Making Informal Learning Legible: Alternative Digital Credentials for College Access

Abstract

Higher education institutions have long strived to recruit and admit cohorts of college-ready students who will not only succeed but thrive in their institutions. Over time, the infrastructure and processes surrounding college admission have evolved to reflect the evolving goals of colleges. More recently colleges have worked to admit classes of students that reflect the racial and socioeconomic diversity of the population of the United States, but for a range of reasons have found this goal challenging. To achieve this goal, many institutions have broadened their definitions of college readiness to include achievements in both formal, school-based learning and informal, out-of-school learning, an admissions process known as holistic review. This issue can be viewed as an information problem, as colleges struggle to use the existing information infrastructure of grade-point averages (GPAs), test scores, and the Common Application to identify promising students. This study explores the thesis that an alternative digital credentialing system can be used to make applicants’ informal learning activities more legible to college admissions personnel, thereby helping to broaden access to college. The findings of this study indicate that this thesis is not correct, or at least correct in only limited circumstances. Prior research has suggested that alternative digital credentials might increase the legibility of informal learning outcomes for college admissions, yet questions remain about how they might be used in practice. This dissertation employs semi-structured interviews with twelve college admissions officers from different types of colleges and universities to understand how they make sense of learning outside of school using the admissions tools currently available to them such as personal essays, letters of recommendation, and information about students’ extracurricular engagement. These interviews also explored opportunities for addressing some of these challenges with alternative digital credentials. Findings suggest that college admissions officers look for specific types of signals when reviewing information about learning outside of school such as the prestige of an applicant’s activities, evidence of career exploration, and the applicant’s ability to weave a narrative of their accomplishments across the different materials of the application file. Improving the legibility of informal learning through alternative digital credentials will require establishing agreed upon taxonomies for informal learning outcomes and information systems for contextualizing applicants’ opportunities to engage in meaningful learning experiences outside of school. The main contributions of this study include insights into the way an institution’s selectivity is likely to shape their use of alternative digital credentials, the types of signals alternative digital credentials should amplify in order to be more useful in the admissions process, and recommendations for future directions for the design of alternative digital credentialing systems for college admissions.