Stephanie Tully-Dartez, president of South Arkansas College, says leaders at her institution have been talking about creating robust microcredential programs for a long time. But they never had the resources to get them off the ground.
“On the credit side, we had a few Microsoft credentials and things like that,” Tully-Dartez says. “But the microcredentialing and badging and the workforce development through that, we just couldn’t quite get across the threshold.”
That changed when the college joined a partnership with the Education Design Lab and seven other community colleges in the state to build what the nonprofit calls “micro-pathways”—stackable credentials that can be earned in a year or less and get students into high-demand careers faster. The idea is that the credentials can be counted toward degrees as well, creating an “on-ramp” to more higher education down the line.
The Big Idea: The Education Design Lab announced its partnership with Arkansas community colleges today, calling it the “Scaling Learner Opportunity and Economic Growth Across Arkansas” program. The colleges will work with regional employers and other local stakeholders to design skills-based education-to-career pathways.
The participating colleges are:
- South Arkansas College
- Arkansas State University, Newport
- Arkansas State University, Three Rivers
- Arkansas Tech University, Ozark Campus
- East Arkansas Community College
- North Arkansas College
- Northwest Arkansas Community College
- University of Arkansas Rich Mountain
The new project builds off the previous work of the Education Design Lab, which has collaborated with nearly 100 other colleges across 20 states to design about 300 micro-pathways. Each pathway is different, with some offering solely noncredit credentials, others all-credit, and some a mix of the two, says Lisa Larson, senior vice president for college transformation at the Education Design Lab.
“The goal with micro-pathways is that they include the technical skills as well as the 21st-century or durable skills, that they’re affordable to the learners that they’re designed for, that they meet the labor market needs of the region, and that they result in jobs that are meeting or above meeting liveable wages,” Larson says.
A Growth in Microcredentials
The new partnership is part of the growing interest nationwide in alternative pathways to well-paid jobs.
“People are beginning to rethink the time and financial investment that goes into longer degree programs,” says Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University. “There’s a lot of experimentation that’s happening, and we’ll see where things end up.”
Research on whether nondegree credentials actually improve student outcomes is limited, but based on what’s available, students in noncredit pathways rarely transition to credit pathways and completion rates lag behind credit programs. However, obtaining noncredit credentials can help students land jobs with higher pay.
Part of the challenge is changing the language used around “credit” and “noncredit” programs and getting the word out to students about the benefits of micro-pathways.
“We have to really break those walls between credit and noncredit and start to see learners as learners, regardless of if they’re coming to the college for a credit experience or a noncredit experience,” Larson says. “It’s a learning experience, and it’s going to continue to have currency or value at the institution beyond that micro-pathway.”
On the Ground: Tully-Dartez says one challenge she anticipates is communicating to students what a microcredential is and how it’s different from the traditional college model, as well as figuring out how to document student achievement in a way that shows employers the credentials’ true value.
Another communication challenge for any college designing a microcredential program is to make sure colleges are clear that the value of the credential is very dependent on the labor market.
“Everyone is hoping to find pathways that lead to well-paying jobs,” says Van Noy. “There are some of those pathways, and then there are also many pathways that lead to first jobs that aren’t particularly well-paying but maybe will eventually lead to a better paying job with further education.”
“The challenge here is that people are looking for good jobs quickly, and then there’s the reality of the labor market.”
Filling Workforce Needs
The Arkansas community colleges are still in the very early stages of designing their micro-pathways, but Tully-Dartez says some key information is already emerging in talks with industry leaders in the area. While South Arkansas College has long-standing relationships with local employers, this is the first time they are seeking their feedback on microcredentials specifically.
The feedback so far points to developing programs in planning and project management, she says. In her area, these skills can be used across industries, including in manufacturing and healthcare as well as the gas station corporation Murphy USA, which is headquartered in El Dorado, Arkansas, just down the road from the college.
Across the state, key industries include aerospace and defense, agricultural technology, IT, and manufacturing. While the local economy is doing well, Arkansas faces one of the nation’s worst worker shortages. Community colleges could provide the pathway for learners to fill these needed jobs.
Larson says that community colleges historically had relationships with employers that were “more transactional than transformational.” She’s working with the lab’s college partners to change that.
“We helped them think through what does that mean to have a better partnership with better outcomes and impacts for learners and for employers?” Larson says. “We’ve learned that reaching out and being able to make visible the opportunities for new majority learners, those who have been underrepresented or have felt excluded from the educational system, that there’s things that you have to do differently.”
For Tully-Dartez, she hopes the relationship between the colleges and employers goes both ways. South Arkansas College can help learners attain the skills that employers want, and employers can send their workers back to skill up even more as they progress in their careers.
“We have a large portion of Arkansans who don’t have any college experience, but they have a ton of on-the-job experience, and they’ve learned so much and have so much value there,” Tully-Dartez says. “I really hope that we can use this as a gateway to get more Arkansans into higher education, whether it’s the traditional degree programs or the microcredentialing or badging, or however that ends up looking.”