Overview

The landscape of postsecondary education and workforce development is undergoing a profound transformation, leading to a substantial and rapidly expanding body of research on credentials. This dynamic field examines the various forms of qualifications individuals pursue, the value they hold in the labor market, and their broader societal implications.

A significant portion of contemporary credential research is dedicated to alternative or non-degree credentials. This includes a deep dive into the emergence, efficacy, and recognition of innovations such as microcredentials, digital badges, and industry certifications. Researchers are actively exploring how these agile forms of recognition address the demand for specific, in-demand skills, offer flexible learning pathways, and respond more rapidly to evolving industry needs than traditional degree programs. Key questions in this area include their quality assurance, transferability, and how they stack or combine to form larger qualifications or career pathways.

While the focus on novel credentials is accelerating, research continues to extensively investigate traditional credentials, primarily degrees and longer-term certificates. This ongoing inquiry largely centers on their enduring economic value for individuals and their critical contributions to social mobility. Studies frequently analyze long-term earnings, employment rates, and career progression associated with different degree levels and fields of study, often considering factors like institutional prestige and program quality.

Crucially, a pervasive theme across credential research is the examination of the differential economic returns of diverse credentials for different populations. This research highlights how the value of a credential can vary significantly based on factors such as an individual's race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic background, and geographic location. It seeks to understand whether certain credentials disproportionately benefit or disadvantage particular groups, addressing critical questions of equity and access in the credentialing marketplace. This area also explores how policies and practices can ensure that all individuals, particularly those from historically underserved communities, can access and benefit from high-value credentials that lead to family-sustaining wages and meaningful careers.

In essence, credential research is a multi-faceted endeavor, striving to illuminate the complex interplay between education, skills, and work. It aims to provide critical insights for learners navigating their career paths, employers seeking skilled talent, and policymakers developing effective strategies for a responsive and equitable education-to-workforce ecosystem.

