The Edge: An inventive credential model bites the dust

Sponsors shut down the 19-campus Digital Tech certificates program. And an analysis questions the effectiveness of many common career-prep pathways. ADVERTISEMENT [The Edge Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around higher ed. This week I report on the demise of a credentialing collaboration between colleges and employers. I also discuss key findings from a new analysis that finds little evidence of the effectiveness of many career-prep efforts that colleges undertake. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. It’s lights out for a promising credential model RIP to the Digital Tech Credential program, introduced four years ago through an unusually inclusive collaboration of mid-Atlantic colleges and employers. What a sad outcome for an effort that showed so much hope. Yes, [I’ve been a big fan from the outset]( but I certainly [wasn’t the only one who saw value]( in credentials jointly developed by academics and employers that would help students signal that they had attained skills needed for the region’s economy. As one university leader in the partnership said to me last week about the demise: ”It’s a shame.” The credentials — three for specialized expertise and one for general tech knowledge — were created under the auspices of the Capital CoLAB (Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business), an arm of the Greater Washington Partnership. Nineteen colleges from Baltimore to Richmond, Va., were part of the effort. But last month, with little notice to the on-the-ground folks at the campuses, the partnership pulled the plug. Rather than promoting the credentials, a vice-president at the partnership said in an email to the university collaborators (which was shared with me), the organization will “focus on our employer signaling work and supporting educators in aligning curriculum to employer needs.” I’m not sure what that means but I hope it’s not as ham-handed as it sounds, particularly after seeing how hard the original college and business partners worked together on the credentials to create a model that both reflected employer needs and respected academic values. In contrast to [the partnership’s publicity in its early days]( the organization did not post a public announcement on its website about the credentials’ ending; as of this writing, that [site still includes information suggesting that the certificates remain available](. Even though I reported in September on the faltering progress of the program — with [fewer than 600 students having earned any credential]( this news surprised me. Just last summer partnership officials told me they would be beefing up their tracking of CoLAB certificate holders and seekers to better understand if the program was leading to preferred internship and interview opportunities with employers in the region, as initially envisioned. Missing out on that information, too, will be a loss, especially for folks interested in learning how to put more oomph into alternative credentials. Which career-readiness programs are effective? The research is surprisingly thin Even as the college-to-job landscape is expanding — with growing interest in internships, mentoring, experiential learning, and a host of other programs — a team of Harvard researchers argue in a new analysis that students at a majority of colleges are being ill-served for their future by the “lack of attention and resources” for such activities. This isn’t a new argument. But the approach of this analysis is: Rather than just bemoan that college-to-career activities get “too little attention both in higher-education budgets and public-policy priorities,” the researchers highlight 13 common programs, establish whether they’ve been evaluated, and — if so — describe what those studies say about their effectiveness. Their clear winner? Internships, which they identified as the one intervention that met all their criteria. But even with that, the analysis spotlights some disturbing inequities. For example, one of the 530-plus studies they looked at found that Black students received disproportionately fewer paid internships and more unpaid internships than their white peers. (For their evaluations, the researchers looked at whether the activity had been substantially researched, whether there was good evidence that the activity improved students’ economic outcomes, the prevalence of the activity at universities, and the ease of putting the activity into practice.) I’ve been spending some time with this analysis, “[Delivering on the Degree: The College-to-Jobs Playbook]( because on Tuesday [I moderated a webinar]( for the Project on Workforce at Harvard that included discussion of the report with two of the co-authors and others. (We also talked about a new data tool that compares regional job growth to college-graduate growth.) If you’re curious how internships stack up next to apprenticeships, job shadowing, career-pathway approaches like “meta-majors,” or any of the other activities the researchers evaluated, you’ll find plenty to ponder in this analysis. For me, some other findings also stood out: - Although employer actions have a lot to do with how students fare in their careers, the authors found very little research on them, nor much research that followed students into their work lives. - When it comes to emerging new approaches, like [micro-internships]( virtual job shadowing, and [embedded industry-certified credentials into degrees]( research lags practice. That means colleges and other organizations may be investing in programs that don’t make an appreciable economic difference for students. - Career advising for students isn’t as ubiquitous as it should be. As one study revealed, at half of all colleges, career advising is still considered an optional service. (That one really stunned me, but I guess, given the focus of The Edge, those aren’t the places I often encounter.) To remedy these challenges, the authors include a series of recommendations that may seem familiar to those at institutions where career-prep has become a priority. For one, they say that career readiness shouldn’t be left to the career office but be treated as “a core education component that is embedded throughout the student experience,” while being especially conscious about disparities in opportunity for students who are low-income, minority, and first-generation students. They also urge employers to work more intentionally to create (and fund) career-immersion experiences for such students, while calling on policymakers to expand financial support and incentives for work-based learning opportunities, and asking researchers to spend more time studying the long-term effects of career-connected programs. The one thing the report didn’t highlight is a question I’ve been pondering. Would a different framing of this issue make it more compelling? Instead of trying to make every college or every professor feel responsible for preparing students for careers, what if the goal was explicitly and deliberately more holistic? I’m in no way minimizing [the importance of helping students become career-ready]( but I can’t help but wonder if that would all go down a lot easier if the preparation was established as one part of a broader mission that included helping students become community-ready and civil-society ready, too. What do you think? Is this just semantics? Or do you see some merit in this notion? Please [write to me](mailto:goldie@chronicle.com) and let me know how the idea hits you. The policy-wonk-turned-interim-president gets the gig permanently As the interim president at Adams State University, David Tandberg wasn’t supposed to be in the pool of contenders for the full-time job, but last week the trustees there unanimously named him as the institution’s 12th president. I’ve been touching base with Tandberg over the past academic year on what he’s learned while in this post — see [here]( [here]( for those dispatches. Now I’m even more excited to hear what he has to say in a few weeks when we do our final check-in. Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, [find them here](. To receive your own copy, free, register [here](. If you want to follow me on Twitter (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there), [@GoldieStandard]( is my handle. 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