Kill the Credit Hour

College costs are skyrocketing and students and their families are looking to make a good investment. To make that possible, we need to move away from measuring course credit by time spent in a classroom to measuring learning outcomes.  

That's the argument Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at New America, makes in "College credit? Kill that," the latest in New America's "Big Ideas" series on CNN.com.

"If credit hours truly reflected a standardized unit of learning, they would be fully transferable across institutions. An hour in Arizona is an hour in New York. But colleges routinely reject credits earned at other colleges, suggesting that even though they use credit hours themselves, they know they are not a reliable measure of how much students have learned. Many students, however, believe the fiction that the credit hour is a standardized currency and assume that credits will transfer from one school to the next. This is an unfortunate and costly assumption," says Laitinen.

You can read all of the "Big Ideas for America" here.