Even though the first wave of online learning innovation unleashed some great benefits for students and employers, because the incentives focused on expanding access above all else, the stories of low graduation rates and some students facing high debt with limited prospects to repay it were also completely predictable in advance. The government should learn from its lessons and shift from funding based on inputs to focusing on incentivizing the outcomes it would like to see from higher education.
Doing this is trickier than it might seem at first blush, though. As competency-based programs emerge, we have little experience regulating them outside of the current constraints. Many of the so-called outcome-based regulation efforts in the states have, in fact, been more focused on the simple output of student graduation, but not the true underlying quality of the programs such that these regulatory efforts may be creating some perverse incentives for colleges and universities.
So should the government simply create or use existing common assessments to measure the underlying quality of these programs? In my May piece for CompetencyWorks, Michelle Weise and I wrote about how important assessments are for creating a quality competency-based program and how they aren’t something that can be done as an after-thought. After identifying the competencies a student must master in a given program, creating quality assessments are critical to driving quality learning.
But a government-driven assessment program is unlikely to work. These competency-based programs are emerging in a wide variety of fields that are constantly changing—from IT fields to the liberal arts. Using common, government-mandated assessments will be difficult and unwieldy at best and could stunt innovation. Even pegging program quality to a broader assessment—the Collegiate Learning Assessment, for example, is a favorite of many people’s for its assessment of underlying critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communication skills—may not be much better because those underlying skills that employers say they need manifest themselves in very different ways depending upon the domain in which someone is working.
And the assessment may miss out on assessing the very reason why students attend certain programs. For example, the CLA is likely to tell us very little about the program quality for students studying in accredited cosmetology colleges—incidentally, a type of school that is begging for competency-based learning to free students from what can be akin to an apprenticeship for which they are paying even once they’ve mastered the craft if the full time of the program has yet to elapse.
A better path forward would be for the federal government to encourage a variety of experiments over the coming years that try out different approaches in a controlled way, all while releasing programs from the current input-based constraints to learn what works, in what combinations and circumstances, and what are the unintended consequences.
A key tenet of all the efforts is that employers, along with students, are likely best positioned to determine program quality—and programs that align their assessments to the competencies employers need will likely be in a strong place.
Some possible paths forward for regulating competency-based programs include:
- Creating risk-sharing programs with the new institutions and broadening the use of income share agreements
- Giving students the dollars up front and creating far more data transparency around program outcomes so students can make more informed choices
- Paying programs based on student outcomes in accordance with a concept we had a while back called the QV Index that aligns to employment and broader student satisfaction outcomes
- Experimenting with accreditors that operate like charter authorizers or employer organizations that operate as de facto accrediting bodies
- Encouraging states to try more experimentation themselves across a broader range of ideas. Moving beyond all-or-nothing access to federal dollars that can create race-to-the-bottom incentives and only consider the tuition cost of a program as opposed to all of its expenditures so that students capture real savings when costs are reduced is also critical.
Although online, competency-based programs have been around for some time, opening up federal funding at scale across the higher education system for lots of new players has never been done before. As the government gets into this game, harnessing, and not limiting, the potential that competency-based learning brings—to be fundamentally about a student’s learning—as it seeks to assure quality is critical. The nation has yet to master that.
Michael B. Horn is a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and serves as the executive director of its education program. He leads a team that educates policymakers and community leaders on the power of disruptive innovation in the K-12 and higher education spheres.
This post was first published on CompetencyWorks. This post has been published with permission from the author.
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