The Chronicle of Higher Education
December 7, 2010

Certificate Programs Could Play a Key Role in Meeting the Nation's Educational Goals
By Jennifer Gonzalez

Creating more certificate programs would help colleges meet the challenge of getting more students to finish a postsecondary credential and help states build skilled work forces, according to a new report from Complete College America, a Washington-based nonprofit group.

Certificate programs, especially those that are at least one year in length, would give students an opportunity to earn a postsecondary credential in a relatively short period of time, the report says. Students in those programs would be able to enter the work force faster than their peers, and the programs would build a foundation for students to pursue further academic work in the future, the report adds.

Complete College America, which works with states to increase college access and the number of college graduates, commissioned the report, "Certificates Count: An Analysis of Sub-Baccalaureate Certificates." The report was completed by FutureWorks, a Seattle consulting and policy-development firm.

Calling long-term certificate programs an underutilized strategy in meeting the nation's college-attainment goals, the nonprofit group advocates aggressive federal and state policies to promote such programs. "The United States should double the number of long-­term certificates produced within the next five years, and then double that number again over the subsequent five years," the report says.

Earning a certificate has "real economic value," said Stan Jones, president of Complete College America. "In some cases, they have more value than associate degrees and even some bachelor's degrees."

About 750,000 certificates were awarded in 2007-8, the most recent year for which data are available. A little more than half of all certificates are awarded by public institutions, mostly community colleges. About four in 10 are granted by for-profit institutions.

Not all certificates are created equal.

Two-year colleges offer both long- and short-term certificate programs. However, the report finds that students reap the most financial benefits when they enroll in and complete a long-term certificate program of one year or more.

Research shows that those types of programs are consistently linked to increased earnings. That's because they tend to include greater technical and academic rigor than shorter-term programs, and they provide graduates with a wider range of job skills.

The report highlights research from Kentucky that found increases in average income for people who earned certificates from programs of at least one year were nearly identical to income returns of earning an associate degree. The incomes of women who completed either the certificate program or an associate degree increased by almost 40 percent, while the incomes of men who completed either went up by about 20 percent.

However, short-term certificate programs resulted in a much smaller increase in incomes. Men who completed certificate programs lasting less than one year earned about 10 percent more than those who did not complete those programs, while the earnings advantage for women in these short-term programs was only about 3 percent.

The report makes several recommendations for using certificate programs as more of a central tool in increasing college completion. They include encouraging states to put in place spending formulas and other policy incentives to support the creation of certificate programs of one year or more. Shorter-term programs that lack significant labor-market payoff should be discouraged, the report says.