The Role of State Boards in Making Credentials’ Value Transparent

There is no guaranteed, straightforward path to student success beyond high school and many blind alleys. Families and educators alike must prepare learners to navigate an overwhelming, confusing landscape of more than 1.8 million credentials: certificates, certifications, licenses, degrees, badges, apprenticeships, microcredentials, and more. And figuring out how to knit them all into efficient, successful career pathways that work for each student’s interests, capabilities, and circumstances is even harder. The options are burgeoning and ever changing. Which ones truly lead students to opportunity and economic mobility?

To address these thorny challenges, states increasingly are including student attainment of credentials within their accountability frameworks. In this way, the phrase “credentials of value” has entered the policy lexicon with force. But despite the growing popularity of credentials, the concept of value often lacks a clear, consistent definition across education and workforce systems. Put plainly, some credentials meaningfully advance educational journeys and careers while others do little. State boards of education, tasked with shaping standards and ensuring students’ postsecondary readiness, are strongly positioned to help bring clarity and cohesion to this space.

Just as they set the strategic direction for learning environments across the country, state boards of education can and should play a critical role in identifying credentials that truly advance economic mobility for learners. By making economic mobility the north star for defining a credential of value, state boards can cut through the noise of available credentials and focus state attention on those that demonstrably improve students’ long-term prospects and career paths.

Key to adding clarity to policy discussions on value is credential transparency. At its core, credential transparency is about making information work for people: helping learners and their families make informed choices about available pathways and enabling policymakers, including state boards, to establish clear, consistent policy that supports education and training programs that deliver on these promises.

The Role of Accountability Systems

School districts are increasingly seeking to expand career readiness for learners via avenues like dual enrollment or career technical education (CTE) pathways, and states are requiring them to show results through career readiness indicators. These indicators often include the percentage of students who have attained an industry-recognized credential, completed a CTE sequence, or engaged in work-based learning.[1]

Since 2014, the number of states incorporating such indicators into K-12 accountability systems has grown dramatically, from 14 to 43.[2] These efforts most often center on the state-selected fifth accountability measure required under Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), known as the School Quality and Student Success indicator. More than half of states that use a career readiness indicator for this purpose are prioritizing students’ attainment of credentials that employers recognize or otherwise value, commonly called “industry-recognized credentials.” The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins V) also supports this focus, allowing states to measure and hold secondary CTE programs accountable for their students’ credential attainment.[3]

But having a clearer line of sight into credentials is a critical piece of accountability. Accountability without full transparency, built on modern data capabilities, can still leave parents, employers, educators, and policymakers ill-informed and unable to act. This visibility enables stakeholders to assess not just whether students are earning credentials but whether those credentials translate into meaningful economic and educational returns for learners. Without accessible, transparent data on credentials, including related outcomes such as employment rates and earnings premiums, even well-intentioned accountability systems risk becoming a “check the box” exercise rather than a tool for improvement.

Attending to Data

Increasingly, state boards must think as much about how performance and accountability data is made available to the public as they do the nature of the measures themselves. They thus should advocate for investments in user-friendly tools that enable parents, families, and students to make more informed choices. The goal of building such tools is a system in which accountability data drives action, not just compliance.

School districts invest significant time, resources, and learning hours into providing access to career pathways, but often the information about available credentials—what they represent, what skills they teach, and their real-world value—is fragmented, unavailable, or buried in PDFs, spreadsheets, or web pages. Credential transparency aims to make sense of disparate information about a credential and communicate it in a way anyone can access and understand. By using a structured, open, linked, and interoperable data (SOLID) format for this information, users can more readily search for and benefit from it. Data can then be compared across education, workforce, and hiring systems; training providers; states; and even countries. In the education and occupational credential and skills ecosystem, there is a de facto standard for this format, the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) (see box).[4]

Adopting CTDL allows for the creation of modern, transparent tools and services for counseling, guidance, navigation, articulation agreements, and career pathways. It can support development of real-time dashboards—with data not just about which credentials are available but which ones connect students to local career opportunities, what graduates typically earn, and how credentials can be stacked or sequenced to unlock further education and training opportunities.

