CPL Experts Highlight Opportunities in New Survey on Accessibility and Inclusion in Credit for Prior Learning Programs

On June 26, CAEL hosted a webinar in which experts from CAEL, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (ACCRAO), and Purdue Global discussed findings from Enhancing Accessibility and Inclusion: The 2024 Landscape of Credit for Prior Learning in U.S. and Canadian Higher Education. The report, published by AACRAO in partnership with CAEL, describes the results from a survey of 399 postsecondary education institutions in the U.S. 

The Importance of the Report

The report is the latest in a series that AACRAO is conducting to track trends in credit for prior learning (CPL). “We felt it was very important to partner with CAEL because of their expertise and their unique membership,” said Dr. Wendy Kilgore, senior director of research for AACRAO. 

Wilson Finch, vice president of higher education initiatives for CAEL, has specialized in higher education policy with an emphasis on CPL for more than a decade. He said the quantitative data such studies provide are vital to the field. “We have done a lot of research in this area, and I could talk anecdotally about it, but the more ammunition that can be provided in these types of conversations, the better.”

Overall CPL Offering

Webinar presenters acknowledged the report’s positive finding that 82% of responding institutions indicated that they offer some kind of credit for prior learning, up slightly from 79% in a similar 2019 survey. But they cautioned that the presence of CPL programs doesn’t guarantee students are accessing them. 

“That's really where all of these other policies and practices come in, and why it's so important to ask a lot of different questions about what CPL looks like at your institution, because those details really matter when it comes to the question about accessibility,” said Becky Klein-Collins, CAEL vice president of research and impact. Such details are precisely what the landscape study sought to shed light on.

Fees and Financial Aid

Previous CAEL research has shown that despite its powerful benefits, only about 10% of students participate in CPL. Underserved students are even less likely to use it. One well-known barrier to CPL access is cost. In the survey, about two-thirds of respondents said that their institutions charged fees for CPL. Very few offered financial assistance to students to offset them. Nor do current financial aid regulations consider the fees associated with the assessment of prior learning to be eligible for Title IV federal financial aid.

Faced with the choice of paying CPL fees or sitting through an entire class covered by financial aid, students otherwise eligible for CPL often choose the latter, said Finch, sacrificing a valuable opportunity to save time and frustration. How can institutions counter this ironic and self-perpetuating trend against CPL usage among students who stand to benefit the most from it? Finch recommends eliminating CPL fees entirely. 

“No institution is getting rich off of these fees,” he said. Moreover, CAEL research has established that CPL students end up persisting and completing at greater rates. That, Finch reminded the audience, means CPL results in more tuition dollars, making the decision to trade fewer fees for more CPL even easier. 

Staffing for CPL

Finch used survey findings about staffing levels to raise awareness about another vicious cycle that can limit CPL impact. While larger institutions were more likely to invest in dedicated CPL staffing, the correlation between staff and institution size wasn’t perfectly linear. “Different institutions are in different places in terms of their funding and capacity,” he said. 

Expanding CPL usage requires dedicated personnel, although it can be a challenge for some institutions to maintain even one full-time staff member, Finch acknowledged. But failing to take on the challenge can be self defeating. “It becomes a cycle,” he said. “If you don't have a lot of staff available, then they can't answer questions, there's a lot of confusion, there's a lack of consistency, and then what happens is that students don't utilize it because no one's advocating for it, and then because there's low utilization rates, there's no justification for more staff.”

Data and Monitoring

Regardless of the level of staffing support, institutions can’t know how effective their programs are in supporting students if they don’t capture CPL data. About two thirds of the responding institutions said they tracked the number of learners with CPL credits and the number of total CPL credits conferred. But only 40% tracked CPL credits by learner demographic. A lack of such data makes it more difficult to address CPL’s chronic equity issues, explained Klein-Collins, which result in CPL’s underutilization among students for whom it is shown to have the greatest potential.

A little more than half (56%) of survey respondents report CPL credits by pathway and/or assessment mechanism, also a number that CPL experts wish were higher. Aggregating military and AP sources of CPL, for example, can obfuscate trends, said Finch. “It's very hard to know how well your program is doing if you're not measuring it.”

Transcripts and Transfer

Ambiguity around CPL can also be a challenge on transcripts, Klein-Collins and Finch said. A strong majority (86%) of the institutions surveyed said that they record all credit awarded through CPL on a learner's transcript. But there is significant variance in how institutions detail it. About half list the number of CPL credits and show CPL credit as a specific course with a pass/fail grade (54% and 50% respectively). About one third (31%) indicate CPL as testing for exam credits on a transcript. 

“While this can seem overly technical, it really can matter,” said Finch. “It has a real, direct effect on transferability and whether the credit is considered legitimate or not.” The more clearly CPL credits are correlated to a traditional course, the more likely they will be accepted in transfer, he said. 

Allegra Fowler, executive director for the Center for Prior Learning Recognition at Purdue Global, said the transcription findings point to the need for postsecondary educators to improve transcript clarity around CPL. “The data captured in the survey here shows a real opportunity for us to do more as an industry, to maybe not seek standardization, but just seek better common language about how these items, how these learning objects, are recorded on a transcript.”

Aside from issues identifying CPL on a transcript, there are policies outright preventing its transfer. More than half (54%) of institutions do not accept CPL awarded by other colleges or universities in transfer, the survey found, an improvement from the 65% share reported in the 2019 study. Invited to share reasons for forbidding CPL in transfer, respondents cited factors related to integrity and vigor, lack of documentation and verification, and institutional policy and faculty discretion. 

Establishing CPL within a broader articulation agreement was the most likely condition for permitting CPL transfer among respondents. Yet such provisions are not frequently formulated within traditional articulation agreements and transfer pathways, said Finch. He discouraged the avoidance of CPL programs because of transfer challenges.

Again citing the importance of quality CPL data, Finch instead urged practitioners to analyze the most frequent users of CPL. Often, he said, institutions find that a very high proportion of learners who could earn CPL credit (that is, their background and degree programs permit it) never intend to transfer in the first place. This confirms the benefits of proceeding with a CPL program even if wrinkles in transfer can’t be immediately ironed out. As for the wholesale rejection of CPL transfer credit, Finch challenged the philosophy behind such a policy. “The question is, if you do think it's [CPL] equivalent, and you do think it has relevant value enough to award credit for it, why would you treat it any differently than other transfer credit?”

“We trust the faculty at the institution of origin to have graded their assignments in a traditional course, and if they're following the CAEL best practices, the faculty would be leading the way on those CPL decisions as well,” said Fowler. “So if we trust faculty to assess their learning in a traditional classroom, it follows that it is reasonable to trust faculty to conduct the same assessment just through a different vehicle."

Fowler went on to acknowledge that embracing CPL in transfer risks another extreme. “We find ourselves in a position of being wary of duplication,” she said. For example, a student may have received CPL at a prior institution via a certification crosswalk. If the student presents the same certificate at the new institution accepting the CPL transfer credit, the student could receive double credit. 

“There's this level of detail and level of exchange I think that needs to mature in the relationship between these transfer institutions,” she said. To that end, she participates in a community of practice CAEL has established on CPL mobility that is engaging practitioners throughout the country. 

The community of practice is focusing on challenges and opportunities related to the mobility and transfer of CPL, and the group will be presenting findings at CAEL’s annual conference. More information on how to attend the conference is available at cael.org. Information on how to participate in a CAEL community of practice, available to all CAEL members, can be requested at cael@cael.org.