Anyone who has ever attended a program advisory committee meeting knows that it can be a mix of exciting inspiration and terrifying fear that one’s programs are not doing enough to prepare one’s graduates. While members of the business community will often give helpful, positive commentary on the knowledge the institution’s graduates bring to the professional environment, they may also pose a problem that the traditional university was never designed to handle: teaching skills in the first or second year of study that will still be cutting-edge and desired by industry at the time of graduation.
At the same time, institutions are increasingly being contacted by working professionals who want to “retool” or update their skills to be more attractive for promotion or increases in responsibility. These working professionals often do not want or need to complete an entire degree to get the value they want from a program, but they do need course options geared to their professional and scheduling needs.
Welcome to the world of alternative credentials. According to “Demographic Shifts in Educational Demand and the Rise of Alternative Credentials,” a report by educational company Pearson and the University Professional and Continuing Education Association (UPCEA), alternative credentials are defined as “competencies, skills, and learning outcomes derived from assessment-based, non-degree activities [that] align to specific, timely needs in the workforce.”
English language proficiency does not eliminate all the special challenges that international students face. Cultural differences—particularly among students from non-Western countries—can create additional burdens. For example, international students may experience difficulty understanding spoken English or an instructor’s use of humor, slang, or cultural references; they may experience a type of “academic culture shock” in which the instructor’s expectations are unclear or significantly different from what the students are used to. All these factors can negatively affect academic performance and increase the likelihood that these students will cheat.
“A lot of faculty and administrators assume that if a student passes a language proficiency exam, then the student is prepared to be in the classroom, and that’s not the case. These exams do not test for how to use the language,” says Rory Senerchia, associate professor and chair of the ESL department at Johnson & Wales University Providence, who has conducted surveys of international students to better understand how faculty and institutions can better support these students.
