Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Education’s competency-based education experiment gave schools the freedom to give credit for prior experience; now an expansion to that experiment means they can charge tuition using a subscription model.
- Under Secretary Ted Mitchell announced the expansion in a Homeroom blog post, saying the subscription model provides “tremendous potential” to reduce college costs for students and open access by letting them take as many courses as they want in a subscription period.
- Federal financial aid would be distributed based on a student’s anticipated enrollment, rather than an existing requirement that students complete a specific number of competencies before later aid disbursements can be made.
Dive Insight:
The competency-based education experiment was announced in July 2014 under the department’s Experimental Sites Initiative. This initiative lets the secretary of education waive certain regulations for a limited number of schools so they are free to test innovations. Demand for competency-based education has taken off among schools with explosive growth in the number of colleges developing programs. The Department of Education, however, has sent mixed signals about its support. In October, the department’s inspector general announced concern over the level of student-teacher interaction in CBE programs accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.