Digital badges promise greater transparency and granularity in documenting the professional learning and knowledge base of teachers compared to traditional credentials like certificates of attendance, resumes, and transcripts. Yet before they gain widespread acceptance, educational leaders must understand what they are, how to use them, and how to…

Noncredit community college programs provide an important route for workforce development. They offer affordable and accessible short-term training options for individuals seeking access to middle-skills jobs. Absent the burdens of accreditation standards, they can respond nimbly to local labor market needs. However, they can also be varied and…

In Mississippi, 57% of job vacancies through 2022 will be middle-skill jobs, but only an estimated 50% of the state's workers will be trained to fill these jobs. The ACT WorkKeys assessment is the primary credentialing tool for high school students entering the middle-skill labor force. The problem addressed in this study is while Mississippi uses…

Texas, like many states, considers students to be "college, career, or military ready" if they earn an industry-based certification (IBC) in high school. While the expansion of opportunities for students to earn IBCs has been stimulated through state policy, limited research has systematically examined what factors influence students'…

Enrollment in American graduate degree programs is increasing, even as undergraduate enrollment declines continue in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With rising numbers of graduate awards, there has been increased attention on understanding the value of these degrees, especially master's degrees. With more workers attaining higher credentials,…

Florida is experiencing a shortage of high-quality mathematics teachers. According to the Florida Department of Education (FLDOE), there was a critical shortage of K-12 mathematics teachers (among several other subject areas) at the start of the 2022-2023 school year (FLDOE, 2022). In this report, the authors present selected findings from the…

This report is a response to congressional requests for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to identify, synthesize, and explain the core components of the workforce skills gap discourse and, to the extent possible, explore and clarify evidence on the existence of skills gaps. The report acknowledges that the skills gap label is often applied…

The paper shares the results of the process of forming a cross-disciplinary collaborative team and using a user-centered design framework to co-create a self-directed, self-paced, personalized, flexible learning environment as an alternative approach to preparing PK-8 preservice teachers to teach computational thinking. It is part of a larger…

Nationwide, many students who enroll in community college programs fail to persist in postsecondary education or complete a credential. The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) Two-Year Occupational Grant Pilot Program (the Occupational Grant) was a financial aid program designed to increase persistence and completion rates through…

The diversity of higher education institutions is changing, and more post-traditional students, including those associated with the military, are engaging in higher education. Almost every post-secondary institution in the United States has military students. In 2020, $11.5 billion was spent on over 875,000 eligible military students. Military…

The lack of skilled workers to fill open positions is a growing concern for the economy. The talent search firm Korn Ferry has estimated that the U.S. could face a deficit of 6.5 million highly skilled workers by 2030, and the skills gap could cost the country $1.75 trillion in revenue by that same year. More important, the failure to better…

Limited research explores how school administrators learn the leadership skills, knowledge, and dispositions that will support young adolescents, particularly how administrators are prepared and credentialed to lead middle grades schools. The purpose of this research was to examine which states offered and/or required administrator credentials…

AB 471 requires that the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing report to the Governor and the Legislature each year on the number of teachers who received credentials, certificates, permits and waivers. This report provides data collected by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (Commission) and addresses several questions…

Over the past decade, California has revised its standards for teacher preparation and credentialing and invested in high-retention pathways for entering teaching. As part of its new accreditation system, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) administers surveys to program completers who apply for their preliminary teaching…

This article responds to the rise of the micro-credential movement. It evidences the heightened attention politicians, policy-makers and educational leaders are giving to micro-credentials by framing the discussion in several recent high-level policy developments, an exponential growth in the number of academic publications and the increasing…