Credentials

"When trying to understand, let alone navigate, a landscape as chaotic and confusing as America's credential ecosystem, a guidebook from trusted experts is essential. This is that—the resource you'll want to read and reread to ensure you have a firm foundation for the journey."

Scott Cheney

CEO, Credential Engine

"A future-focused analysis of credentials and credentialism doesn't get any more timely than this. This is a must read for higher education leaders today, but it may prove even more important for future leaders interested in an equitable and sustainable future of work and learning."

Parminder K. Jassal

CEO, Unmudl Skills-to-Jobs Marketplace

"Given the accelerating rate of change in the workplace, credentials have become an even more essential tool to ensure the relevance of skills. The authors’ overview of the credentials landscape should help readers understand more fully the complex factors at work in how they are used by employers and educators."

Van Ton-Quinlivan

CEO, Futuro Health; Former Executive Vice Chancellor, California Community Colleges

"Paul Gaston and Michelle Van Noy tour the burgeoning credentials landscape from traditional degrees to emerging and unfamiliar new credentials and through non-degree credentials to apprenticeships, describing their characteristics and considering their applicability and quality. In doing so, they provide a very helpful introduction and analysis of an increasingly complex field."

Peter Ewell

President Emeritus, National Center for Higher Education Management Systems

"Credentials does a wonderful job of laying the framework of why credentials are important to an advanced society focusing on educating the workforce and building the economy. By looking back as a way to look forward, Paul Gaston and Michele Van Noy

document the importance of well-defined credentials while suggesting what the competency-based credentials of the future will look like. What I like the most is how they advocate for quality and equity both within each credential and in the transitions made among credentials."

Aaron Thompson

President, Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education

"Credentials are fundamental to employment and opportunity, but also to personal identity. They are of interest to educators, employers, and policy makers. Yet despite their ubiquity and significance they are poorly understood; even more so every day as the number and type of credentials have exploded in the last two decades. Gaston and Van Noy provide an excellent framework to help navigate this proliferation. They plot an insightful way forward for college and university administrators, faculty members, academic advisors and others as they design academic programs (and associated credentials) and help guide students to use credentials to achieve their goals.

Thomas Bailey

President, Teachers College, Columbia University

"The importance of this book is reflected in continuing calls for attention to quality and equity in education at all levels within postsecondary education. With government at both the state and national level as well as other stake-holders seeking increased accountability through accreditation, this readable book could not be more timely."

Leah Matthews

Executive Director, Distance Education Accrediting Commission