Toward a national commitment to competency-based, equity-centered education

Abstract

Imagine this: The owner of a Boston-based computer gaming company needs a Python-savvy programmer to develop a new game. Melina is a self-taught programmer living in Somerville, just outside the city, who was recently laid off because of the pandemic. Melina would be an ideal candidate for the position, but she chooses not to apply because the job description specifies that a computer science degree is required. Melina had started her degree a few years earlier but had to drop out because balancing her full-time job, raising a child, and going to school on a rigid schedule was untenable. Melina had continued to learn on her own, but never obtained the degree to show for it.

Unfortunately, variations of this story are repeated every day. The unemployed programmer, project manager, or sales associate can do the job that an employer is trying to fill, but the employer inadvertently closes off that option in the job description by requiring a degree.

This focus on degrees as hiring criteria hurts many jobseekers but hits underrepresented communities especially hard:

Degrees have historically been the currency of the education-to-work continuum, serving as shorthand for competence and functioning as gatekeeping mechanisms for higher-status education and employment. We are not arguing that degrees do not matter, but we are promoting the design of alternative approaches that can also function as bridges to attaining a degree or demonstrating competence.

Put simply, people with competencies need jobs, but are hampered by a perceived need for degrees to obtain those jobs. It is our responsibility as educators and advocates to elevate and scale CBE as a solution to this challenge.

There is an urgency to this matter because of a growing bifurcation of access to education and opportunity between white, affluent students, and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds and people of color, especially Black and Latinx students. Research from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce reveals that Black Americans are steered toward majors and career paths leading to low-paying jobs. Even when entering high-paying fields, Black students often pursue the lower-paying majors within them. For example, a higher representation of Black female students entering a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program choose biology, the lowest-paying science major. In contrast, white students and those of higher economic status often enter into longer-term degree programs with greater overall economic value (Carnevale et al., 2016).

In a 2020 article, Carnevale asserted the following:

The divide Carnevale pointed to must be addressed in ways that make the bachelor's degree—and those higher-paying majors and jobs—accessible to all. Any new educational and funding policies should avoid sending a message to certain learners that the baccalaureate degree is “not for you, but we have something else that is more appropriate.” That scenario represents the underlying problem. Thus, we have a twofold challenge that is not easy to navigate: We must “credentialize” CBE, while also “democratizing” the BA.

An important task for a national program is to educate hiring managers. We can help employers with jobs that require skills rather than degrees to avoid being mesmerized by academic credentials. In the case of the gaming company executive and the Python programmer, the two will never meet under current circumstances, which is a net loss for both—and for the local economy. However, the change is as simple as deleting one phrase in a want ad: “computer science degree required.”

Equity in work and economic opportunity is at the heart of our mission at JFF (Jobs for the Future): As noted earlier, we believe that one effective response to these inequities is a national commitment to competency-based, equity-centered education, or CBEE.

Employers like our gaming company manager routinely cite a lack of preparedness in the talent pool, pointing to a competency and skills gap that needs bridging. Often, these hiring managers are sorting candidates exclusively through a degree-focused lens, which narrows the candidate pool overall. When using degrees as a blunt sorting mechanism, many employers still note a persistent skills gap in potential hires. Further, they often state that degree-holding candidates lack specific, foundational skills they are seeking, even in entry-level candidates (Sidhue & Calderon, 2014). Another priority of a national program would be to point out that there is a connection between their hiring process and the skills gap.

From an education and training perspective, the employer's dilemma reflects multiple realities in our current approach to education and work: (a) It underscores the value of degrees as the ultimate currency in our labor market; (b) it suggests that although degrees offer recognized criteria for employment entry, they are usually insufficient in conveying specific skills or overall competencies for employment readiness; and (c) it implicates the inherent inequities in long-term economic mobility for those currently underserved in degree-granting programs. Ultimately, employers are missing out on an untapped market—those prospective workers who possess skills and potential but no degree. Hiring managers may not realize that the capability is there, because “degree-based myopia” prevents them from seeing it.

