Micro-pathways: A Gateway to College

The time has come when a college freshman can be 15, 18, 25, 45 or even my age.

So... the college community breathed a sigh of relief this week, when we all learned that last fall’s shocking report of falling freshmen enrollment, was, er, um, actually, miscalculated. Now, we learn, freshmen college enrollment is up! Significantly. 5%. Hmm..

I have to feel for the good folks at National Student Clearinghouse, who do these quick turnaround calculations each fall and spring, because, as they explained in their mia culpa, reporting these numbers is getting harder and harder, as we try to define and redefine, “What is a freshman?” It turns out that, these days, college enrollment comes in many more flavors, so it’s hard for the analysts to tell a high school junior who is taking a college class from a welder who is earning an upskilling certificate from a dewy-eyed 18 year old being dropped off on campus for the next four years. As Liam Knox at Inside Higher Ed summed up the revised update, “The numbers suggest a new landscape taking shape. Much of this fall’s recovery was powered by a rapid boost in alternative credential and certificate programs, which the report shows are up nearly 10 percent year over year and 28.9 percent since 2019. “

The new landscape reflects the rise of “just in time” learning, which I write about in my book coming out Feb 25, Who Needs College Anymore? And in this blog, I want to draw attention to one particular new model I feature, which is starting to get a lot of attention: micro-pathways.

“Co-designed with learners and employers, micro-pathways are two or more stackable credentials, including a durable skills micro-credential, that are flexibly delivered to be achieved within less than a year and result in a job at or above the local median wage, and start learner-earners on the path to an associate degree.”

from Education Design Lab website

Community colleges lost one-third of their enrollment between 2010 and 2022, so many of them have focused since the pandemic on how adapt the model for a new age. And enrollment, particularly in skills-focused programs, has begun to recover.

Micro-pathways are not producing big enrollments yet. They are too new and have yet to produce outcome data. But 100 colleges have recently launched or are in the design phase with employers for 130 of these job role specific cluster of micro-credentials. I write about them in my upcoming book as one way to deliver on what I believe will be the college design model of the future: a stepladder approach, where learners can come in and out of college building their earnings power as they go.

Data is starting to show that for micro-pathway pilots at least, learners and workers are tapping into this stepladder approach at all ages and points in their working lives, starting in high school. (Who’s a freshman here? These folks could all qualify.)

Age distribution of students enrolling in micro-pathways nationwide, Data Collaborative, Education Design Lab

And the data show that employers are coming from many industries in search of a more skill specific talent pipeline.

Let me give a few examples of how states, colleges and employers are using micro-pathways:

Phoenix:

I talked to Janelle Elias this week. She’s VP of academic affairs, strategy and advancement at Rio Salado College in the Phoenix area. She described how four colleges around Phoenix are working with the Education Design Lab to create micro-pathways across several fields, based on employer demand from advanced manufacturing to health care to tech. The first to launch last fall have been for data analytics and IT help desk roles. Also, a two week bootcamp to expose interested workers to the coming demand in becoming a machinist in the semiconductor field, which is expected to explode shortly with new plants coming online. The two week boot camp is an outlier, but most of the micro-pathways are six months to a year to ensure that training for entry level roles includes modules and “certification” on what the field is now calling “durable” skills (or soft skills).

Janelle says it has been: “Game changing to be able to show up with employers to design to their needs,” and to have faculty leading the design and considering how these “fast track” learning sprints can be designed to qualify for credit and stack to degrees if learners want that.

I was fascinated to see that nationwide, besides being all ages, the majority of micro-pathway enrollees are coming to college for the first time. So they are those elusive “fresh people” colleges have been trying to reach out to for years. Have we landed on a model to support the majority of adults who do not hold a college degree? Could this help with the diploma divide that is creating resentment in our society and stress for families who feel caught between a desire for professional career paths and facing a financial or time investment of a degree that feels risky?

Janelle believes that the role of colleges, particularly community colleges, is changing,

“ Employers and students don’t want to wait two years or more to solve their employment issues,” she told me.

