WASHINGTON, D.C. — Competency-based education is an “important building block” in the push to make higher education more productive, but one of the biggest hurdles to its growth is figuring out how to allot financial aid in the absence of the traditional credit hour, a U.S. Department of Education official said Thursday.
“We do need to foster innovation to raise productivity in this environment in a way that maintains quality,” said Dr. Eduardo Ochoa, Assistant Secretary for Postsecondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education.
“It’s not a matter of just pushing out more credentialed individuals, but men and women who have the knowledge, skills and abilities those credentials are supposed to represent,” Ochoa said. “Competency-based education is an important building block in this effort.”
Ochoa made his remarks at the Center for American Progress during a panel discussion titled “Competency Based Education: College Strategies for the Success of 21st Century Students.”
The discussion took place in conjunction with the release of a new issue brief on competency-based education written by Louis Soares, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Much of the discussion focused on the merits of competency-based education – a workforce development approach in which institutions of higher education award credentials based on what students can do versus what they’ve been taught or how many credit-hours they’ve amassed.
The approach was cast as being beneficial to employers for its ability to produce graduates able to do specific things to meet employer needs, and as a more cost-effective way for students to get skills without having to take extraneous courses not germane to their chosen line of work.