Pursuing a degree is a costly proposition in both time and money, and its importance as a job portal has offered a means of social mobility for those of economic or racial privilege while consigning others to the lower rungs of a class hierarchy. This is the problem that we must address.

As we grapple with the economic reality of a global pandemic, we detect a growing tension nationally between the desire for short-term, revenue-producing jobs and the return on investment that typically comes with a 4-year degree. An article in Inside Higher Ed (Clayton, 2020) stated the following:

Our task as we emerge from the current crisis is to become bridge builders, spanning the chasm between the short- and long-term needs of students and workers. While people require “economic security” today, they will also need “economic mobility” in the future.

Today's jobseekers are looking for programs that can prepare them for careers—and they need a strong indication that a degree will pay off in the long run. As Paul LeBlanc, president of the University of Southern New Hampshire, a national leader in CBE, said, “Many students don't have the social capital to get it wrong. A bet on us is a big bet” (LeBlanc, 2020). Students have much to lose if they make the wrong choice because they are counting on their educational investments to produce labor market value. They are losing faith in the BA because its value can be unpredictable. CBE can offer a better value proposition when done well, because it promises better outcomes when tied to labor market and offers more efficient pathways at lower cost in time and money.

A shift has been taking place, and we are now witnessing a tipping point where competencies are increasingly being recognized as more important than the traditional degree in the hiring process for many disciplines. Many employers are requiring specific competencies in their top candidates, showing less adherence to the “degree as currency” model that has shaped much of the higher education landscape.

As the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation (2020) stated:

It may be difficult to see it now, but the degree is eroding as a “gold standard” for hiring. The federal government—the nation's largest employer—announced in June 2020 that hiring in many federal jobs will now be based on competencies, not degrees. White House Exec. Order No. 13932 (2020), “Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates,” laid out the new policy. It states the following:

The Trump administration's move to accelerate skills-based hiring builds on prior administrations' openness to CBE and other skills-based education and training programs. This latest decision appears to hold great promise that more federal jobs will open up to currently underserved communities, but many observers greeted the announcement with skepticism. For example, Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, senior fellow at the National Skills Coalition, said, “This executive order is like trying to turn around the Queen Mary. … It's going to take years to see how this really plays out” (Koenig, 2020).

Beyond the federal government's efforts, we have seen an increasing commitment by colleges and employers to reduce the equity gap in credential attainment and wage gain for people of color. However, successes to date represent isolated pockets of advancement, and there is little evidence of scale. Colleges—particularly community colleges—are still under fire for not preparing students to take the next step in their work and learning journeys, so they are increasingly interested in reconfiguring how they teach and document learning outcomes. Thus, there is still much to be done by educators in conjunction with the actions of public- and private-sector employers. Now is the time to seize the opportunity for transformation through reforms like CBE that are more accessible for more people.

Everyone agrees that COVID-19 has upended employment and education worldwide. Rapid, unplanned shifts to online learning have been only partially successful, and efforts to safely operate schools, colleges, and universities remain problematic. COVID-19 has amplified preexisting concerns about the need to shift higher education from its focus on degree completion to jobs and career paths, and about its perpetuation of inequities. The pandemic has merely made the consequences more immediately clear, given that the people who have been hardest hit by the financial fallout are those with the least economic security: workers whose jobs are disproportionately in service industries and similar fields.

This terrible situation offers the opportunity to advocate for fundamental change in the current system. The time is right to ask, “What are the implications of COVID-19 for CBE and all forms of education and training?” As we rebuild, it's essential that we create education approaches that bridge a short-term need for training with a long-term need for career success—from “economic security” to “economic mobility.”

The pandemic and accompanying recession means that there are vast numbers of unemployed and underemployed who need additional skills and credentials to get back into the workforce, and CBE is the ideal model to meet their needs because of its tie to labor market demands and efficient pathways to jobs and careers.