Colorado:

In the book, I describe how Colorado used micro-pathways a little differently. Coming out of the pandemic, the health care system reached a crisis point with a shortage of clinical therapists and social workers in the rural parts of the state. Colorado community colleges were able to bring together, not only their employers, but also the the certification bodies that set the rules for how much training is required. Here’s a mini excerpt from the book, including a quote from Jennifer Dale, Community College of Aurora:

Eight years—that’s how long it takes to get through university training for these roles. And even after that long road, the jobs don’t pay that well. “Poverty is a very real situation that a majority of our students deal with,” Jennifer (Dale) explained, “and how do we support students in learning a field, a skill, getting into an industry that provides a living wage and more?” The roles they are creating have titles like behavioral health assistant, peer support specialist, and client/patient navigator. These will be entry-level jobs that fill a gap for the community while allowing learners to earn a living while they build further skills. It’s a practical stepladder approach for an industry that had been asking for all types of workers to have at least a master’s degree.

San Antonio:

Finally, Texas. Luke Dowden has been leading one of the biggest embraces of micro-credentials in the country at the five community colleges that make up Alamo Colleges District in San Antonio. When I met him 7 or 8 years ago, he was just getting started, but today the colleges have built a reputation of being responsive in near real time to the shorter-term needs of employers, whether it’s supply chain logistics or health care. Among many initiatives, they did a health care micro-pathway design sprint in just a few months to accelerate the region’s health care worker pipeline, to meet employer demand for several roles, such as cardio technician. “We’re doing our best to get people upskilled,” Luke said, “and getting them to living wage jobs, but here’s my real hope, that we’ll prove that a micro-credential can unlock a resource that learner would have never had, which is access to tuition assistance from their employers.”

But Luke, like others, is sobered by what we give up if we encourage learners to take shortcuts, bypassing degree pathways, which is why these micro-pathways are set up to stack to the next training and learning rung on the stepladder, to build to a degree. What we don’t know yet, is whether learners will persist, and come in and out of learning opportunities while they are working. (We do know that a majority of college students, no matter what age, work at least parttime.) The Lab has set up a first of its kind Data Collaborative to track outcomes data for short term programs.

Luke: “I am worried that we are going to convince a group of people that this is good for them because it’s quick. That it gets them a good job, that’s family sustainable, but then what happens to them when they hit the ceiling in that job…we need to finish the work of connecting that (the micro-pathways) all the way.”

For this reason, the colleges working on this model have agreed to try to implement eight design criteria, the first of which makes it clear that micro-pathways should build college credit and visibly stack to degrees. The last one on the list below is also important in the age of “just in time” learning. It recommends that colleges incorporate ‘durable” skills training into the micro-pathways, so, a tangible certification in critical thinking, or collaboration, for example. The employers recommend which durable skill(s) is(are) most important for the job role. (Critical thinking is the frontrunner, in case you were wondering.)

I don’t want to suggest that this new construct of micro-pathways is moving the needle yet on community college enrollment. Luke, for example, says 30% of San Antonio’s 100,000 in enrollment is for non-degree training programs, but that includes everything from one-off certificates to apprenticeships. It’s too new and they are just starting, And there are challenges. Like how to fund micro-pathways and design them in a way that students can get college credit. Also, colleges don’t have budgets for consumer marketing to tell the world about fast track programs, to get the word out that there’s a new form of college in town, purpose fit for today’s fast changing skills economy, but frankly, still needing more proof points.

The frustration of both learners and employers to hurry up already is becoming more palpable in surveys. The latest survey out this week (Hult International School of Business) says 9 out of 10 employers try to avoid hiring recent college graduates, because they just haven’t learned the right skills. But what I love about micro-pathways is that it’s an attempt by, now, thousands of educators and employers to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even though I’m coming out with a book called Who Needs College Anymore? I mean it more as a provocation to face the realities of how college needs to change. Not to discard the noble model that has served most of us who will read this article.