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["Secular" Realities]A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: The Certification System in Information Technology - October 2000
While hardly any of us who work in the traditional system of higher education noticed, a new, parallel universe of postsecondary credentials sprung up in the 1990s. One can see it now in job advertisements, on the Web, and in the financial markets: an educational and training enterprise that is transnational and competency-based, confers certifications not degrees, and exists beyond governments' notice or control. And it is much bigger than we imagine.
**1. In matters of post-compulsory schooling, we grew up and work in a world of traditional and predictable boundaries. We have universities, colleges, community colleges, and trade schools, all accredited by one recognized association or another, all granting credit hours and traditional degrees or certificates, all participating in the Federal student financial aid system, all reporting data on enrollments, degrees, staffing, salaries, and so forth to the U.S. Department of Education through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Even if these institutions offer virtual instruction, credit-by-examination, and other variations on the delivery of knowledge, they are still recognizable parts of the American postsecondary system.
2. The for-profit University of Phoenix is part of our comfortable world. So is the virtual Western Governors University. University College of the University of Maryland, with outposts in a dozen countries and distance delivery that reaches two dozen more, is one of us. Programs carried out by higher education institutions in concert with corporations that provide content (e.g. Novell), corporations that provide virtual delivery systems (e.g. Caliber Learning Network), and corporations that provide both (e.g. IBM), are our programs (Marchese, 1998). In all these cases, course work and credits as we historically have understood them are at the center of the transaction between student and program, and one party in the provision of learning offers the standard currency of higher education.
3. When national policies on post-compulsory schooling are formulated, the unit of analysis has been--and still is--the government-recognized college. From the 1960s through the 1990s, most countries assumed that these institutions would bear principal responsibility for developing new programs and new delivery systems that would serve the greater numbers of students coming forward for tertiary-level education. These policies were built on economic models of what could, would, or should happen given changes in demand.
4. Since 1972, when the Higher Education Amendments changed the fulcrum of funding in the United States from the institution to the student, the growth and change of our colleges, community colleges, and trade schools has been driven principally by demographics, and, to a lesser extent, by adjustments in financial aid formulas and practices. These are technical--and not fundamental--engines. They can be plugged into economic models. Indeed, the literature on access to higher education is full of such modeling.
5. Quite suddenly, all this seems old-industry, old-think. A new class of postsecondary providers has come on the scene--boundary-breaking and border-crossing every step of the way--to scramble institutional and governmental assumptions about the future. In higher education's fascination with the likes of for-profit degree-granting institutions such as the University of Phoenix or DeVry Institute, and with virtual degree delivery, it has been looking for challenges in the wrong direction. In a real sense, the operative economic models have been superceded by a "secular" development.
* Note: A shorter version of this monograph, with the title, "A Parallel Universe: Certification in the Information Technology Guild," appeared in Change, vol. 32 , no. 3 (May/June, 2000), pp. 20-29.
** Note: Paragraphs/sections are numbered to facilitate citations. See "References and Sources."