The sacrilege of job training in higher education, and what to do about it -- Part 2

To recap Part 1: funding for higher ed comes from two major sources, state governments and students (tuition), and both parties are increasingly interested in return-on-investment. We believe that a liberal arts education provides many skills and competencies that employers desire. But given the pressure from state government and potential students (and competitors) we must do a better job demonstrating (or documenting) the ROI of the liberal arts.

So how can we do that? First let's look at how we document what we do at this point. A college graduate typically gets a diploma, with associated transcript and GPA. As I said in Part 1, these credentials really only tell an employer that a student knows a lot about her or his major discipline, and perhaps in specific courses of interest. But nothing in those credentials speaks to the things that employers tell us they are looking for in employees, like communication or critical thinking skills. 

We can do better. The answer goes by several terms: badges, microcredentials, nanodegrees, and more. But the idea is the same: provide documentation of learning; in my case documentation of learning (and skill acquisition) other than disciplinary knowledge. 

Several organizations are pursuing this idea, notably the Lumina Foundation, but there are many others. In fact, the credentialing landscape is now so crowded that the Lumina Foundation recently held a conference with the goal of establishing an industry-standard credentialing ecosystem that would benefit students, employers, and faculty. Several learning management systems companies have added badging functionality into their systems. Companies like Portfolium are banking on the profitability of eportfolios. 

The idea is that documenting non-disciplinary skills and competencies that our students already acquire in our major can costs faculty very little, can help our graduates gain employment, and can communicate to stakeholders that economic value of a liberal arts degree. It really can be a win for students, employers, and higher education. A win that wide-spread is rare indeed.

Until the credentialing movement matures and a universal system is agreed upon we can move forward in-house. My department is currently creating non-disciplinary credentials that our students could earn in our existing courses. I'll update this blog as we progress.