So now is the time to implement innovative competency-based programs, supports, and experiences designed for learners and workers from all backgrounds and contexts. The “CBE advantage” provides the flexibility and targeted skills development, combined with personalized supports, to help our students as they confront numerous challenges that were unknown even recently.

It is our responsibility as education leaders to work with employers to expand and scale CBE programs to offer educational pathways that are more relevant to the labor market and reduce the amount of time and expense required to obtain a credential. It will be a great loss to society if we continue with “business as usual” or wait to “get back to normal.”

As we continue our efforts to recover from the pandemic in 2021, equity must be a central concern. The education community will fail in its obligations if we ignore this unique moment to build career pathways that break the vicious cycle perpetuating inequities by tracking people into low-wage jobs that lack long-term financial and advancement opportunities.

However, many attempts to create skills-based approaches have led to unequal quality in programming, where low-income students and students of color are too often funneled into shorter-term and less economically viable pathways. In contrast, white students and those of higher economic status tend to enter into longer-term degree programs with greater overall economic value. The pandemic has focused a spotlight on marginalized students. For many of them, in-person schooling represents a safe place, a community, and perhaps the only place where they can access the technology needed for learning in a modern setting. Online learning has been a net loss for many of them.

CBE alone cannot address every dimension of social inequality. However, it can help to remove specific barriers. In a degree-dominated world, economic disparities may prevent lower-income students from putting in the “seat time” needed for educational attainment. A parent working two jobs will find it difficult to be in a classroom every week for 2 or 4 years or more. If the work-life experience of that parent is taken into account and a customized career pathway is created for her, she can obtain a credential faster and less expensively. A flexible, CBE career pathway, that recognizes previous learning and provides opportunity for all learners to secure a job with a family-sustaining wage, offers a convincing model of education with equity at the center.

The postsecondary education landscape is crowded with reform initiatives because almost no one is satisfied with the current situation. The question is not “What is wrong?” but “What will work?”

For more traditional postsecondary education, specifically in academic, credit-bearing programs, much of the reform effort of the past 20 years has centered on increasing access to higher education opportunities. In light of acute attention to alarmingly low graduation rates in the early 2000s, the focus moved to the “completion agenda”—getting students in and out of their programs with credentials more effectively and efficiently.

Current reforms fail to challenge the dominant paradigm, focusing instead on improving what already exists. Only in the past few years has the postsecondary sector as a whole begun to home in on the importance of job skills and career advancement. This trend accelerated in 2020 with efforts to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and the over 40 million unemployed, the majority of whom were low income and people of color (Casselman et al., 2020). The intense concern with jobs and economic recovery challenged states, colleges, and employers to make more public commitments to reduce inequities in the job market. A strong partnership among these stakeholders offers the promise of a new post-pandemic paradigm.

Reforms for both guided pathways (degree programs) and career pathways (career and technical training programs) have shown real promise in supporting learners in credential attainment. However, their ultimate goals and their typical student populations diverge.

Guided pathways seek to build out structured systems that move students to completion of a degree with transfer value, or a job with economic promise. Although guided pathways have generated substantial movement toward education attainment for community college students, the focus has remained on sequences of courses rather than on program competencies grounded in the labor market. And guided pathways’ goals of improving equitable outcomes remain unfulfilled.

Career pathways address the ways in which learners build and stack skills and credentials to address both immediate needs (jobs) and long-term economic prospects (careers). However, the promise of “stackable” credentials has not been fully realized (Bailey & Belfield, 2017), and such credentials are often inadequate if their skills and competencies are not explicitly vetted by employers or are not transferable to multiple contexts.

Combining guided and career pathways approaches—grounded in competencies—and collaborating across sectors will promote wider access to education and training programs that go beyond college completion and ensure that students can directly apply learning to jobs and careers with labor market value. This will create a transformative marketplace that promotes equitable economic mobility.

