development outside the classroom. Higher education institutions are being more proactive about creating structured internship opportunities for their students, either through their own efforts or through working with organizations that facilitate employer partnerships. Many of these institutional efforts to facilitate internships result in “micro-internships” in which a student works with an employer on a defined project, often of less than 100 hours in duration, that enables the student to demonstrate skills and gain professional references. Such institution-facilitated internships are often designed to align with microcredentials and create direct pathways into employment, a model exemplified by the University of California’s Degree Plus initiative.
Looking Forward
Work-based learning, skill mapping, and embedded microcredentials represent three models for higher education institutions seeking to improve the visibility of their graduates’ skills. We already see promising implementations of these across higher education—but in a world where financial pressure on higher education is only going to increase, it will be difficult for less-resourced institutions to keep up without imposing even higher costs on their learners. In this sense, the “skillification” of higher education could amplify inequalities within higher education unless institutions are able to develop less costly approaches than what commercial vendors are currently offering.
Kyle Albert is co-director of the Program on Skills, Credentials, and Workforce Policy and an associate research professor at George Washington University. Corey Moss-Pech is an assistant professor of sociology at Florida State University.