Microcredentials offer career-aligned path for liberal arts students

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As a humanities professor who has been teaching in his field for more than two decades, Jude Okpala has encountered all the most common criticisms of his discipline: that the study of humanities doesn’t lead to employment, for instance, or that its graduates do not find immediate economic success in the work world.

That’s why, when Okpala first learned of The University of Texas at San Antonio’s plans to embed microcredentials into existing courses and degree programs, he knew he wanted his humanities students to participate.

“Connecting the humanities to the microcredential is a way, really, to not only take into consideration all of this critique of the humanities, but to create a bridge between the study of the humanities and employment,” said Okpala, professor of instruction in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at UT at San Antonio.

The program at UT at San Antonio is part of the University of Texas System’s embrace of microcredentials. Funded in part by Strada Education Foundation’s Beyond Completion Challenge, nine UT campuses have embarked on their own microcredential offerings designed to meet the regional needs of their student populations, and a new partnership with Coursera makes online professional training available to all UT students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

In San Antonio, a data analysis revealed three majors — humanities, modern languages, and women’s studies — produced graduates who earned less than in other fields of study. “We wanted to address the equity gaps,” said Claudia Arcolin, executive director of teaching and learning experiences at UT at San Antonio. “We wanted to identify the majors where a microcredential can have the most impact for our students.”

As part of a pilot project, students were offered the opportunity to complete a Grow With Google certificate as part of their coursework.

“At first, when I was offered to take the Google Project Management Certificate through my humanities course, it didn’t really seem like they would mesh,” said Sofia Cavenaile, a UT at San Antonio senior. “But the more I went through the course, the more I realized these really were related. And the skills that you learn in the certification could be applied to pretty much every class and every job that you would be in.”

Cavenaile was enrolled in the Grow With Google course while working part-time as a legal assistant at a law office and found immediate ways to apply her new skills to her job.

The law office was moving, and Cavenaile’s role included leading coordination of the movers, the office staff, and the materials to be relocated.

“So while I was taking the course and doing this moving project at the same time, I put to use the skills that I was learning in the course into the project,” Cavenaile said. “It was directly applicable to why I was taking the course.”

JoAnn Browning, interim vice president for research, economic development, and knowledge at UT at San Antonio, said the microcredentials program is popular with regional employers who believe they give students skills that not only help them be more competitive for jobs, but also allow them to meet their employers’ needs from the first day of employment.

“How can we serve our students better to make them feel more successful when they get out and be more successful overall?” Browning said. “The employers are a really critical part of this whole feedback loop, and they are absolutely an important part of how we design future microcredentials.”

UT at San Antonio is now expanding its Grow With Google certificates beyond the three original majors. More areas of study have been added to the initiative, and students will explore several professional certificates to gain data analytics, entrepreneurial, and digital communication skills.

“It allows you to reinterpret the skills that you gained through the classics – problem solving, critical thinking,” Arcolin said, “and how they can be used in the current marketplace.”