If they had transparent information about credentials, school counselors could offer students and families informed guidance about career pathways and CTE programs of study. Districts could better align their CTE and other program offerings with regional workforce needs, and they could more readily demonstrate returns on the investment in public education. Transparent credential data helps state leaders do the following:

• align K-12 with postsecondary and workforce opportunities;
• track and publicly report outcomes like employment and earnings;
• guide families through complex career navigation decisions; and
• ensure that systems of accountability meaningfully promote credentials that unlock further opportunity for students.

Leading States

State leaders must move beyond encouraging students to earn any credential and steer them to pursue the right credentials—those that lead to rewarding career opportunities. Many states have made a start.[5] Colorado’s Workforce Development Council and its education partners have developed a unified framework for identifying quality, in-demand nondegree credentials. It requires credentials to meet four criteria:

• market demand, as evidenced by alignment with growing industries and job openings;
• transparent, clear articulation of the skills taught and earned;
• substantial employment outcomes that show the credential leads to a living-wage job; and
• a progressive learning sequence, in which there are opportunities to build toward or stack credentials or degrees.

By connecting this framework to the state’s Eligible Training Provider List and making all credential information transparently available in the state’s Credential Registry using CTDL, users can see whether a credential will truly help prepare Colorado students for an in-demand occupation.[6]

Three Texas agencies—the Texas Education Agency, Workforce Commission, and Higher Education Coordinating Board—develop and maintain the shared, open Texas Credential Library. The library lists credentials of value, as well as their connections to regional occupations and wage outcomes. The coordinating board defines credentials of value as quality, affordable postsecondary credentials that

• equip residents for strong career trajectories;
• improve earnings opportunities; and
• align with high-demand jobs with Texas employers.

Through its Building a Talent Strong Texas initiative, the state became the first to tie credential completion goals directly to long-term wage outcomes.[7] Texas leaders set a goal of 550,000 students annually earning credentials that lead to economic self-sufficiency. Credential providers must show that typical graduates will earn enough within 10 years to offset their postsecondary education costs and exceed the annual median earnings of a Texas high school graduate. Work in these and other states is still too new to yield full insights on impacts and outcomes, but the development of student- and worker-facing tools and services will eventually allow more data collection and longitudinal analysis.

Tasks for State Boards

State boards are well positioned to press for credential transparency as a key strategy for improving students’ prospects. Over 30 states are already moving down this road.[8] State board members can ask whether their state has a foot in the door already and how to engage further. If their state has not begun, they can take the lead.[9] To help with this effort, Credential Engine, the organization that I lead, produced a series of state policy briefs and guides in support of the adoption and use of CTDL, in collaboration with national education associations and advocacy groups, including the Chief State School Officers Organization.[10]

To realize the many benefits of transparency, state boards must foster meaningful collaboration across K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development systems, which too often remain disconnected. Students want—and deserve—to understand and build meaningful pathways across credentials of value, regardless of who offers them, what agency oversees them, and where the funding comes from.

Defining and Promoting Value. State boards can champion a shared understanding of what makes a credential valuable. What makes a credential valuable depends on context. The value signal changes based on local labor market needs, emerging industries, and the learner’s own goals. Such signals may include wage gains or return on investment, entry into employment or upward career mobility, advance standing toward further education or training, industry recognition for specific occupations, or alignment with high-skill, high-wage occupations, as defined in Perkins V and the Workplace Innovation and Opportunity Act.[11]

The definitions of value that state boards set can help filter out low-value credentials that do not help learners advance. According to Advance CTE, 44 states have publicly available lists of industry-recognized credentials, and 34 of those states have a process to formally approve those credentials.[12] These efforts provide a foundation that boards can build upon.

Establishing and Promoting Common Data Standards. Credential data is rarely standardized. Systems may describe the same credential in different ways or not at all. Many data systems do not talk to each other, so the result is a patchwork of disconnected information that is difficult to use at scale. CTDL is designed to provide transparency across all levels of education and workforce, and all types and levels of credentials. By setting clear standards and encouraging locally aligned policies, state boards can ensure that every credential earned has real-world value.

