Short-term credentials are proliferating and growing more popular as students come to see them as quicker, cheaper routes to jobs than traditional degrees. But are these programs as inexpensive as students think?
The Education Trust, a nonprofit policy and advocacy organization, explored that question in a new report released Tuesday. The authors looked at how much it actually costs students to participate in these programs, including living expenses like room and board, books, technology, and transportation. They found that costs varied widely among different types of credentials, with some offered at no cost and others exceeding $20,000 per month.
Digital badges and apprenticeships, for example, tend to be low to no cost while the total monthly costs of certificates from academic and nonacademic providers alike ranged from free to, in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars. The authors conclude that low-income students working minimum wage may need financial assistance to pay for these programs, depending on the state where they live.
Sandra Perez, senior higher education research analyst at EdTrust and an author of the report, said studying the costs of short-term credentials is fairly uncharted territory, even though so many learners are using these programs to upskill or make their first forays into higher education.
“When we were looking at this, we were like, ‘OK, how can we put ourselves in the mindset of a student that will be looking at these different costs and trying to see how they can weigh them against each other?’” she said.
She and her colleagues analyzed the costs of 19,549 credentials that take a year or less to complete from academic and nonacademic providers across 43 states, using 2024 data from Credential Engine, a nonprofit that seeks to map the credentialing landscape and collects self-reported data from programs. The data represented a variety of program types, including certificates, licenses, digital badges and apprenticeships. The costs were all over the map.
A ‘Crazy Amount’ of Variation
The report found that costs for short-term credentials vary dramatically—particularly those offered by employers and companies.
For example, workforce providers offering certificate programs charged tuition and fees ranging from no cost to $26,700 per month. The median cost of attendance for these programs over an academic year was $2,552 per month, including living expenses. Tuition and fees for certificate programs from academic providers ranged from no cost to $17,900 per month, with a monthly median total cost of $2,112 over an academic year.
The report shows a “crazy amount of variance among all these different credentials” and just how hard these programs are to study and understand as a result, said Rachel Fishman, director of the higher education program at New America, a left-wing think tank.
“There’s just a lot of sub-baccalaureate and sub-associate degree credentials out there” of different lengths and costs, called by a variety of names and offered by different kinds of providers, making it “hard to decipher any sort of outcomes or similarities,” she said. “The data continue to be such a challenge” at the same time that there’s “so much frenetic excitement from policy makers” about building out these programs.
The report found that workforce providers tended to offer lower tuition rates than programs offered by academic providers.
Perez said it’s unclear why that’s the case. She suspects it might be because students pursuing these credentials in higher ed settings may qualify for federal financial aid, whereas students pursuing these programs through employers or other providers cannot. It’s possible higher ed institutions charge higher tuitions as a result. (Programs 15 weeks or longer offered at accredited colleges or universities can be eligible for federal aid dollars.)
Without financial aid, low-income students may need extra help paying for these programs, depending on where they live, the report concluded. The authors assessed how many hours minimum-wage earners would have to work in different states to afford short-term programs.
The results were mixed. Some programs were affordable for students earning minimum wage, but many programs’ hourly costs exceeded what a minimum-wage worker could make in an hour.
For example, a learner in New Jersey could find multiple program options that were affordable while earning the state minimum wage, while no Wisconsin programs in the Credential Engine data were affordable to minimum-wage earners in the state. In Washington State, where the minimum wage is $16.28, a student would have to work 241 hours on average to afford a short-term credential offered by a nonacademic provider. A student in Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25, would have to work 1,467 hours on average to afford the same type of program—seven times as many hours.
Just a ‘First Step’
Jinann Bitar, director of higher education research and data analytics at EdTrust and an author of the report, said understanding these credentials’ costs is just a “first step” toward assessing their value.
The goal of the report was to answer a question: Do these programs “really cost less [than degrees] when you consider everything—living costs and all that?” And by and large, it “turns out they’re pretty cost-efficient,” she said. Now the question is, do these programs lead to well-paying jobs with potential for wage growth that’s worth what students pay?
She noted that research shows a bachelor’s degree is still “the most sure social mobility tool for increased earnings over your lifetime.”
“So, we need to know, are these short-term credentials competitive?” Do they deliver a “family-sustaining wage” and “do they also continue the same trajectory of lifetime earnings that a bachelor’s does? … There’s a lot we don’t know,” she said.
She added that these questions are particularly important because there are efforts underway to funnel more federal and state dollars toward these programs. There’s bipartisan interest in extending Pell Grants, federal financial aid for low-income students, to higher ed programs less than 15 weeks long. And the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the legislation governing workforce training, is undergoing a reauthorization process in Congress, which could yield more support to students in these kinds of programs.
“The money is actually already flowing, or there’s a lot of conversations around it,” she said, “and so I think it’s critical to understand the value for students.”
Fishman agreed. If microcredentials are affordable, more students have access to them, she said, “but access to what? Are you better off than if you had not gotten that credential?”
Perez said more comprehensive data on microcredentials, their outcomes and their costs is key to reaching some of those answers. She noted that some short-term programs that self-report their data to Credential Engine don’t update numbers as often as researchers would like or leave information out in ways that can make programs difficult to compare. The report called on states to pursue more data-sharing agreements with nonacademic credential providers so they have better access to a wider range of data and can include short-term credentials in state longitudinal data systems.
If there was an “enhancement of these efforts, I believe that we would have a lot better information, especially when looking at costs of attendance for these credentials,” Perez said. As learners increasingly choose these programs, “it’s extremely important for at least academic researchers to be able to see what’s going on with this group of students.”
