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Ever-rising college costs, more than one trillion dollars in outstanding federal student loan debt, and graduates doubtful that they'll be able to earn enough to repay their loans have driven college value to become a major concern for most prospective students. Yet students, families, and policymakers are finding their questions can't be answered - because the higher education lobby has fought to keep it that way. This report tells the story of how the private nonprofit higher education lobby, whose members rely heavily on federal financial aid, drove efforts to preempt the creation of a federal student unit record system that would enable students, families, institutions, and policymakers to answer fundamental questions about college value. Although those institutions represent a minority (less than 15 per cent) of undergraduate students, they often exercise outsized influence on federal financial aid policy. Changing politics, however, mean that the industry organizations that represent the vast majority of the country's undergraduates now support a student unit record system. And students, experts, and education stakeholders across the country are asking the same critical questions about college value - ones only a unit record system can answer.

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For the purposes of this report, we consider short-term credentials to be less than one year of full-time study and long-term credentials to require more than one year, as typically defined by federal data systems. Given the rapid growth in short-term programs, and policymakers' fast-growing interest to invest federal higher education dollars into very-short-term credentials, we explore what the research does - and does not - show us about such credentials' utility in the labor market. With concerns about equity, our review of the literature guides us towards caution, as a strong push for short-term certificates may run the risk of reifying socioeconomic stratification.

Edited excerpts from publication. Show less