20190425.0430

Another of the many pieces LinkedIn has recommended to me is DeVry University's re-release of John Hanc's "Building a Career, One Academic Step at a Time." (I suppose I should note here that I am, as of this writing, contingent faculty at DeVry.) The piece describes "stackable credentials" as an interlocking system of two-year, four-year, and graduate degrees and of various certifications and continuing education units. Hanc focuses on extolling articulation agreements--that is, agreements that allow straight-across transfers of course credits--between community colleges and senior colleges and universities. A couple of student examples bracket the article, and a number of educational administrators are quoted as being in support of the idea, as well, helping the article to make its case.
There are some solid, salient points in the piece. Community colleges can offer students who have previously been academically underserved or who have been away from formal education for some time to re/acclimate themselves to general academic environments. They are also usually substantially less expensive than senior colleges and universities (though this is often at the price of having fewer facilities and less access to research apparatus), making them more accessible to socioeconomically disadvantaged populations. And it is the case that baccalaureate and higher education is not the best fit for many people--and no shame should accrue to that, although it does in too many cases.
At the same time, there are some issues with the piece. Perhaps the most glaring is that it appears to call for an extension of credentialing-mania; part of the problem that attaches itself to higher education in the United States at present is that it is seen as providing necessary credentials instead of a broader education. (I am aware of how fraught the term is. The discussion goes on in many places, carried out by people far more eloquent than I; it can be found easily.) Incorporating more sites of education more explicitly into such systems is likely to have the same effect on them as it has on prevailing educational standards, prompting the same kinds of things currently decried. And it will also likely drive up what are currently more manageable costs, so that access to educational opportunities currently in place will become more restricted yet.
There are other issues, as well. For one, part of the value in staying with an institution across a longer term is the opportunity for continuity. Even for non-traditional students, there is value in seeing familiar faces week to week and session to session. The longer engagement allows for the development of relationships that can help students transition out of the classroom successfully. Fragmenting curricula through "stackable credentials" disrupts that, serving to isolate students-turned-workers further from one another, and individuals are not as able to align for common goals and good as are already-existing groups. And, for another, the move to fragment curricula reads as another avenue of attack on humanistic study. While "writing" instruction--narrowly tailored to workplace genres such as resumes and HR reports--will doubtlessly remain in place, the broader liberal arts will likely fall away even more than they already are.
I do not need to speak here to the threat such poses.