State boards should prioritize working with other state-level partners to ensure that common data standards allow credential information to be shared across systems, starting with their own K-12 data infrastructure and extending to their postsecondary and workforce development partners. Such standards can help ensure that students and families can easily compare credentials from different providers and deepen credential alignment with wider career pathways and CTE programs. Taking inventory of existing data systems and their related capabilities is a first step toward standardizing credential information and integrating it with broader student information systems, school-level initiatives, and career readiness accountability and related reporting.

State boards should train their focus on outcomes: Are learners gaining access to careers, continued learning, and long-term success? User-friendly tools and accessible points of access to these data, such as public-facing dashboards, are key. They should communicate career pathways and report expected earnings, connections to stackable credentials and further learning, and data disaggregated by demographics and credential types. This reporting can ensure that disparities in performance and outcomes are not hidden behind aggregated measures.[13]

Building Cross-System Collaboration. K-12, postsecondary, and workforce systems were initially developed independently and, as a consequence, have operated with separate policies, governance structures, and accountability frameworks, which may or may not be fully aligned. To begin to break down these silos, state boards can leverage their convening power to establish shared definitions of credentials’ quality and create formal mechanisms that ensure regular collaboration with other system-level partners to identify key elements that contribute to this vision. When systems all speak the same language and use the same means of transaction—in this case, credentials—stakeholders can help ensure that student learning is reliably measured and documented, with seamless transitions between and among these systems without students losing time or credit.

Such collaboration will also be important for regular reevaluation of which credentials meet graduation or career readiness requirements and align with current labor market needs. There will never be, nor should there ever be, a single, static list of credentials of value. Rather, the focus should be on establishing clear, consistent criteria for evaluating credentials that can be applied as new opportunities and needs emerge. Central to these efforts is transparency. Credential transparency empowers both policymakers to make evidence-based decisions and learners to choose credentials that align with their goals.

From Ambiguity to Action

The landscape of credentials is evolving fast, but state education leaders should not keep students and families in the dark while education and workforce systems catch up. Credential transparency helps students, parents, educators, and employers make sense of a complex world. It connects learning to opportunity and ensures that the credentials students earn provide valuable entry points to positive learning and employment outcomes.

The infrastructure to evaluate credentials is already being constructed. Organizations such as mine, Credential Engine, are working with states, training providers, institutions of higher education, and other partners to build an open, structured, and connected system of credential data.

State boards have an opportunity—and a responsibility—to lead on this issue. By demanding greater transparency and promoting shared data infrastructures, state boards can ensure that students have all the information they need to make smart decisions about their futures.

Notes

[1] Advance CTE, “Making Career Readiness Count: A 2025 Update,” report (June 2025), p. 9.

[2] Advance CTE, “Making Career Readiness Count,” report, p. 8.

[3] Twenty-two states choose postsecondary credential attainment as a program quality indicator under Perkins. Advance CTE, “The State of Career Technical Education: Credentials of Value,” report (May 2025), p. 7.

[4] CTDL is an open-source, Creative Commons–licensed resource, the development and continued evolution of which is managed through Credential Engine with topic-specific task groups of diverse international subject-matter experts. Credential Engine, “Credential Engine Technical Site, web page.

[5] National Conference of State Legislatures, “Credentials of Value,” brief, updated February 23, 2023.

[6] Credential Engine, “Colorado | State & Regional Partners,” web page.

[7] Credential Engine, “Texas | State & Regional Partners,” web page.

[8] Credential Engine, “Federal, State, and Regional,” web page.

[9] Credential transparency raises no student data privacy concerns because it does not touch any personally identifiable information. This work simply ensures that essential information about credentials, programs, skills, aggregate outcomes, indicators of quality, transfer and articulation, alignment to job skills, and pathways is available to the public in a standard way.

[10] Credential Engine, “State Policy Briefs,” web page.

[11] Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, “Defining Quality Non-Degree Credentials Is Crucial to Putting Students on a Path to Success,” National Skills Coalition Skills Blog, September 23, 2019.

[12] Advance CTE, “Credentials of Value,” report, p. 2.

[13] Advance CTE, “Making Career Readiness Count,” report.