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Credit for Prior Learning Mobility: Possibilities and Practice from the Field

When college-level learning experiences are overlooked, so are the students who completed them. That’s why credit for prior learning (CPL) has been a guiding principle for CAEL and its members since the organization’s founding more than 50 years ago. From building capacity at colleges and universities to increasing awareness, the expansion of CPL has helped higher ed become more inclusive. 

The stakes are high. CAEL research has demonstrated CPL’s powerful impact on student and institutional success factors including recruiting, retention and completion. Receiving CPL boosts completion rates among adult learners by 17%. CPL also saves students significant time and money. Because CPL students persist and complete at greater rates, they also complete more traditional credit hours.  

Thanks to a passionate membership community, CAEL has seen much success in its efforts to transform CPL. It has gone from a niche practice to a must-have for institutions that want to thrive amid rapidly changing—and increasingly intersectingeducation-employment pathways. But CPL’s growth has brought new challenges. As practitioners, we’ve become more agile in how we recognize prior learning within our own institutions, but how do we manage CPL credit mobility when students continue their studies elsewhere?  

As transfer enrollment increases alongside the expanded use of CPL, it’s an important question. Whether students received credit by sitting through a traditional course or by demonstrating prior mastery, administrative obstacles shouldn’t force them to duplicate their efforts, nor should we expect administrators to take CPL in transfer on faith.  

Unfortunately, institutions of higher learning lack widespread solutions for nontraditional credit mobility. National data standards for CPL do not exist. Instead, each institution or system establishes its own data definitions for the purposes of data collection, tracking and reporting. This reality can trap CPL transfer credits between two extremes during the transfer process: being ruled ineligible or being counted twice.  

Fortunately, there are solutions for avoiding this worst-of-both-worlds paradigm. To explore them, we have been tapping into the CAEL community’s best practices, not to mention their experience and expertise. Over the past few years, we’ve collaborated within CAEL’s credit mobility working group. Members of the group represent public and private two- and four-year postsecondary institutions. Since 2023, the group has met monthly to assess and scale evaluation methods that enable or enhance the mobility of nontraditional credits. Our dialogue, supplemented by CAEL’s broader community of practice, has generated diverse insights about reducing credit mobility barriers.  

Our working group’s guiding principle is that the CPL a student earns at one institution should be accepted and utilized by the student’s next institution(s). We believe it is tragically demotivating and counterproductive when students take the time to translate their experiential learning into academic credit at one institution only to see it rejected upon transfer. On the other hand, blindly accepting academic credit threatens the integrity of degree programs. There are specific institutional conditions and expectations for transfer coursework and test scores, which should also be true of CPL transfer credit. And many accreditation bodies and standard-bearers outline such conditions in various policies. 

One of our major discussion points was a case study of CPL transfer between Purdue University Global and Ivy Tech Community College. The institutions coordinated closely to help more than 30 students successfully transfer their CPL credits over the past two years. They were able to ensure fairness and accuracy by carefully reviewing the source of CPL credits, including details that aren’t typically present in transcripts. In fact, the case study concluded that, without this additional information, 60% of the earned CPL transfer credit would have been duplicate credits if accepted.  

These findings point the way to policies and procedures that can improve CPL transfer for students and administrators. Institutions that send students into the transfer process should ensure the CPL they have earned is thoroughly described in detailed documentation such as an enhanced official college transcript and any necessary supplementary records. Receiving institutions should maintain transfer policies that accept CPL. These policies should be supported by an internal process for how to evaluate CPL from a transcript or supplementary document. Staff should receive training on how to process records pertaining to transfer credits that originated in a CPL learning experience.  

Underpinning these recommendations is access to the information needed for a complete and accurate transfer evaluation inclusive of CPL sources. Our working group prioritized enhanced data standards around CPL to ensure such information is present. Examples include: 

  • The sending institution and the receiving institution should have clear roles and responsibilities. 
  • Sending institutions should pursue improved documentation, including details such as: 
    • CPL type, or evaluation method, used (e.g., standardized exam, department exam, portfolio; ACE military credit recommendations, evaluation of noncredit instruction, etc.); 
    • CPL source, or the organization through which the learning was completed (e.g., AP, CompTIA, U.S. Army); 
    • CPL item, or the specific learning object the student completed (e.g., AP Chemistry, CompTIA Network+, or U.S. Army Combat Medic Specialist 300-68W10); 
    • Date that the learning occurred (not the date it was accepted for credit). 
  • Receiving institutions should revise institutional policies to accept CPL in transfer, develop or revise internal processes to responsibly evaluate CPL from a transcript or supplemental documentation, and train staff to recognize and act when they receive a transcript that contains CPL. 

We’ll be sharing more details about our recommendations for enhanced data standards in a white paper in the next few months. In the meantime, some of our working group’s conclusions are echoed in a just-released report from CAEL and the American Council on Education. Based on a 50-state analysis of CPL policies aimed at increasing CPL opportunities, the report urges states and systems to prioritize standards for data collection and reporting. It warns that the absence of standardized data (or, in some cases, any data at all) can undermine cross-institutional trust and create obstacles for students seeking to transfer their CPL-originating credits. CAEL and ACE will be hosting a webinar to discuss the report Jan. 30 at 3 p.m. ET. Registration can be completed at the ACE website. 

We’re heartened that more voices are joining the important discussion around CPL transfer. If you’d like to include yours, please consider joining CAEL’s member community of practice on credit mobility. You can do so at CAEL’s Member Hub or by emailing Carolyn Swabek at cswabek@cael.org.