Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on April 9, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Since the 1997 founding of Western Governors University (WGU), a private, nonprofit institution developed to pioneer so-called competency-based education (CBE), a growing number of colleges throughout the U.S. have explored the model to varying degrees. Sometimes referred to as “proficiency-based learning,” “mastery-based learning,” or “student-centered education,” CBE is an alternative model of academic instruction that empowers students with variegated choices in learning pace, individualized academic support, and progress based on mastery of course materials.
According to the latest national survey regarding CBE, conducted in 2020 by the American Institutes for Research, 47 percent of institutional respondents reported being in the process of adopting CBE, and 13 percent reported current operation of at least one full CBE program. These 65 CBE-implementing schools had a total of 551 CBE programs, of which 415 (75 percent) were offered at the undergraduate level and 136 (25 percent) were graduate programs. Compared with traditional learning programs, which track seat-time, deadlines, grades/test scores, and rigid academic schedules, CBE is attractive as schools seek to improve learning outcomes, respond to evolving workforce needs, and expand access.
As WGU’s materials describe it, CBE “means that students progress through courses as soon as they can prove they’ve mastered the material, rather than advancing only when the semester or term ends.” This innovative approach is particularly popular among institutions catering to nontraditional learners, such as community colleges—so much so that, in 2021, California’s state lawmakers enacted legislation (AB 102 and AB 1958) to promote CBE.
Specifically, over $4 million in state funding was allocated for the purpose of expanding CBE to eight community colleges in an unprecedented pilot program. Each participating college was provided with up to $500,000 over the course of four years to design and implement its own CBE programs. In November 2024, an additional $5 million was approved to further help the eight participating colleges, who were originally given three years to flesh out their CBE models but will now have until the end of 2027.
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However, in spite of the state government’s enthusiastic support, the pilot has met with strong resistance from union representatives and faculty members at these colleges. One participant, Madera Community College in central California, took its disapproval of the state-sanctioned reform to a new level when its academic senate issued a vote of “no confidence” in the college president as a signal of its opposition to the pilot.
What happened?
First and foremost, any “institutional transformative change”—a phrase used by one faculty member to describe the CBE pilot—is by nature disruptive and bound to encounter grievances from interest groups. Some of these grievances are constructive criticisms exposing the logistical and bureaucratic barriers impeding the reform. After all, schools must institute necessary changes to their state-funding formulas, faculty pay, and financial-assistance regulations to outfit a CBE program.
For instance, a music instructor at Shasta College, which offers CBE for its associate’s degree in early childhood education, expressed the following confusion about the pilot:
Take a look at teacher load, teacher contracts—that’s all connected to time in the classroom, lecture hours. This whole framework is going to have to break or change and nobody really knows how to go about doing that.
Aside from confusion over compensation, workload, and course design, others expressed concerns over the short timeline for so radical a reform. East Los Angeles College responded to the bureaucratic challenge by moving its CBE program from technology and logistics to biotechnology since the latter has more staff to support the program. The director of innovation and special projects at Shasta College acknowledged that the school has yet to calculate faculty pay under the new system, which affords students a self-paced format and up to three chances to take an exam. The director also noted that students must be made aware of CBE’s unique challenges and demands for self-discipline.
Of the eight colleges that signed onto the state pilot for CBE, only Coastline College, which is implementing the pilot in an associate’s in management program, is expected to meet the initial 2024-25 deadline. Madera Community College was the only other school that offered a business major for the state program. Coastline’s business department has 11 faculty members, while Madera seems to have fewer than five for its business and information systems program.
But fundamental and irreconcilable disagreements have led some to view the reform as “an existential threat.” In the case of Madera Community College, the conflict is about “equity.” As early as August 2023, when the school’s academic senate voted unanimously for a resolution urging administrators to reconsider participation, faculty leaders opined,
The Academic Senate of Madera Community College is supportive of equity-focused programs, and CBE is being presented as equity-focused, yet some ‘experts argue that … these programs will only serve to exacerbate class and race-based inequalities in higher education [and] establish a separate-but-equal landscape in higher education, with poor students relegated to CBE programs.’
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In April 2024, the president of the academic senate, Lynette Cortes Howden, a mathematics professor at Madera, called the school’s disillusionment with CBE “a participatory government problem” and “a leadership problem” in an official statement. Cortes Howden further complained about the pilot’s lack of equity and its disproportionate effect on “women of color”:
First, when a dean asks part-time or tenure-track faculty to work on a project, that comes from a position of power, and it is difficult for those people to say no. You state you’re having a hard time with the buy-in—no one wants this, or there’s a power dis-balance, and that’s an equity issue. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, that grants come to this campus or district, and the work lands on women of color.
Dr. Antoniette Aizon, a psychology professor and a guest at the April 2024 meeting, further spoke of CBE’s built-in bias against “marginalized” students:
As a community college, we serve marginalized and disenfranchised students, and we have a responsibility to fully vet CBE and not harm these students. There is still much that is unanswered about CBE. […] Having rubrics in CBE modules could also create a culture of bias within the modules and favor students who have college experience.
Equity-centered objections to CBE sharply counter proponents’ position. The model’s promise of freeing students from sitting through classes to obtain college credit (when students may face challenges from work or family obligations) is typically branded as a solution to educational inequity. For Charla Long, president of the Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) and a consultant for the pilot, traditional models of learning have “created an inequitable system because it’s so time bound.” By meeting learners where they are, CBE advocates say, the system promotes equity. Yet one person’s equity is another’s inequity.
At Madera College, faculty leaders’ fierce resistance to competency-based learning demonstrates the precarious limits of a top-down approach to educational reforms. Half a million dollars in state funding has been easily offset by unforeseen hurdles, both bureaucratic and administrative, to meeting an arbitrary deadline. Some barriers can be overcome with careful planning and stakeholder coordination. But others, political in nature, can’t be mitigated. Perhaps the best course of action would be to let reforms proceed organically as responses to evolving demands in the marketplace rather than as capitulations to the strong hand of government.
Image: “East Los Angeles College” by Cmorozco on Wikimedia Commons
