The 41 Million SCNC: Why Higher Ed’s Greatest Failure Is the Refusal to Recognize Real Life

 

The 41 Million SCNC: Why Higher Ed’s Greatest Failure Is the Refusal to Recognize Real Life

Originally published by UPCEA on March 25, 2026

Co-authored with Julie Uranis, Melissa Peraino, and Stacy Chiaramonte, with contributions from UPCEA Council for Credential Innovation co-chairs Doris Savron, Sheila LeBlanc, and Melissa Jimenez.

More than 41 million Americans have attended college without earning a credential. Too often, these learners are described by what they lack rather than recognized for what they already know: the college learning they completed, the skills they developed at work, and the expertise gained through military service, caregiving, and community life.

This jointly authored piece argues that the continued growth of the some-college, no-credential population is not simply an enrollment problem. It reflects systems and policies that remain poorly designed for the realities of adult learners.

Learning mobility offers a different architecture. It treats learning as a portable asset that belongs to the learner—not the institution—and asks colleges and universities to recognize, translate, and connect learning acquired across classrooms, workplaces, and life experiences. Credit for prior learning, flexible modalities, transparent credentials, and stronger connections between credit and noncredit education can reduce the friction that too often prevents adults from returning and completing.

But the greatest barriers are not technological. They are cultural and structural: outdated assumptions about academic value, fears that recognizing prior learning will cannibalize enrollment, fragmented institutional systems, and short-term strategies that disappear with leadership transitions.

The central question is no longer whether higher education can recognize learning acquired through real life. It is whether institutions will redesign themselves to do so.

Read the full article on UPCEA →

Topics: Learning Mobility · Credit for Prior Learning · Adult Learners · Some College, No Credential

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