Should the U.S. Lean into Short-Term, Nondegree Workforce Education and Training? Yes, but Carefully

Workforce development in the United States has increasingly emphasized flexible, fast, and focused education and training that enhances individual economic security. Some scholars, policy experts, and other stakeholders are hoping Congress will lean further into this sort of education and training—perhaps with sustained and even new federal investments and supports.

But should we?

Research to date, including our own, suggests proceeding with caution, since short-term, nondegree certificates that take less than a year to complete tend to produce no or very small wage gains for the individuals who complete them.

We can unpack the nuances of individual wage returns to flexible, fast, and focused education and training using our own research on computer science (CS) and information technology (IT) education and training in Ohio as an example.

CS and IT are critical fields in the U.S. economy: There is and likely will be strong demand for CS and IT workers, and wages in these fields tend to be higher than in other fields. This suggests any CS or IT credential should increase the wages and economic security of individuals who complete them. Using 15 years of detailed administrative data on education and employment pathways, we estimated the individual wage returns to a variety of credentials from public community colleges and universities in Ohio—including short-term certificates that take less than a year to complete, long-term certificates that take a year but less than two years to complete, associate degrees, and bachelor's degrees. We specifically compared returns for credentials in CS and IT to individual wages with the wages of those individuals prior to their completing these credentials.

Our analysis shows that short-term education and training that takes less than a year to complete may not be as valuable as one would hope, even in the case of fields like CS and IT with relatively high demand and wages.

Looking at Figure 1 below, the average individual who completed a short-term certificate in CS or IT earned no more than before they received the certificate. This pattern of no wage returns to short-term certificates in CS and IT extends to long-term certificates that take more than a year to complete, though only for IT.

Credentials other than short-term certificates, especially in CS and degrees more generally, tend to increase wages. Individuals who complete a long-term certificate in CS tend to receive wage returns of roughly $1350 in a calendar quarter, and this is similar to the average wage return for other types of long-term certificates. Wage returns are slightly higher for associate degrees with an average return of $1800 for CS and $600 for IT.

Importantly, four-year degrees—especially in CS—result in the largest wage gains for individual Ohioans. The outsized returns to a bachelor's in the high-demand, high-wage fields of CS and IT are another piece of evidence that the United States should proceed with caution on fast, focused, and flexible education and training like short-term certificates.

	Computer Science	Information Technology	Computer Science/Information Technology	Other
Short Certificate	426.906	-818.603	-8.63	396.21
Long Certificate	1347.65	-549.715	732.17	1,226.93
A.A.	1797.029	616.393	1,631.82	1,785.14
B.A.	5961.347	3649.612	5,630.04	2,257.45
Post B.A.	5302.653	478.645	3,646.81	5,641.65

Source: Authors' analysis of individual education and employment data from the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, 2006–2019. All models include individual and period fixed effects as well as time-varying controls for individual characteristics. Estimated wage returns hold across a variety of fixed effect and cross-sectional specifications. See Andrew et al., 2024. Growing the Computer Science and Information Technology Workforces in Ohio. RAND Corporation.

Our research on wage returns to different CS and IT credentials in Ohio is part of a larger body of work (PDF) demonstrating uneven and uncertain returns to short-term certificates across a variety of fields. Additionally, wage returns do not necessarily translate to a sustainable, living wage overall in cases of significant wage returns to short-term certificates in a specific field.

But, policy interest in and learner demand for short-term certificates is growing despite uncertain wage gains that do not bring greater economic security. Learner survey and other data suggest this is because short-term certificates can provide greater access to postsecondary education and training with an emphasis on specific labor market skills that employers might want. As a result, policymakers and other stakeholders cannot ignore the larger access and economic security issues driving growing learner demand for such certificates, especially since the promise of higher wages with the completion of short-term certificates often goes unfulfilled.

We therefore make four recommendations to improve federal supports for short-term certificates.

1. Experiment with federal waivers, pilots, and competitive or block grants. Congress is currently considering workforce and postsecondary bills that might include federal funds to support completing short-term certificates. In the current political environment, it is uncertain either of these bills will pass on their own. If some part of them is included as part of a continuing resolution or other federal bill, policymakers can still begin to revise federally supported education and training to include short-term certificates (or other provisions) on a smaller but still significant scale. This can be done via waivers or grants to states or community college systems or in a national pilot program across multiple sites to experiment with different proposed provisions. This sort of flexible or phased implementation has been used before, for example, in the case of federal welfare funding in block grants under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program or in the case of a national pilot program providing Pell grants to incarcerated individuals. The current Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), as does its potential renewal bill currently under consideration, provides competitive grants to extend workforce development programming in alternative ways, though requirements for these grants might be expanded to allow states to experiment in order to improve the economic impacts of short-term certificates on the individuals who complete them.
2. Mandate rigorous evaluations to learn and document what works. Program evaluations are common mandates in federal grant and other programs (e.g., the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grant program). But, these evaluations must include quasi-experimental or experimental evaluations that provide some of the most rigorous evidence on interventions like completing a short-term certificate. These evaluations should include not only proximal program and participant outcomes (e.g., number of participants served in a certificate program, whether an individual with different sociodemographic characteristics is more or less likely to enroll in a certificate program) but also more distal, labor market outcomes (e.g., individual wage returns and employer staffing). Importantly, evaluation studies can provide sorely needed implementation data to add further nuance to our understanding of which short-term certificate programs lead to wage returns or other desired outcomes and why. In the case of federal efforts to renew and revise workforce and postsecondary education and training, evaluations might also help guide future congressional legislation, even helping to resolve current points of difference.
3. Collect standardized data for large numbers of short-term certificate learners across fields and programs. Evaluation studies required under federal waivers, pilots, grants, or other mechanisms will provide a broad and reliable research base on how we might improve short-term certificate programs to increase wage returns and the overall economic security of individuals who complete them. But, to make this evidence as meaningful as possible, it will need to be based on standardized data and research designs. Standardization in metrics across certificate, learners, programs, providers, and communities—within and between states—is necessary to understand how different certificates from different programs and providers impact different learners in different communities. Standardization in research design can further improve comparability of evidence across different certificates. Importantly, standardization will provide data for large numbers of learners across different contexts. Different stakeholders are already hard at work creating tools to support this kind of standardization, including Credential Engine's national registry that describes credentials using a standardized framework and language for cross-stakeholder, cross-platform classification. This tool can be expanded to include additional labor market metrics, including employment, wage, and wage return outcomes, as well as quality assurance indicators like those advocated by the National Skills Coalition and that Tennessee and other states are working to put into place (e.g., portability of certificates and other credentials across institutions).
4. Experimentation and evaluation should focus on increasing stacking. On their own, short-term certificates do not necessarily lead to wage gains or economic security. Stakeholders therefore often emphasize “stacking” multiple certificates together in a field to build towards an associate or bachelor's degree. Yet relatively few learners stack short-term certificates in this way. Intentional experimentation with the implementation of short-term certificates and rigorous and standardized evaluation of this experimentation should focus on (a) how programs support stacking, (b) how and under what conditions learners stack short-term certificates, and (c) what the individual economic impacts of stacking are. This evidence on program structure and implementation, learner behaviors, and individual economic impacts is necessary if we truly want to improve stacking and the economic impacts of short-term certificates.