Credit Where Credit’s Due: Lets Level the Playing Field for Adult Learners
The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the U.S. labor market, leaving millions of displaced workers struggling to reinvent themselves for new and more resilient career paths. But while college enrollments ordinarily swell during an economic recession, this time around, the trendlines suggest the historical countercyclical enrollment pattern may not be a given.
A troubling paradox is being revealed. On the one hand, adult learners are expressing a growing interest in postsecondary education. On the other, they are feeling less confident about the value of that education. The tension reflects a long-standing challenge in addressing the specific needs of adult learners—one growing in urgency during the pandemic. Institutions have a profound responsibility to recognize the knowledge and skills that students bring to their postsecondary studies from the “real world” of work and life and, where applicable, to help ensure that learning counts toward their academic pursuits.
Done right, prior learning assessment—or PLA—can unlock the potential of millions of workers while helping them save money and find a faster path to degree completion and economic mobility.
PLA first found a foothold on college campuses in the 1940s, helping millions of GIs translate their military training and experiences into learning as they returned from the Second World War. It grew in popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s as a new influx of working women returned to higher education. Over the last decade, PLA has seen a modern resurgence as more working adults have needed to upskill, reskill, or gain new credentials to meet the evolving workforce skills demands. And in the wake of the current economic crisis, PLA can once again rise to meet the needs of a growing, but still underserved, population. It is increasingly seen as a tool to help adults returning to school accelerate their credential completion.
Working adults are no longer a peripheral part of higher education but increasingly the core. They are central to higher education’s sustainability in the long run. Even before the pandemic, adult college students numbered more than 6 million, with many more having attended college at some point but not yet earned a credential. The 2018 U.S. Census Bureau data indicated that 35 million Americans over the age of 25 have earned college credits but have not finished their degree. On top of that previous formal learning, a returning student today likely brings with them considerable knowledge from years or even decades of professional and life experience. This experience-based learning often goes unacknowledged and unappreciated in the classroom.
While the concept of prior learning assessment has been around for decades and is now widespread, institutions are still using the practice unevenly. A large-scale study of 230,000 working adults conducted by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL)found just 11% of students in a sample of more than 230,000 had earned any credit from prior learning assessments. The problem of low PLA usage may not rest with the students. In a survey of 500 colleges and universities, about one-third of institutions said there were institutional practices or policies that made it difficult for students to have their prior learning recognized. This, despite research that underscores just how much of an impact a modern approach to PLA can have.
The CAEL and WICHE study found that earning PLA credit increased the likelihood of an adult student completing a credential by 17%—and that positive impact on completion held for every student subgroup, including by race-ethnicity and income. A recent study from Capella University—which uses a direct assessment approach to award credit for prior learning — further found that students in bachelor’s programs with PLA credits saved an average of $10,000 in tuition. The study also found that students who earned credit for their prior learning were 9.3% more likely to persist and more quickly accumulate credits toward a degree, compared to students who did not.
The practice of PLA in postsecondary education continues to evolve, allowing institutions to better translate professional experiences into academic credentials. The best prior learning assessment tools today are rigorous and thorough. They are designed according to accepted quality standards for assessing learning. They do not rely only on standardized tests but encompass a broad and flexible array of practices for assessing and evaluating student learning.
For example, some institutions have partnerships with non-college training providers and local employers to evaluate formal training outside of the academic setting and create crosswalks to their degrees. They can follow recommendations from existing corporate and military training evaluations published by the National College Credit Recommendation Service (NCCRS) and the American Council on Education (ACE). Students can also earn credit by submitting a portfolio of their documented learning or by taking faculty-developed exams.
Against a backdrop of deep unemployment and rising inequities, we face a renewed sense of urgency to further modernize and practice PLA, creating alternative credit-earning opportunities tailored for the emerging majority of college students. It is time for policymakers and postsecondary leaders to expand resources and opportunities around prior learning assessment, helping more students accelerate their credential completion through the power of their existing knowledge.
