The federal government, states, institutional leaders, and researchers are striving to understand the entirety of workforce offerings in the United States. But there is a huge blind spot: noncredit offerings. That’s why a team led by Michelle Van Noy of Rutgers University and Mark D’Amico of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, along with Peter Bahr of the University of Michigan and Di Xu of the University of California, Irvine, are investigating what data is available on noncredit programs in three states. There are a lot of noncredit offerings. The researchers counted 924 unique offerings at 15 community colleges in Iowa, 396 at 12 community colleges in Louisiana, and 6,045 across the 23 Virginia Community College System (VCCS) institutions. Most of these offerings are occupational trainings.
