Dive Brief:

• The Lumina Foundation-sponsored National Credentialing Summit will be held Monday, with representatives of labor, business, education, and public policy organizations present in Washington to sort out what has become a tangled web.
• The Chronicle of Higher Education reports summit participants will kick off a process meant to make sense of modern credentials, giving employers and prospective students clarity in figuring out what they represent.
• The summit is co-sponsored by the Center for Law and Social Policy and the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce.

Dive Insight:

Accreditation offered credibility to degree programs when the number of degree-granting institutions grew beyond a manageable pool. The success of this Lumina-sponsored group’s work in making sense of a diverse credentialing landscape will certainly affect the next few decades of higher education. If this group can add transparency to nontraditional programs that employers still don’t quite understand, it could make nontraditional degrees more valuable to students who go back to school for an edge in the job market.