Examples

• The Inter-American Development Bank and Workcred collaborated on A World of Transformation: Moving from Degrees to Skills-Based Alternative Credentials (2022).
  • The report summarizes evidence suggesting a decrease in the value of degrees as a signaling mechanism in the labor market.
  • It also identifies the benefits of non-degree credentials and makes recommendations on ways to increase their value and acceptance in the market.
  • It concludes that it remains to be seen whether non-degree credentials are a short-term strategy to close skills gaps and deal with the transition to adaptive and qualified labor, or a permanent strategy of human capital development.
• Workcred (research affiliate of the American National Standards Institute) focused on industry certifications in Certifications: The Ideal, Reality, and Potential (2022).
  • Among workforce credentials, certifications stand out for their accuracy in signaling the skills of the certification holder, their accessibility to people with varying levels of education and experience, and their ability to motivate skill acquisition through recertification requirements. Yet, certifications are still not as widely known or understood as other credentials.
  • The report offers policy and operational recommendations to increase the use of certifications and better integrate them into U.S. education and training systems.
  • It also highlights areas in further need of research.
• In The College Payoff: More Education Doesn’t Always Mean More Earnings (2021), the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce explores how lifetime earnings vary by education level, field of study, occupation, industry, gender, race and ethnicity, and location.
  • The lifetime earnings of a full-time worker with a high school diploma are $1.6 million, while workers with an associate degree earn $2 million. However, at least one-fourth of high school graduates earn more than an associate degree holder. Bachelor’s degree holders earn a median of $2.8 million during their careers, 75 percent more than if they had only a high school diploma. Master’s degree holders earn a median of $3.2 million over their lifetimes, while doctoral degree holders earn $4 million and professional degree holders earn $4.7 million. However, one-fourth of workers with a bachelor’s degree earn more than half of workers with a master’s or a doctoral degree.
• In The Overlooked Value of Certificates And Associate's Degrees: What Students Need to Know Before They Go to College (2020), the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce examines the labor market value of associate degrees and certificate programs.
  • It finds that field of study especially influences future earnings for graduates of these programs since they are tightly linked with specific occupations.
  • It reveals that the combined number of certificates and associate degrees awarded by colleges is similar to the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded—around 2 million per year—with certificates and associate degrees each accounting for about 1 million.
  • About half of postsecondary students taking undergraduate coursework are enrolled in certificate and associate degree programs. Associate degrees include a mix of general education and career preparation, while certificates are almost exclusively career-oriented. Workers with associate degrees in engineering have median earnings that are about twice that of those with associate degrees in education or the arts. Workers with certificates in engineering technologies have median earnings that outpace earnings for those with certificates in cosmetology and education.
  • Students enrolled in certificate and associate degree programs are more diverse by race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and age than those in bachelor’s degree programs.
• In The Most Popular Degree Pays Off: Ranking the Economic Value of 5,500 Business Programs at More Than 1,700 Colleges (2022), Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce finds that the economic value of business programs is high compared to the financial returns from other programs; though not as high as returns associated with programs in health, engineering, or computer and information sciences.
  • While graduates’ earnings and federal student loan debt vary by institution and degree level, the majority of business programs lead to median earnings that are roughly 10 times graduates’ debt payments two years after program completion.
  • Two years after graduation, associate degree holders in business have median annual earnings of $30,000 after debt payments. The financial returns from a business degree rise to $43,200 after debt payments for bachelor’s degree holders and $51,600 for master’s degree holders.
• The National Research Collaborative on Competency-Based Education and Learning (CBE), hosted by the American Institutes for Research (AIR), produced a series of “explainers” that provide brief summaries of the existing research on CBE (2020).
  • Intended to be useful for practitioners, program leaders, and researchers—those already working in CBE and those interested in pursuing work in this area.
  • Provides a summary of resources available for advancing research in CBE and supporting quality research-based efforts to implement or improve CBE programs.
  • The series focused on:
    • Foundational knowledge: What we know about the landscape, quality, and benefits of CBE programs.
    • Design and implementation: What we know about CBE program design, workforce alignment, and cost.
    • Public perceptions: How a broad range of stakeholders (including employers, potential students, policymakers, and providers), think about CBE, what policies at the state and federal levels impact the development and implementation of CBE programs, and what the implications are of current policies or policies under consideration.
• The Counting Credentials 2025 report (a fifth in a series of annual Counting Credentials reports) provides insights into the evolving credential landscape by counting the total number of unique credentials available in the U.S. and describing the rigorous process of accounting for each credential category.
  • Report identifies 1,850,034 unique credentials in seven distinct credential categories, 134,491 providers of these credentials, with total annual expenditures of $2.34 trillion across the full ecosystem.
  • For each credential category, the report provides the credential type definition, typical credential provider, and the method by which the credential was counted.
  • Each section includes a brief discussion of the state of the credential type, as well as suggestions for future research.
  • The report uses credential categories that include similar types of credentials, regardless of credential provider. In prior Counting Credentials reports, credentials were grouped by education or training provider type. This 2025 report organizes credentials into credential types that are more intuitive to understand and easier to navigate for those interested in more detailed subcategories.
  • The report includes a state-by-state breakdown of credentials offered by state-based entities.
  • The seven credential categories:
    • Degrees – 264,099 Title IV, non-Title IV, and degrees from foreign universities
    • Certificates – 486,352 certificates of completion, academic certificates, and apprenticeships
    • Certifications – 6,892 certifications
    • Micro-credentials – 3,384 micro-credentials
    • Licenses – 14,331 occupational licenses
    • Secondary School Diplomas – 52,948 secondary school seals and endorsements, public school diplomas, private school diplomas, alternate diplomas, and equivalencies.
    • Badges – 1,022,028 badges

