By Michelle Mott, Consultant, Innovative Credentials Project Manager, AACRAO
A veteran applies to your campus with years of technical training. An adult learner returns to finish a degree they started 15 years ago, bringing a decade of workplace expertise. A dual-enrollment student arrives with credits that may or may not transfer. Each asks a version of the same question: Does what I already know count here?
Too often, the answer depends on who they reach, which office they land in, or whether anyone thought to evaluate their prior learning before they enrolled. Recognizing real learning is often inconsistent.
That gap is costly. For learners, it means repeated coursework, additional tuition, and more time to complete a credential. For institutions, it means missed enrollment opportunities, lower persistence among adult learners, and underused strategies for supporting learner success. Registrars and enrollment leaders sit at the point where these questions are answered, and where better systems can make recognition more consistent, transparent, and equitable.
A Collaborative National Effort
AACRAO is leading a national coalition, with support from the Strada Education Foundation, to help make that happen. In March 2026, AACRAO convened a national leadership roundtable of higher education organizations, including ACE, CAEL, C-BEN, UPCEA, and the Center for Academic Innovation, to strengthen national coordination around Credit for Prior Learning. For years, institutions have navigated a fragmented landscape of competing terminology, overlapping frameworks, and guidance spread across organizations that rarely spoke with one voice. Rather than creating another standard, the roundtable is working to connect and translate decades of existing work into a practical, coherent path institutions can readily implement.
There is a unified conviction anchoring the effort: institutions recognize learning to make it possible for learners to benefit from what they know and can do. Roundtable members returned to this principle throughout their discussions, viewing it as the foundation for a more consistent, learner-centered approach to recognizing knowledge and skills acquired both inside and outside the traditional classroom.
Why This Matters for AACRAO Members
The roundtable made a deliberate choice that should land squarely with every registrar and enrollment leader: the primary audience for this work is you. AACRAO members sit at the busy intersection of admissions, academic affairs, records and registration, degree audit, transfer, and credentialing. We are uniquely positioned to implement high-quality recognition practices and help build the cross-institutional trust that supports learner mobility.
The roundtable’s goal is to provide practical resources and actionable guidance institutions can use: implementation guidance, exemplar policies, quality principles, decision frameworks, and tools that help campuses strengthen existing CPL practices or establish new ones. The work also places CPL within the broader learning mobility ecosystem that many institutions are already navigating, including transfer, Learning and Employment Records, microcredentials, workforce learning, and evolving state and federal policy.
The timing is not neutral. CPL has become a national priority for policymakers. Recognition of learning connects directly to the two things presidents and provosts watch most closely: enrollment and revenue. Reframed that way, CPL is not viewed as a cost center and starts to be seen as an enrollment strategy, an affordability strategy, and a completion strategy at once. Registrars and enrollment officers fluent in this work are positioned to lead an increasingly important institutional conversation and communicate the demonstrable ROI of this work.
The Work Ahead
The roundtable has completed its initial alignment phase, during which members mapped existing frameworks, identified shared priorities, and established a common direction for the work.
Current priorities include:
- Developing shared quality guardrails. The roundtable is creating a concise set of guiding principles that protect academic quality while supporting innovation and respecting institutional autonomy.
- Establishing common language. Rather than beginning with a comprehensive glossary, the roundtable is using recognition of learning as the broad umbrella concept, with CPL serving as the operational term for higher education practice.
- Creating a practitioner-focused guide. A jointly authored resource is being developed for registrars and enrollment leaders that synthesizes existing research and guidance into practical implementation strategies, process maps, institutional examples, and supporting tools.
- Grounding the work in practice. State initiatives already underway in Arizona and West Virginia will help inform and validate the coalition’s guidance as it is developed.
What’s Next
The roundtable will continue meeting throughout 2026, with focused virtual working sessions supporting development of the guide, establishing quality guardrails, determining shared terminology, and creating related resources. The resulting guidance will be shared with the higher education community through venues including Convergence, CBExchange, and the AACRAO Strategic Enrollment Management Conference, where the roundtable aims to further position recognition of learning as a key strategy for learning mobility and student success.
As the work progresses, AACRAO will continue sharing updates and resources with members. In the meantime, the coalition’s message to institutions is simple: Recognize learning. Start somewhere. Try something. Learn from the results.
share