Scott Kinney studied geology and business at Dartmouth and Stanford before embarking on a career that eventually brought him to Capella University in 2012. The courses he took at both schools were traditional classes, rooted in a model that required students to complete a certain number of credit hours to receive a degree.
That approach differs considerably from Capella’s competency-based model, which doesn’t require students to log a certain number of hours in a classroom and focuses instead on their ability to demonstrate skills and abilities that employers need and want.
Kinney recently talked about his own education and how working at Capella has given him a fresh perspective on the differences between traditional and competency-based education. Here’s what he had to say.
“Being at Capella has definitely made me think about my undergraduate experience at Dartmouth and my MBA program at Stanford. Both are elite institutions that do well in the kind of rankings published by U.S. News and World Report. But what I find really interesting in those models is how the professor has carte blanche to decide what the course outcomes are going to be, what’s going to be taught, and how it’s going to be taught.
“I was a geology major at Dartmouth. And I do believe several of my professors taught in competency-based terms. They thought, ‘If you’re going to be in a geomorphology course, you need to be able to demonstrate certain competencies and so here’s how I’ve organized this class. And I’m going to assess your mastery of these competencies through these kinds of exercises.’ The fact that they were in a credit-hour based model was immaterial to them.
“But generally speaking, there were very few professors who took that approach. And that was probably even truer in my MBA program. I don’t think there were many instructors who thought, ‘How well-aligned are the course goals with what’s needed by the marketplace?’ That wasn’t their concern, or the concern of the institution.
“There will always be room for both approaches. Looking back, I can say I had fantastic experiences at both Dartmouth and Stanford. Part of what makes higher education great in this country is the wealth of options. But I also believe that in the years ahead every school, college, and university—even the Ivy League—will be transformed by the integration of more competency-based approaches to education. Capella is on the leading edge of that.”
Learn more about competency-based education at Capella.
