By: Jon Alfuth
Kathleen Farley from Google recently wrote about what it would mean to shift from traditional credit hours in K-12 education to skills-first standards. I’ve long thought a shift like this is needed and necessary. But, in my years of work around personalized, competency-based education policy, I continue to see such efforts run into a persistent and steadfast roadblock: college admissions requirements. Without a substantial shift in college admissions requirements, widespread adoption of skills-first standards and competency-based approaches will continue struggling to see widespread adoption.
Admission requirements are ostensibly used to screen for quality collegiate candidates. Coursework and grades make up key components of this evaluation process. These requirements aim to determine, among other things, whether students have the content knowledge and “soft” skills needed to succeed in pursuing a postsecondary degree. The implicit assumption here is that successful completion of a specific course sequence shows what students know and can do as well as how successful they will be on campus.
While rigorous coursework and good high school grades have historically been predictors of college success, there are signs that this may be shifting. Rampant grade inflation, persistently high rates of remedial coursework and college instructors indicating that students are increasingly unable to complete college-level coursework calls into question the underlying connection between courses, grades and postsecondary readiness. Yet, we continue to accept this approach because it’s the way that things have always been done.
This matters because prioritizing Carnegie units and grades in college admissions makes it difficult to shift to skills-based standards, as well as the classroom practices needed to operationalize them. By prioritizing traditional courses and grades as indicators of postsecondary readiness, colleges exert downward pressure on high schools to conform to traditional coursework approaches and outdated models of measurement, and this then extends to the entire K-12 system.
If we could instead orient K-12 education around skill development and application rather than Carnegie Units and grades, we could create a new paradigm for where, when and how students demonstrate college and career readiness. Competency-based education moves schools and systems towards this desirable future that balances knowledge with skills.
The Challenge With Change
Despite tremendous evidence of its potential, efforts to accelerate this shift have been stymied by the tyranny of college admissions requirements and processes. Parents, teachers, administrators and policymakers end up in a quandary. Anyone attempting to shift away from this traditional course sequence is criticized as trying to lock kids out of higher education and we snap back to the way things have always been done.
This logic, no matter how flawed, is why we need to shift higher education admissions if we are ever to achieve widespread changes to our K-12 education system. Imagine if, instead of assuming that courses and grades were an appropriate proxy for the knowledge, skills and dispositions that students need to be successful in postsecondary education, college admissions established standards around the skills they find to be most predictive of college success and requested evidence of those skills for admissions. In this future, rather than clamoring to keep high school coursework in stasis, we might expect to see an upswell in demand for more competency-based and skills-oriented K-12 learning experiences.
Policymakers have a role to play too. While not every state has set admissions requirement standards, many do. In these states, changing standards in statute or regulation will be key to making this shift in higher education. In states where there is no statewide requirement in law around admissions requirements, policymakers could either create them or exercise other levers such as funding incentives to compel higher education to make modifications.
There are a handful of states with policies that could be built upon. The Universities of Wisconsin System embeds a competency-based admissions option into its freshman admissions that could be more broadly applied. In Colorado, the higher education system explicitly instructs colleges to consider demonstrations of learning, like capstone projects, in their review of students’ academic preparation as long as it is documented on their transcript. Indiana has taken a different approach, offering automatic admission pathways to postsecondary institutions for students showing mastery of durable skills like communication and collaboration through high level diploma “seals.”
There are also individual institutions piloting admission innovations that could inform large scale changes. The University of Michigan Ross School of Business allows students to submit a performance portfolio alongside their general application materials. The City University of New York operates a pilot program that uses performance assessments to admit qualified applicants whose entry exam scores fall below standard admissions thresholds. In a small study, students admitted under New York’s pilot program had a higher persistence rate after the first year than those admitted under the standard admissions protocols
The Infrastructure of K-12
Easier said than done, I know. The nuts and bolts of how exactly colleges would do this would be a challenge, because frankly it hasn’t been done before, at least not at scale. Examples like the Mastery Transcript Consortium or the Big Picture learning credential offer examples of how K-12 systems might capture and communicate information about students’ mastery of skills. Participation in the performance standards consortium has been particularly effective, leading to higher graduation rates and greater college persistence rates. Colorado offers another powerful example of how a state might give broad flexibility to schools and districts in a skills-first education system through its menu of options for how students show what they can do to graduate from high school.
Reimaging how we evaluate postsecondary readiness would take a highly coordinated effort, but it’s well past time to begin taking steps in this direction. If we are ever to advance from a system stuck in centuries past towards skills-first standards and widespread K-12 transformation, changes to the college admission process must be among the challenges we tackle first.
Jon Alfuth serves as the Senior Director of State Policy at KnowledgeWorks, where he leads technical assistance strategies to help states adopt and implement personalized, competency-based learning systems. A former public school teacher and administrator in Memphis, Tennessee, Jon brings deep, hands-on educational experience to his policy work. His extensive background in state and federal policy includes roles at the National Governors Association—where he advised states on education-workforce alignment, dual enrollment, and work-based learning—as well as positions with the U.S. Department of Education and as a policy aid to Senator Richard Durbin. Jon holds both a bachelor’s degree and a Master of Public Affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in his spare time, he enjoys running half marathons and reading world history.
