The ROI of Workforce Certificates vs. Degrees

In March 2024, the Burning Glass Institute launched the Credential Value Index, a publicly accessible platform analyzing the labor market outcomes of more than 23,440 credentials across 5,700 skills and job roles, drawing on the career histories of 19 million U.S. workers. It was the most comprehensive attempt yet to answer a question that millions of workers face every year: is this credential worth what it costs? The platform's arrival reflected growing recognition that the higher education and workforce training markets had expanded faster than the consumer information infrastructure designed to help workers make sense of them. More than a million short-term credential programs exist in the United States. Workers enrolling in them rarely have access to the employment and earnings data that would allow them to make an informed investment decision. The Credential Value Index was built to change that.

The fact that such a tool needed to be built at all tells you something important about how the credential market operates. The degree has long served as a shorthand for workforce readiness, a signal whose value workers and employers understood even without detailed outcome data. As the credential landscape has fragmented and the bachelor's degree has become both more expensive and less sufficient as a universal pathway, the need for precise return-on-investment analysis has become urgent. What follows is an assessment of what the current evidence actually shows.

The Degree Premium Is Real and Persistent, but Not Universal

The bachelor's degree continues to produce a durable earnings premium over high school completion across most occupational categories. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce projects that by 2031, 66 percent of good jobs, defined as those paying middle-class wages, will go to workers with college degrees. The labor force will be increasingly divided between those with postsecondary credentials and those without, and postsecondary education of some form remains, in the Georgetown framing, the only reliable path to a middle-class livelihood for most workers.

That finding is accurate as an average. It obscures substantial variation that matters enormously for individual workers making real decisions.

The Georgetown CEW's own 2024 analysis of middle-skills credentials found 107 high-paying middle-skills occupations — those in which workers with certificates and associate's degrees out-earn most bachelor's degree holders with similar job experience.

The same analysis found that the blue-collar sector faces a critical production shortage: current credential output is projected to meet only 13 percent of projected job openings through 2032 in high-paying middle-skills blue-collar occupations. The mismatch is not abstract. It means that hundreds of thousands of well-compensated positions in construction, manufacturing, and technical trades will go unfilled or be filled by workers without the preparation to perform them at full productivity, because the training infrastructure is not producing enough credentialed candidates.

Where Certificates Outperform and Where They Do Not

The ROI calculation for workforce certificates is not a single number. It varies by field, by region, by program quality, and by whether the credential is recognized by the employers a worker is actually trying to reach.

In healthcare, the return on certificate credentials is well-documented and strong. Licensed practical nurses, radiologic technologists, dental hygienists, and diagnostic medical sonographers all earn well above the median for bachelor's degree holders in their regions, with credential programs that run 12 to 24 months at a fraction of four-year degree costs. Georgetown CEW identifies healthcare as the only sector with a nationwide projected oversupply of middle-skills credentials relative to job openings, a finding that reflects both the strength of community college healthcare programs and the rate at which the field has built recognized credential pathways.

In information technology, the market is more complex. Employer-recognized certifications from CompTIA, Cisco, Google, and Microsoft function as genuine hiring signals in specific roles and companies, but the IT credential market has also produced a proliferation of unrecognized programs with limited employer uptake. The Burning Glass Credential Value Index was designed in part to address this legibility problem: workers need to know not just what a credential costs but whether the specific employers they want to reach actually recognize it.

In construction and the skilled trades, certificate programs at community and technical colleges produce strong employment outcomes and wage premiums, but the national underproduction of these credentials relative to demand, documented by Georgetown, means that the programs that exist are over-subscribed and the workforce development system is not producing enough completers to meet employer need.

Where certificates consistently underperform the degree is in managerial and professional advancement pathways. Workers who enter organizations through certificate programs frequently hit advancement ceilings at roles that are formally or informally gatekept by degree requirements at the management level, regardless of the skills-based hiring commitments their employers have made at the point of entry. The certificate gets workers in the door. It does not always provide the same upward mobility within organizations that degree credentials do.

The Information Gap Is a Policy Failure

The most consistent finding across every analysis of credential ROI is that workers cannot currently make rational investment decisions, not because the information does not exist but because it is not systematically disclosed.

A worker considering a medical assistant program at a for-profit training center and a comparable program at a community college typically cannot access the employment rates, median starting wages, or credential recognition rates for either program before enrolling. They can access tuition costs, because those are required to be disclosed, but cost without outcome data is not sufficient information for a high-stakes decision. The Burning Glass Credential Value Index is a private-sector attempt to fill a gap that public policy has not required institutions to fill.

Several states have moved toward mandatory outcome disclosure for credential programs. California's Strong Workforce Program requires community colleges to report employment and earnings outcomes for career education programs annually, creating a public data infrastructure that allows workers, employers, and policymakers to evaluate program performance. Texas and Florida have built similar systems. But these requirements typically apply only to publicly funded institutions, leaving the private training market, where a large share of short-term credentials are issued, largely unaccountable for outcomes.

The policy fix is not technically complex. Extending outcome disclosure requirements to all programs receiving federal student financial aid, and making that data accessible in a standardized format at the point of enrollment decision, would give workers the information they need and create market pressure for programs to improve outcomes or lose enrollment. The political obstacles are substantial: for-profit training providers have consistently opposed outcome-based accountability measures, and the regulatory history of this issue is a long record of proposals that were advanced, contested, and withdrawn. But the argument that workers should be able to know whether a credential program leads to employment before they pay for it is not a complicated one to make.

This article is part of the PPV Education and Human Capital series. The previous installment, Stackable Credentials and the Death of the Traditional Degree, examined the structural conditions under which credential stacking produces real earnings gains and the infrastructure gaps that prevent those conditions from being universally available. The next, Lifelong Learning Infrastructure: Who Pays?, looks at how the cost of continuous workforce training is distributed and why the current allocation produces chronic underinvestment.

Have data, research, or institutional experience with credential ROI? Reach out.