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If you need to take a class to get credits toward graduation, there’s usually financial aid available for that.
But if you’ve already picked up the material on your own—through work, independent study or whatever else—and you just need to take a test to get those same credits, there’s no financial aid to pay for the test.
There’s something wrong with that.
Students who show up at college with skills they’ve picked up elsewhere complete at higher rates when they’re awarded credit for what they can prove they already know. That makes sense: allowing them to bypass courses they don’t need saves them time and money, reducing the opportunities for life to get in the way of completion. It also saves everyone the frustration of pushing students into classes they’ve already mastered. Many of us have heard the stories of students who arrived fluent in, say, Spanish, only to flunk Spanish 101. The culprit in those cases is typically a combination of boredom and frustration. The student doesn’t see the point in an overly simplistic class and stops attending, which leads to a failing grade. Prior learning assessment allows students to avoid this kind of frustration.
Prior learning assessment (also sometimes called credit for prior learning) comes in various forms. Standardized tests like CLEP or DANTES are available in some popular general education areas; in those cases, simply being able to cover the cost of the exam would make a difference. In other cases, something like portfolio assessment is more common. CAEL does that at scale, though at a considerable cost (usually to the student) of both time and money. Local departmental exams or portfolio assessments have to be covered either through institutional operating budgets or through charging students fees that financial aid won’t cover.
Conceptually, PLA is similar to competency-based education. The operational difference is that PLA is usually assessed upon enrollment, where CBE occurs in a structured way during enrollment. But the idea behind PLA is similar to the one behind CBE: in both cases, credit is granted based on outcomes, rather than the time spent getting to the outcomes. If it takes one student three weeks to learn to put together a business plan and it takes another student eight weeks, so be it; as long as they can produce a satisfactory one, they can move forward.
The great danger with CBE is students getting lost; the traditional semester schedule provides a structure that can help make the path to a degree legible. Institutions are experimenting to find the optimal mix of guidance and autonomy to allow the most students to succeed. But doing that at scale is prohibitively expensive for most places as long as students can’t get financial aid to do it.
From a pragmatic policy perspective, I could see starting with PLA as the easier case. What if, say, Pell Grants could cover CLEP testing fees? What if portfolio assessment could be underwritten, at least to such a degree that institutions could afford to do it more regularly? I don’t think the sky would fall; if anything, I suspect we’d find it both easier and more rewarding than is usually assumed. And starting there, where the costs would be relatively modest, could provide lessons to apply to the more ambitious case of entire CBE programs.
Institutionally, a similar dynamic would hold. Colleges that could afford to ramp up PLA would develop protocols and standards for portfolio assessment that could then be applied to the development of CBE programs. They’d learn, too, how to administer the newly available financial aid in ways that make sense. Over time, transfer institutions would have to adapt, which could only help.
The federal Department of Education has allowed some experimental sites to move forward, but to really make a difference we’d need to see aid become available nationally. Many colleges won’t (or can’t afford to) move significantly toward PLA unless and until they’re assured that the money will be there to pay for it.
PLA would be a great place to start.
