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California is trying to make it easier for community college students to convert prior work experience—such as military training, industry certifications, and job-based coursework—into academic credit, a policy Gov. Gavin Newsom has backed with state funding in recent years and put more money behind in January. The goal, state leaders say, is to help students reduce the time and cost of earning credits and degrees, including when that prior experience can translate into equivalent college-level learning.
Laylah Rivers, 31, said the impact of those credits was personal. She had already served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and worked across the West Coast in technology, including at Amazon, before enrolling at West Los Angeles College. Rivers received seven credits—described as equivalent to about two classes—after providing her military transcript and evidence of computer courses she took while working at Amazon Web Services, and she said, “Of course, with 13 years of experience, I should get more credit for what I’m doing,” adding, “But I’m grateful.”
Rivers’ experience reflects the broader expansion California community colleges have made since 2017, and the state’s longer-term benchmark for the program. By 2030, the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office wants at least 250,000 students to have earned college credit for work or other “prior learning” experience, a target that Newsom has supported with funding that, in recent years, has included more than $34 million for related state efforts. In January, Newsom proposed putting an additional $37 million toward that goal.
Still, state officials say the data on how widely students are being served does not fully capture the program’s reach. The chancellor’s office operates a public dashboard showing that more than 40,000 students in California have received at least one credit for pre-college work or education in recent years, but Samuel Lee, a senior adviser to the community college chancellor who oversees the dashboard, told CalMatters that the real total is roughly twice that. Lee said he could not provide exact figures, and he described adoption as uneven: “it’s taking the colleges a while,” he said, adding, “Some are nowhere and some are really down the road.”
Some of the students who benefit from prior-learning credit can do so through long-established routes like Advanced Placement exams, while the policy emphasis in California is more recent when it comes to job experience. Community colleges can award credit for work-related learning—such as computer courses or military training—once students provide evidence and faculty translate it into course equivalents. The process can be straightforward for students who submit materials like military transcripts, certifications, or test results, but it can be more subjective in fields such as photography, where faculty may assess a portfolio, and it still depends on whether a campus chooses to implement compatible systems.
At West Los Angeles College, administrators have tried to make the opportunity more visible to students who plan to transfer. Allison Tom-Miura, the dean of academic affairs and workforce development for the campus, said the college made it a requirement that all transfer-oriented students learn about opportunities to get credit for prior work experience during meetings with a counselor in the first semester or at orientation. Tom-Miura called it “a big equity issue,” saying, “How can we help students from repeating courses that they do not need?” She said Rivers did not learn about how her prior experience could translate into credits until months after enrolling, when a dean noticed her military and computer science experience, and she described it as having taken “a whole semester to figure it out.”
State action began with legislation that eventually would require every college to adopt a policy for awarding credit for prior learning or work experience. In 2018, California’s Legislature passed a law to mandate the approach, but community college leaders said colleges initially received little or no funding to implement it. Lee said his statewide system lists skills and certifications that colleges already recognize to make it easier for students to petition for credit, but he said only about half of the state’s 116 community colleges were actively participating in the effort.
Lee and other officials are now working to reduce the gaps caused by different campus-by-campus approaches to tracking credits. He has been touring colleges across the state and presenting on the benefits of a shared tracking system, including at a Sacramento conference last month where he shared a stage with Palomar College interim president Tina Recalde. Recalde said Palomar has given more than 3,600 students credit for work or other prior learning experiences, but her college’s figures do not appear on Lee’s platform or other public dashboards, according to Palomar’s dean of career technical and extended education, Nichol Roe, who said Palomar used its own system before Lee’s platform existed.
California’s plan to align tracking is also tied to funding incentives. The Legislature approved a budget last year that guarantees $50,000 to each community college campus that wants to participate, and Lee said colleges receiving the money agree to use aspects of his data system and screen veterans and incoming students for potential additional credits. College of the Sequoias in Visalia president Brent Calvin said the campus chose not to apply for the money; Lee said that by the deadline, every other college applied and that he would “gladly” make an exception for College of the Sequoias. “Our goal is not for them to meet the deadline,” Lee said. “Our goal is to get people funding and support.”