As University of Texas System Expands Free Online Certificates, Students Super-Charge Degrees
Credit: Brandon Bell / Getty Images News- The University of Texas (UT) System has expanded its partnership with online education platform Coursera to provide all students with free access to job certificates.
- In the year since it launched, UT students have spent over 111,000 hours learning online through Coursera’s Career Academy and have completed more than 18,300 courses.
- Experts in the credentialing space see this as part of the future for higher education institutions.
As Brody Feldberg wrapped up his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, he was increasingly concerned by news articles about how hard it was for college graduates to land a job — and by the growing sentiment that a four-year degree was no longer enough.
He knew he wanted to work in analytics after his May 2023 graduation. But he was worried his economics degree wasn’t going to be enough, and he wanted a leg up. When he received an email from UT about a new credentialing program, he pursued a Google Data Analytics certificate to pad his resume for free.
Feldberg is now a cost analyst and said that, in job interviews, he always leveraged his certificate and emphasized how he coupled it with his degree.
“My college classes gave me a lot of knowledge, but it didn’t really give me real-world application use. Whereas that’s exactly what the certificate gave me,” Feldberg told BestColleges. “Even today, in my job, it’s so applicable to what I’m doing. It really prepared me, more so than any of my other classes, for how the real world operates, and what’s being used.”
The program — Texas Credentials for the Future — turned out to be a resounding success for both Feldberg and his university.
Last month, the UT System announced it was expanding its partnership with online education platform Coursera to provide students at all of its institutions with free access to nondegree credentials and job certificates.
The program originally offered free access to Coursera’s certificates to the 240,000 students from UT’s nine academic institutions. The expansion includes the nearly 15,000 students enrolled at UT’s five health institutions: UT Health Houston, UT Health San Antonio, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, UT Medical Branch, and UT Southwestern Medical Center.
The move is meant to help students, alumni, faculty, and staff augment their degrees, degree plans, and work experience with industry-recognized professional certificates in high-demand markets.
Students Flock to Earn Credentials
Stackable credentials are certificates, microcredentials, and badges that build on prior learning and can reflect a set of acquired knowledge and skills to potential employers. Stacking credentials is particularly popular — and often more successful — in fields such as technology and healthcare, more so than in other fields.
UT officials say they hope these credentials will prepare students for high-demand roles in fast-growing industries.
Kelvin Bentley, program manager for Texas Credentials for the Future, told BestColleges that the initiative’s first year saw “a strong level of interest from students and alumni,” including students from its health campuses asking when they could get free access to certificates.
Since its inception, UT students have spent over 111,000 hours learning online through Coursera’s Career Academy and have completed more than 18,300 courses. The Career Academy offers over 45 professional certificates in partnership with Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
An April 2024 UT survey found that the majority of students with Coursera accounts said their access to professional certificates was a positive experience. And most said they would recommend other students pursue microcredentials.
“The strong response to our Texas Credentials for the Future initiative already underway at UT’s academic campuses made expanding access to students enrolled at our health institutions an easy decision and natural next step,” said UT System Chancellor James B. Milliken in the press release about the expansion.
“In today’s dynamic healthcare landscape, many students may wish to supplement their current health-related degree plans with credentials for work in the biotechnology, biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, and pharmaceuticals industries. We’re all in for any way we can help our students expand their career opportunities.”
Streamlining the Credentialing Process
Bentley said the main challenge students listed was how time-consuming earning the credentials is.
“I really like the fact that our system is trying to find ways to work with faculty to help educate them about how they could imbed access to the microcredentials in courses,” Bentley said.
He cited faculty bundling credentials into courses as extra credit or alternative projects. He said this motivates students to complete the credentials.
Feldberg said that because he was in college through the pandemic, he felt prepared to complete the course independently online, and the certificates’ flexibility made it easier to progress through than online classes.
UT is working to inform students that if they can’t complete a microcredential in their course, they have the opportunity to complete it later. It’s also exploring a way to give students academic credit for completing microcredentials on their own.
“I think over time there will be some campuses that will count the microcredential in a stackable way so that students can actually apply it toward whatever degree pathway they are pursuing,” Bentley said.
“It’s still a work in progress, but I know that’s where some of the campuses are heading as they weigh the microcredentials that students are starting to complete within the system.”
Will Microcredentials Stand on Their Own?
Universities’ adoption of credentials leads to the question of when credentials will be able to stand on their own to employers.
“At one level, it’s kind of too soon to make a definitive statement,” Nan Travers, co-lead for Credential As You Go and director of the Center for Leadership in Credential Learning at State University of New York’s Empire State College, told BestColleges.
Bentley said we will probably be able to see more standalone microcredentials when they can be bundled with other experiences prospective employers would value, such as an internship or apprenticeship.
“The microcredential in and of itself is still not enough, just like in some ways a degree in and of itself is not enough,” Bentley said. “It’s really those experiential learning components when packaged with traditional or nontraditional education, that’s when I think students can make even a stronger case for themselves that they are ready for a particular role within a particular industry.”
He said microcredentials are “a jigsaw puzzle piece, but still you need a couple additional pieces as well.”
Travers said that one of the issues that’s always existed with traditional degrees is that employers make “assumptions about what that person knows and can do.” Credentials have that same problem, she said: “In the same way, [employers] need good signals as to what that credential represents.”
Travers predicts there will be changes in hiring practices as employers switch to more skills-based hiring. She said credentials lend themselves to this shift. Industry leaders are already reporting as much to her.
According to Bentley, some UT campuses have worked with their industry partners to learn which certificates on the Coursera platform those partners would like to see students completing.
Are Credentials the Future of Higher Education?
Looking ahead, Bentley said UT is embracing microcredentials as a supplement to degrees.
Bentley sees credentials offered alongside degrees as “one element of the future of higher education.” He said that this will be particularly beneficial for those students who achieved some college credit but no degree.
To Travers, colleges offering credential options as well as degrees is key to the future of higher education.
“From my point of view? Absolutely,” she said.
She said one of the biggest value-adds of credentials is helping students who do not finish their degrees still walk away with some form of credential.
“This is all about really helping learners and making sure people are not left with lots of learning but it doesn’t add up to anything,” Travers said.
UT Looks to the Future
Bentley said UT administrators are learning as they go and will continue to “be a model for other colleges and universities” in this space. He said they have regular communication with other systems doing similar work and will “continue to learn as a community of practice.”
He said higher education has to continue to find ways to keep the cost of supplemental credentialing low to encourage students to do this work, and they must “connect the dots” for learners to understand what earning a credential can do for them.
On this front, UT plans to follow up with its microcredential earners over time to track what types of jobs and salaries they are experiencing. The hope is to make the case to future students that earning a credential is worth it.
For Feldberg, his credential is already worth it. He said the certificate “gave me that leg up,” and is “really helpful in landing your dream job.” Feldberg is pursuing his master of business administration from UT and is currently completing another certificate through Coursera.