What (Isn’t) in a Name

The debates around the term “noncredit” for courses that don’t carry academic credit isn’t likely to end any time soon.

The folks responsible for noncredit offerings often object, rightly, that the term “noncredit” defines the courses by what they are not. (In my postmodernist days, I would have argued that that’s a feature of language generally, but that isn’t terribly helpful here.) The label implicitly defines credit-bearing classes as normal and implies that everything else is, well, everything else. It also doesn’t make much sense to people who aren’t acculturated into academia.

The term encompasses several species of courses. It applies to workforce-oriented training, such as courses in QuickBooks or writing business plans. But it also applies to Adult Basic Education, which is instruction in the fundamentals of reading and math, and to “personal enrichment” classes, such as bus trips to plays or museums. Each of those serves a different group of students and defines success differently. A course leading to a Microsoft certification would measure success differently than a course in flower arranging or one in entry-level ESL. The one thing they have in common is that they don’t carry degree credit.

I’ve heard a few alternative names, but none of them seem quite right. “Workforce” is the most common one, but that doesn’t fit the personal enrichment or ABE sides, and it denies the reality that many degree paths—nursing, accounting, welding—are explicitly geared to the workforce. “Training” comes closer, but some people find it demeaning, and it’s not a great fit for the personal enrichment classes. (“OK, now that we’ve seen four Shakespeare performances, everybody write one!”)

Louisiana apparently uses “validated skills and learning,” which is just awful, not least because it implies that credit-based learning isn’t validated. Ivy Tech, in Indiana, uses “skills training,” which comes closer, but still doesn’t capture the personal enrichment side. “Community education” isn’t terrible, but isn’t that supposed to be everything a community college does in the first place?

Some argue that we should do away with the distinction altogether. I get the impulse, but that would first require completely revamping our systems of financial aid, transfer, scheduling, faculty workloads, collective bargaining agreements, graduation requirements and tuition, among other things. SNHU did it by bypassing the task of reconstruction altogether and simply building a parallel institution using competency-based credentialing; it’s audacious and brilliant, and I’d love to try it, but most of us don’t have that kind of autonomy or funding.

Too, most community colleges run the noncredit side on a break-even or for-profit basis to help offset losses on the credit side; collapsing the distinction would require reinventing budgets and likely either reducing faculty pay dramatically or going entirely adjunct. (I’ve never seen a full-time faculty position on the noncredit side anywhere I’ve worked; the economics don’t support it.) Whenever someone has proposed allowing credit faculty to include noncredit classes in their load, the idea has collapsed as soon as we’ve run the numbers. As the kids say, the math isn’t mathing.

In the short term, at least, we’re stuck with the divide. If I had the answer, I’d happily share it, but I just haven’t seen a term that encompasses everything without some variation of negation (“noncredit,” “nondegree,” “nonmatriculated”). “A certain je ne sais quoi” might be fun, but I don’t see it catching on in this context. At best, we might need to disaggregate the category into its component parts. “‘Adult Basic Ed” and “Personal Enrichment” both sound fine to me, and they make sense descriptively. The workforce-focused part is the hard part.

Wise and worldly readers, have you seen or thought of a better umbrella term? I haven’t, but there is more to heaven and earth than is encompassed in my philosophy, as I recall from a long-ago bus trip. Please let me know, either on Bluesky (@deandad.bsky.social) or via email at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com. I’ll share the best ones.