Professional certificates gain favour over degrees

Time 15 April 2012

Reggie Herndon returned to college because he wanted to change careers. What he didn’t want was another degree, writes Jon Marcus for Time. Herndon, a University of Tennessee graduate, is on his way instead to finishing a nine-month professional certificate in counter-intelligence from Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania, which he hopes will bolster his odds of landing a job as an intelligence analyst.

“I decided that I wanted to re-engineer myself,” said Herndon (56), who handles marketing for an employment programme under contract to the Social Security Administration. “But I didn’t want to go back and do the whole graduate programme, and come out with a tremendous amount of debt.”

Responding to demand from more and more students like Herndon, universities are jumping into the business of providing professional certificates that were once the domain of community colleges and for-profit providers like the University of Phoenix.
Full report on the Time site

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