According to the U.S. Census Bureau, nondegree credentials may boost earnings, especially for those with just a high school diploma but sometimes even for those with college degrees.
Local community colleges often provide a path to higher earnings through nondegree credentials (NDC). Locally, South Plains College provides NDCs through its Continuing Education & Workforce Development and technical divisions to help students quickly gain jobready skills and begin earning a living.
About 37% of adults aged 25 to 64 with at least a high school diploma went on to earn nondegree credentials (NDC), including professional certifications, licenses or certificates which typically target specific skills and occupations.
According to 2019– 2024 combined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), fulltime workers in this age group with an NDC reported 16.4% higher annual median earnings than those without one.
Earned outside of the traditional academic processes that lead to a college degree, NDCs are typically job-related and earned upon com-pletion of a program of occupation-specific coursework, training or demonstration of specific skills.
Vocational and educational certificates, sometimes called diplomas, are earned from community, technical or career colleges as well as trade schools and universities.
Most programs focus on job-skill development and career preparation. People with certificates enter a variety of fields from food service and maintenance to health care.
Certifications and licenses both require recipients to demonstrate job-specific knowledge, skills and abilities, which usually means passing an exam or other standardized assessment. Unlike certificates, certifications and licenses can expire.
Certifications are issued by industry-recognized boards, organizations and associations such as the American Nursing Association and by private companies like Google. They are particularly common in healthcare and technical fields.
Licenses are legally necessary to work in an occupation and are issued by governmental agencies at the local, state or federal level.
Each state and the District of Columbia have different rules, but all require emergency medical technicians, cosmetologists, barbers and attorneys to have a license.
Full-time workers with NDCs often reported significantly higher median annual earnings than those without, regardless of educational attainment.
Workers with certain types of NDCs who had completed high school or “some college” had median incomes on par with people with more education. There was no difference in the median incomes of those who didn’t go beyond high school but had a certification or license and those who had some college or even an associate degree but no NDC.
Some college plus a certification or license was associated with higher median income than an associate degree alone.
People with just a high school education were the only group to report significantly higher median earnings across all NDC types, making 7.4% more with a certifvice. icate or certification/license, and about 21.0% more with a CCL, which is a combination of both.
Workers with some college or an associate degree plus a certification/ license or combination CCL earned 10.9% to 16.2% more.
On the demographic side of the working population, women (36.1%) had NDCs at slightly higher rates than men (32.8%).
About 30% of Hispanic (28.9%) and Asian (30.3%) workers reported having NDCs, compared to approximately a third of White (36.0%), Black (34.0%) and adults of another race or ethnicity (35.6%) who earned NDCs.
Roughly half of associate degree holders (46.7%) reported having an NDC, possibly because a high proportion (43.0%) of associate degrees of adults age 25 and older were occupational rather than academic, often preparing graduates for healthcare and other technical fields that demand highly specialized training and additional qualifications.
To measure NDC attainment across jobs, the Census Bureau examined five categories, including service (healthcare support, food service, and custodial); sales/administrative; farm/craft (farming, fishing, forestry, construction and repair); production (manufacturing and transportation); and professional (management, STEM, education, healthcare practitioner and legal).
Almost 40% of workers in service, farm/craft and professional occupations had at least one NDC, which is not unusual given the extensive credentialing requirements for healthcare workers and information technology-related certifications for various software, programs and equipment. Farm and craft trades, like agriculture and plumbing, similarly require credentialing to work with hazardous chemicals, heavy machinery and complex systems.
NDCs were less common in production and sales/ administrative occupations; and retail doesn’t require extensive technical training.