Dr. Paul J. LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University, is an international leader in the competency-based education movement.  Proponents of this form of education assert that a college degree should convey a level of mastery of a subject or set of skills and that seat-time does not equate to acquisition of knowledge.

“The irony of the three-credit hour is that it fixes time while it leaves variable the actual learning. In other words, we are really good at telling the world how long students have sat at their desks and we are really quite poor at saying how much they have learned or even what they learned. Competency-based education flips the relationship and says let time be variable, but make learning well-defined, fixed and non-negotiable.”  [read more]