Tara’s family never had a lot of money, but her mother instilled in her a taste for learning from an early age. Tara’s mother had grown up with dyslexia and little support. She wanted better for her bookworm daughter and stressed the importance of going to college. As a young adult, Tara worked full time to take affordable college courses online. But she struggled to balance the demands of work and family with the demands of college. Refusing to give up, she started working for another company, a company that further supported her aspirations and offered tuition assistance as a perk.
Then the pandemic came and Tara was temporarily fired from work amid nationwide lockdowns. Her grandmother also fell ill and was hospitalized. Tara’s mental health declined as she struggled to take care of her family, pay her bills, and continue working to graduate. She quickly dropped out of school to focus on supporting loved ones, becoming one of 36 million Americans who have attended college but have yet to graduate. “I like to learn,†says Tara. “But my sanity was so pervasive that I couldn’t even cope with other programs. It would be one more square on a list of things I need to accomplish.
Higher education and employers need to work together to rethink our systems to accommodate the complex lives of students like Tara. Aspiring learners need a more flexible approach to education that allows – and fully recognizes – progressive learning. They need a system that helps students work toward multiple possible futures, and that ensures they don’t easily walk away empty-handed if life gets in their way.
Many working adult learners intuitively understand that we no longer live in a world where a single, linear career path is typical or even desirable, but higher education and employers still validate and accept only one path. : the graduation. This path is part of a legacy system that ignores the need for lifelong learning, and it reinforces deep-rooted inequalities across race and class.
In her framework for equityXdesign, Caroline Hill, an expert in equity-focused design, argues that relinquishing power is a key step in the design of new education systems. Ceding power means looking at existing systems in their historical context and shifting the power gradient between those who design the systems and those who are to be served by the new systems.
As Hill explains, “If we can agree that the legacy system is a relic of the past, those of us with the most power and privilege need to recognize it, do the hard work of recognizing the resilience of the relics and their influence on the present. (even when we benefit from it), surrender the power and release these habits, practices and ways of being.
Our conventional top-down approach ignores the fact that working adults often already have many of the skills essential for the future of work. Forward thinking leaders in higher education and business recognize the value of cultivating both current and perishable technical skills and more enduring and unique human skills that have the potential to support people’s long-term career goals. . Schools and businesses must learn to recognize, maintain and validate these enduring skills, even when they do not come from a formal educational setting.
This approach – which we call Credit for X – recognizes and recognizes the variety of methods by which students gain experience, skills and competencies outside of traditional school environments. Today, institutions often independently decide which apprenticeship to validate, and employers independently decide which apprenticeship should serve as a hiring signal.
Rather, universities and employers should work together to think critically about the flexibility of pathways between apprenticeship and career. Today, universities and employers are working together to award credit hours that count towards a degree based on an employee’s participation in on-the-job training, but the next evolution of this collaboration may be deeper and more meaningful.
Such a system should also take better account of the learning that students acquire on the way to a diploma. We see our employer partners promoting their employees who work to graduate or graduate at about double the rate of their peers who are not taking advantage of education benefits.
Institutions and individual states create policies to ensure that non-degree degrees are cumulative, meaning that students earn degrees throughout their academic journey and not just when they graduate years later. Promising efforts such as the State University of New York’s ‘Credential as You Go’ strive to create scalable and sustainable ways for higher education to create these pathways. At the center of this initiative is progressive accreditation, which ensures that all post-secondary learning is captured and easily demonstrated to employers. Portability is crucial as many learners will eventually gain access to education at multiple institutions throughout their years of learning and working.
Unfortunately, as Amber Garrison Duncan, Executive Vice President of the Skills Education Network, notes, we have yet to embrace these strategies on a large scale. “Instead,†she says, “we are barring learners from continuing education opportunities and reinforcing a message that has been sent time and time again: we only value a particular type of learning rather than what someone knows and knows about. can actually do.
Building a world where all learning matters requires more work than simply recognizing previous credits and training. It requires changing the way we think about how knowledge and skills are acquired. And that requires humanizing the conversation. The massive social and political upheavals of recent years have created the conditions to redesign existing systems. Employers and universities should take advantage of this moment and support the upward mobility for humans – especially BAME workers – who make their jobs possible.
Lisa McIntyre-Hite is Senior Director at Guild Education. His professional passion is rooted in taking measurable action to tackle inequalities in education systems.
Mackenzie Jackson is a researcher and content developer at Guild Education. Her work focuses on understanding the whole person experience of working adult learners.
