Introduction

Jordan Schoener needed a jump-start on his education. He had joined the military straight out of high school and, after completing his service eight years later, went to work at an iron casting foundry in his hometown of Mankato, Minnesota.¹ He enjoyed machining, and as he approached his 30s, he decided to upgrade his skills by pursuing an associate’s degree in it from the nearby South Central College, a community and technical college.

Attending the program while continuing to work full time could have slowed Schoener down. But luckily for him, South Central was part of a grant program run by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), which allowed the school to create a system that awarded him 12 credits for machining skills he had obtained through his previous experience in the military and at work.² Receiving those credits gave him the head start he needed to earn his degree in two years. He is now pursuing his bachelor degree in manufacturing engineering at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Schoener’s experience shows the promise of prior learning assessment (PLA), the process of evaluating and awarding college credit for the equivalent college-level learning acquired outside of a postsecondary institution, such as at a job, during military service, corporate training, or through volunteer work. Colleges and policymakers have been working to build these opportunities for 80 years.³ Now, interest in prior learning assessment is growing as we face a future where people need to get their skills and abilities recognized and built into credentials. These credentials in turn give them an edge in the face of automation and recession.

Unfortunately, Schoener’s story is all too rare. Despite years of investment in policies and programs to support PLA, it has not been scaled up in the way that other student success strategies—such as remedial education reform or guided pathways—have. For instance, a recent survey by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges of its member institutions found that very few track the use of PLA and, among those that do, less than 5 percent of students take advantage of the opportunity.⁴

Even after years of focus, PLA has failed to take root. The Labor Department’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program provides an opportunity for studying why that might be. Over each of its four rounds, the DOL emphasized investing in better systems for awarding credit for prior learning. By directing money and focus on PLA and adult students, TAACCCT created the ideal circumstances for colleges to implement PLA.

We conducted a systematic review of how PLA was implemented under the ideal circumstances provided by the TAACCCT grant program. We found that there was plenty of positive policy development, but student use of PLA opportunities remained low. In some isolated places, we found policy and practice changes that were actually connected to an increase in students’ use of PLA. From this analysis, we distilled lessons on implementation and suggest how to scale up the use of PLA in higher education.

There was plenty of positive policy development, but student use of PLA opportunities was low.