The Future (?) of PLA

I recently returned from the 29^th National Institute on the Assessment of Adult Learning, which I also direct. (This is partly why there has been so much time between posts.) As much as I love being handed a microphone and acting as host to all of these educators and assessment professionals, I do find that the role is harder to fill every year. It’s not my energy level flagging (I think). Rather, it’s the nature of the main topic of the Institute, Prior Learning Assessment (or PLAR for you Canadians, or RPL or CPL for other people). It’s been around for 45 years, and it’s a valid method of assessing the learning that adults acquire through work, military experience, hobbies, or any external learning experience. It’s also changing and evolving, which keeps it interesting: institutions have introduced new methods and approaches for translating learning into credit that students can earn toward a degree. PLA links education and the workplace: competency-based education really does come directly out of the PLA world.

The problem, however, is that, on the one hand, PLA is being co-opted by people who don't understand it, and on the other hand, it is being shoved to the side by institutions that mistakenly see it as a time-waster and an unnecessary expense.

Both of these issues have everything to do with money. Not that this is surprising.

Prior Learning Assessment has its roots in the radical challenge to authority of the 1960s that affected all institutions. All sources of traditional authority were called into question, and higher education was no exception. Why was it that only learning that one acquired within the walls of the ivory tower had value? Why couldn’t learning that none acquired through experience or through less formal training also be valued? PLA was seen as liberating and transformational, as the everyday learning one acquired was suddenly valuable and validated. (Yes, it still had to be validated by people in the ivory tower, but it was a good step.) At first only a handful of institutions did PLA, and these tended to be ones that were exclusively adult-focused: my institution, SUNY Empire State College, Charter Oak State College, and a few University Without Walls programs that sprouted up at places like UMass-Amherst and the University of Minnesota.

These programs existed to transform the lives of adult learners, to expand access to education, and to make people feel that they were not imposters—that they belonged in the college classroom, and that their knowledge was as valid and as relevant as anything a professor might teach them. While this idea has not been accepted by everyone—many college faculty members still raise questions about the rigor of PLA, and the notion that something learned on one’s own could be as good as something a professor could have taught them—it has certainly gained a foothold in higher education.

Recently, though, the idea of leveraging learning acquired outside the classroom has been co-opted by those looking for ways to crank out more college degrees and increase the number of adults with credentials, without spending more money on higher education. Rather than add classroom space, why not just increase the number of credits students bring in from outside and get them closer to the finish line? While this isn’t a bad idea in principle, it’s being applied by a number of state systems without any sense of the empowerment and transformation that PLA should represent. Instead, it’s a cynical move on the part of politicians who are mistrustful of their public institutions, instituted as a way of suggesting that the ivory tower is indeed not as valuable as its inhabitants believe.

On the other side of the coin, PLA is seen by some as expensive and irrelevant. Studies have consistently shown that students who use PLA persist in college longer and have much higher graduation rates—in other words, students who earn credit via PLA actually take more courses with you, not fewer, because they are less likely to drop out. However, misguided faculty members and bean-counters look at the costs and revenues for the numerous methods of prior learning assessment on their own terms, and don’t relate them to the success of the overall enterprise. They see PLA as either a shortcut to college credit, akin to what a diploma mill would do, or as taking students out of their own courses in favor of the cheaper PLA methods. Cheaper must mean less profitable, right? Actually, wrong.

I think the problem here, as it is at my own institution, is that people are not sure to which category PLA methods belong. Are they an academic offering, comparable to courses? Or are they the same as transferred courses? Or are they a recruiting and enrollment management tool, to be compared to the expenses incurred by Admissions and Marketing and Advising?

I think PLA has something in common with all three, though they should be considered to be their own category. PLA is an academic offering, a method of documenting and addressing the learning outcomes of a course: courses are just one way to earn credit. As such, PLA methods utilize a rigorous approach to assessing students, in that the assessment is focused on the actual work produced and how well it demonstrates mastery of the subject—whether someone showed up to class or made smart comments in class is not part of the determination of credit.

Credit earned via PLA is also like transferred credit form another institution—it is credit earned elsewhere that your institution agrees to accept toward your own degrees. I am not aware of any institution that it trying to limit admissions to transfer students—why the double standard?

Finally, the idea that PLA competes with an institution’s own traditional offerings is flat out wrong-headed. Students do not, and should not, use PLA as a kind of independent study. (There is much to be said in favor of self-paced independent study for those students who prefer that approach, though.) On the other hand, forcing a student to enroll in your regular courses when they already know a subject is a waste of time, both the student’s and the instructor’s. Short-sighted institutions look at the cost of tuition for a course, and compare that to the cost of a portfolio assessment or a challenge exam (which is usually much lower), and they think they are actually doing math when they arrive at the conclusion that they will make more money if they get students into courses. Which, again, is not true. Students have options: they can drop out or transfer, or, if they are told this when they arrive, they can simply choose not to enroll.

All of this is to explain why I am so discouraged at the end of the National Institute. Even my own institution has fallen prey to both of these misguided tendencies, driven by the fear of the market, and not knowing how to develop a sustainable business model: the quick, cynical fix, and the pursuit of the short-term gain, at the cost of the long-term gain and the sacrifice of the mission.