Completing a college degree remains critical to economic mobility and career opportunities. Sixty-five percent of jobs require a postsecondary education, yet there are still 36 million working adults who never completed a degree, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Credit for prior learning (CPL) from workplace training or professional certifications saves learners time and money in attaining their degrees and connects learners to flexible college pathways. While many colleges accept CPL, reliable and accessible information about it isn’t widely available to learners and the existing process is difficult to navigate. Some of the main challenges learners have described include a lack of transparency in the process and a lack of guaranteed credit acceptance for CPL.
ACE is addressing this challenge by creating an innovative network—powered by
Credly, a business of Pearson—to connect learners to colleges that guarantee acceptance of CPL and provide greater transparency about learners’ possible college pathways. This program, like
ACE Apprenticeship Pathways, builds on learning from a pilot project and ACE’s years of experience with CPL networks. The network will provide a trusted source to connect learners to transparent information about the CPL that colleges accept. The program will also help colleges evaluate prior learning more easily by provide information, tools, and resources to support the course review and articulation process.
ACE received a two-year grant with generous support from the ECMC Foundation to implement a pilot project to conduct research and build a foundation for this network. ACE selected a group of founding higher education institutions and identified a set of initial articulations, paving the way for future degree pathways for ACE-endorsed learning experiences. In collaboration with key stakeholders and partners, ACE also conducted a learner survey and created the technical scope for an online platform for the network and began to develop training resources to help colleges effectively engage with the network.
Valuable insights gained during the pilot indicate strong demand for the network, such as:
- Sixty-one percent of respondents to an ACE learner survey said they would be interested in enrolling in a college or university if they knew they would be guaranteed ACE credit transfer.
- Learners want to know which credits count toward specific degree programs and which colleges will accept credits.
- Transfer credit acceptance is just as important a factor as tuition cost when choosing college programs, according to respondents to an ACE learner survey.
- Twenty percent of learners—much higher than the industry average for the education sector—click to learn more when they see a pop-up about their CPL options on Credly.