Higher education's shift in focus from college access to college completion, and from job attainment to economic mobility, will especially benefit learners and workers of color and low-income first-generation students. If we embrace equity as the object of this evolution, we will be addressing social problems on a broad level, using the education system as a mechanism for scale.

The National Survey of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education (2018) asserted that “policymakers want to know whether CBE is expanding across institution types and what barriers are inhibiting growth as they consider whether and how to design policies that support or inhibit CBE expansion.” So we know that CBE is on the minds of federal policymakers, but they need to know what to do next. Successes in the past offer some guidance.

When the United States makes a national commitment, as it did, for example, with the Apollo moon-landing program or the GI Bill, transformative results follow. The White House's executive order cited earlier marks a hopeful beginning toward a national approach to equitable education and economic advancement.

We find another positive indicator of progress in the regulatory language around distance learning recently issued by the US Department of Education (2020). Among other things, the new regulations emphasize demonstrated learning over amount of time in class (i.e., seat time) and encourage employer participation in designing educational programs. We should build on initiatives like these with legislation that encourages employers to take a leadership role while supporting educators to find new ways to address the competency gap. Here are a few examples of what this might look like:

To build an approach to the next generation of CBE—one that incorporates equitable economic mobility: Competency-based Equity-Centered Education (CBEE). We must look to the current reform landscape and identify what is working, what can be strengthened, and what efforts can be combined for deeper impact. The next generation of CBE should apply the strengths of past efforts, integrating them into a cohesive system and reporting the results nationwide. Two examples of lessons learned come from promising work by organizations leading CBE efforts at a national level.

C-BEN (Competency-Based Education Network), the largest education network dedicated to CBE and the national leader in CBE quality standards, developed its Employer Engagement Best Practices Toolkit (2019) as a resource for institutions of higher education to establish industry partnerships. Educational institutions should work collaboratively with employers and industry to build out modularized curricula and share competency and assessment data. With tools like C-BEN’s employer toolkit, model CBE programs can be designed with input from employers and industry through a rigorous process based on defined standards for quality.

Other important lessons coming out of CBE reform efforts are highlighted by the 2019 National Survey of Postsecondary Competency-Based Education, conducted by American Institutes for Research. The resulting report describes the continued growth of CBE programs nationwide and the overwhelming confidence that college leaders have in the CBE model. Yet the authors also recognize that the persistent internal and external barriers encountered by colleges require significant changes in policy and business practices to fulfill their potential impact and scale. The authors make a number of recommendations, including paying more attention to reporting completion and labor market outcomes for CBE students. They also advocate for “research about how and whether employers value the demonstration of competencies in CBE programs will continue to advance conversations about quality and the validation of programs in the labor market” (Mason & Parsons, 2019).

Events in 2020 laid bare the inadequacies of our working-learning ecosystem and highlighted the urgency of fundamental transformation. The current patchwork of reform efforts will help, but it will not produce the results needed to support short- or long-term economic recovery. As we look to the next generation of CBEE—Competency-Based, Equity-Centered Education—we should aim for a more resilient, market-driven system that will aid in economic recovery, create a competitive advantage for the United States, and demonstrate a commitment to equitable solutions for low-income learners and people of color.

Now is the time for a national mobilization of resources to develop a CBEE model as the foundation for a robust, resilient system tied to the labor market—all while reducing inequality and maximizing economic opportunity.

The arrival of a new administration in Washington offers multiple opportunities to jump-start the proposed national commitment. For example, the initiative could be designated the Biden-Harris Program for Competency-Based, Equity-Centered Education, and the Vice President Kamala Harris and First Lady Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, could co-lead it. Vice President Harris has demonstrated a strong concern for underrepresented communities, and Dr. Biden has an abiding interest in community colleges, which have been proving grounds for CBE over the years.

This national commitment speaks to many of the issues on which President Joe Biden ran for office, and it is an idea that might well attract bipartisan support. Even if the new administration does not adopt CBEE as a federal initiative, the need for a national commitment remains clear, and we are hopeful that its champions will eventually emerge.

No conflicts declared.