Educating Versus Training and Credentialing

Lurking behind many current debates about higher education lies a divide between those who seek to credential a growing number of young people and those more concerned about maintaining the integrity, quality, and rigor of a college education.

Criticisms of for-profit providers and their non-profit imitators, of certain brands of online education, and of alternate educational models, including competency-based education and stackable credentials, ultimately rests on a concern that these offer training and credentialing, but not a true higher education.

The goal of many degree completion, competency-based, and self-paced, self-directed programs that target working adults and family caregivers is to ensure that these people receive a meaningful, marketable credential as quickly, flexibly, conveniently, and affordably as possible, often by awarding credit for prior learning, whether that took place in a classroom or through corporate or military training and life experience.

The unbundling and disaggregating of the faculty role, the standardization of courses and degree pathways, the elimination of low-demand majors, and online delivery without the accoutrements of a traditional campus represent ways not only to trim costs, but to streamline the pathway to a marketable skills and a high-demand credential.

Credentials document and validate a person’s knowledge and skills. Higher education, in contrast, has traditionally had broader goals: To Instill a wide range of literacies (including cultural, scientific, and numerical literacies, communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, and a college-level capacity for critical thinking and ethical reasoning) and document a host of other attributes, including perseverance, self-discipline, and the ability to multitask.  

What distinguished higher education from a correspondence course (and its updated, digitized successors) was regular, substantive interaction with a professor and classmates and ongoing scaffolding, mentoring, constructive feedback, and assessment from a recognized scholar. 

Many criticisms of what passes for a genuine higher education today are certainly justified, and make it much harder to for faculty members to disparage lower-cost credentialing models. These include:

• The inverse relationship between spending on instruction and student support and student needs.
• The intensifying stratification of higher education, with lower income students increasingly concentrated in the least selective, least successful institutions.
• The prevalence of large lecture courses, especially at the lower-division level, that lack much interaction or hands-on opportunities for learning.
• Curricula that reflect departmental self-interest rather than a carefully reasoned sense of what students should know and be able to do.
• Insufficient substantive, personalized feedback on student work.
• Assessments that do not truly measure student mastery of essential knowledge and skills.

Also, given the monetary value of a college degree, irrespective of provider, faculty should be wary of becoming too quick to condemn programs that seek to bring non-traditional, low-income, and underrepresented students to a brighter future.

Nor should faculty be too quick to disparage models that seek to control costs, for example, by optimizing the number of courses, limiting the number of majors, and restricting student choice by instituting guided pathways.

What needs to be reaffirmed, however, are the purported, traditional standards for accreditation, which include faculty responsibility for the design, integrity, and implementation of the curriculum; knowledgeable faculty who are active scholars in the field in which they teach; and a liberal education that places a premium on written and oral communication and fluency in the humanities and the arts.

None of these principles are incompatible with a more skills-based, outcomes-focused education or accelerated degree programs. None are at odds with a pathways approach that guides students toward a profession or career. After all, preparation for a profession ought not to be limited to skills-training; it should involve professional identity formation, which is much more holistic. A professional is not a technician. (Nor should a technician simply be someone with technical skills).

Whether one invokes the language of business – such as human capital formation and return on investment – or of liberal learning, we must remember that higher education ought to involve much more than training and credentialing.

Euclid’s words, that there is no royal road to geometry, require a contemporary variant:  there should not be truncated road to a bachelor’s degree. 

Steven Mintz is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the forthcoming Higher Ed Next: Overcoming Barriers to Access, Affordability, and Achievement.