• Counting U.S. Postsecondary And Secondary Credentials Report was issued by Credential Engine in fall 2022.
  • Two new credential categories were added at the secondary level for the 2022 edition: alternative high school completion certificates and high school equivalency awards for individuals completing a set of requirements or passing tests that do not require graduating from high school with a full diploma. This is the first time the report has recognized these alternative credentialing outcomes resulting from a high school education.
  • New in this report is the number of credential providers associated with each of four broad types of providers as well as for each of the 18 credential categories: postsecondary educational institutions, MOOC providers, non-academic providers, and secondary schools.
  • As in prior years, this report demonstrates the nation’s need to dramatically improve transparency in the credential marketplace to promote economic growth and individual mobility.
  • The report identifies 1,076,358 unique credentials in the U.S. in 18 detailed credential categories across four broad types of credential providers:
    • Postsecondary Educational Institutions: 350,412 degrees and certificates
    • Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Providers: 13,014 course completion certificates, micro-credentials, and online degrees from foreign universities
    • Non-academic providers: 656,505 badges, course completion certificates, licenses, certifications, and apprenticeships
    • Secondary Schools: 56,179 diplomas from public and private secondary schools, alternative certificates from secondary schools, and high school equivalency diplomas.
• What We Know About Non-Degree Credentials: A Literature Scan (2019) is a project of the Non-Degree Credentials Research Network at the George Washington Institute of Public Policy, The George Washington University, summarizing what we know about the following questions:
  • How prevalent are non-degree credentials in the U.S. workforce? 
  • Who benefits from non-degree credentials in terms of labor market outcomes, and to what extent?
  • Why have non-degree credentials proliferated in recent years?
  • How do employers perceive and use non-degree credentials? 
  • What motivates individuals to pursue non-degree credentials?
• The Non-Degree Credentials Research Network’s New Directions for Non-degree Credentialing Research - Stakeholder Summary (2021) discusses promising insights from research and describes the 15 most pressing research questions that should be addressed.
  • These include questions about who benefits from different types of credentials, how to identify high-quality credentials, how employers are using credentials, and how policymakers can improve the value of non-degree credentials for all parties in the credentialing marketplace.
• The National Student Clearinghouse conducted a pilot project—Industry Certification Education and Performance Data System initiative (2020)—with the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)/Manufacturing Institute (MI) and their national manufacturing organization partners.
  • The purpose of the project was to study how data about industry credential attainment could be matched with and incorporated into the enrollment and degree information that the Clearinghouse collects.
  • That data would then be matched against Census Bureau data to produce preliminary aggregate labor market outcomes.
  • The data shows that most of the people who earn a manufacturing credential from the National Institute for Metalworking Skills (NIMS) or the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council (MSSC) are earning those credentials in the noncredit environment, rather than in high school or on the manufacturing floor.
  • This flyer explains the data system developed and provides sample reports, and this white paper has more information.
  • Preliminary data showed an immediate increase in wages and the year-over-year increase in wages after the attainment of the last credential. When the data was broken down by age, it revealed additional points of interest: 
    • People ages 18-25 see an immediate upward wage trajectory for five years after receiving their credential. 
    • Between ages 26 and 45, wages are stagnant before earning a credential, then rise steadily for five years after earning the credential. 
    • People older than 45 who are earning a manufacturing credential are able to replace wages that they lost before they attained that credential.

Ecosystem Relationship

Credential research is intimately tied to the learn-and-work ecosystem by providing critical insights into how education and training programs align with workforce demands. It helps to illuminate pathways for individuals to acquire in-demand skills and for employers to identify qualified talent, thereby fostering a more responsive and efficient system for continuous learning and career progression.

Resources

It’s Not Just Education — Credentials Are a Maze in the Workforce Too | John Bailey, AEI (2019, October 16)

The Impact of Digital Credentials on Professional Growth and Opportunities | University of Minnesota

Industry Credentials | National Student Clearing House [Archived 2024, January 14]

Credential Engine

Research | Institute for Credentialing Excellence

Research | Workcred