For decades, language study in higher education has often been framed around a requirement: complete the sequence, fulfill the general education requirement, earn the credits, and move on.
But today’s students are asking a different question: What does this skill do for me?
That question matters at a time when language programs are facing declining enrollments and students are weighing every course against competing academic, career, and financial priorities. Language programs across the country are shrinking, and the reasons aren’t a mystery. In Language Program Vitality in the United States, Heidrich Uebel, Kronenberg, and Sterling identify why students leave or avoid language study: they don’t see a path to career advancement, they can’t fit another course into an already crowded schedule, or they simply assume English is enough.
The challenge, then, is not simply convincing students that languages matter. It is helping them see and document what their language skills are worth.
That is where the Global Seal of Biliteracy can play a distinctive role in higher education.
What if a small credential could help solve a big problem: declining enrollments and student uncertainty about the value of language study?
For decades, the language field has treated enrollment as a box to check, a graduation requirement rather than a career asset. Proficiency has been framed as a cultural nicety instead of what it actually is: a marketable, income generating skill. And today’s students are pragmatic. They’re not asking “is this interesting?” They’re asking “what does this get me?” If a language course can’t answer that question, they’ll spend their credit hours on one that can.
This is where the Global Seal of Biliteracy comes in. It’s not just another credential. It offers a direct answer to a question institutions have often struggled to answer: what’s the return on investment? By translating language proficiency into a recognized, career relevant marker, the Global Seal reconnects what should have never been separated in the first place: language acquisition and future opportunity.
From language requirement to career-ready credential
Founded in 2018, the Global Seal was created to give bilingual and multilingual individuals a way to document, celebrate, and leverage their language skills for academic and employment opportunities. Today, more than 100 colleges and universities have issued the credential, and more than one in five Global Seal certificates are awarded by colleges, universities, and employers. The credential is available in more than 170 languages and has been issued in more than 70 countries.
Unlike a course grade or a statement that a student is “proficient,” the Global Seal provides a verifiable, comparable, portable, and digitally shareable record of demonstrated proficiency. Students can place it on a résumé or CV, share it through their LinkedIn profile’s “Licenses and Certifications,” include it in applications and portfolios, and carry it with them beyond a single institution.
That distinction matters. Language ability is often real but difficult to document in a way that employers, graduate programs, or other institutions can readily interpret.
As Arwa Alkhawaja, Program Coordinator at San Diego State University, explains:
“Graduates have used the Global Seal as a professional credential in employment and graduate opportunities, while also experiencing cultural affirmation through formal recognition of their linguistic identities.”
The result is a shift in how institutions can frame language learning: not simply as something students complete, but as something they can prove and use.
Making Language Skills Count in the Job Market
For students, documenting language proficiency is about more than recognition. It is about making a skill visible when opportunity arises.
Employers increasingly look for evidence of what graduates can actually do, not simply what courses they completed. The National Association of Colleges and Employers’ Job Outlook Survey reported that 60% of employers want to see proof of skills on a recent graduate’s résumé. A verified language credential gives students a concrete way to demonstrate proficiency alongside their degree and other career ready skills.
That documentation can matter when language ability is relevant to hiring, placement, advancement, or compensation. In fields ranging from health care and education to business, social services, and international commerce, employers may seek employees who can communicate effectively with multilingual customers, patients, families, colleagues, and communities. Some employers also offer language differentials, bonuses, or other compensation incentives for demonstrated bilingual skills.
For higher education institutions, this creates an opportunity to connect language learning more directly to career readiness. A Global Seal credential gives students evidence they can carry from the classroom to the workplace, and gives institutions another tangible way to demonstrate that their graduates leave campus with skills employers value.
The credential doesn’t promise a particular job or salary. Instead, it helps students answer an increasingly important question in the hiring process: “What can I prove I can do?”
A credential that can help build enrollment
Many students arrive at college with language skills developed through high school, family, community, travel, heritage language experiences, or previous schooling. Yet those students do not always continue studying the language in college.
The Global Seal can create a bridge.
Because certification is based on documented proficiency, students can enter higher education with evidence of what they already know rather than starting over simply because their previous learning occurred outside the university classroom. Institutions can use that evidence in recruitment, advising, placement, and credit decisions. Using a verifiable Global Seal certification, backed by a full four skill test, ensures accurate placement and eliminates the need for placement testing.
Consider what that could mean for a language department trying to increase upper division enrollment and its number of majors and minors.
The University of Idaho and the University of Texas at Arlington have developed credit pathways for Global Seal holders, with opportunities for students to receive up to 16 and 14 college credits, respectively, based on demonstrated proficiency and institutional policy.
At UT Arlington, the institutional experience is especially striking. Dr. Price reports:
“Upper division course enrollment has almost doubled since adopting the Global Seal of Biliteracy, and we have added majors and minors too.”
The important point is not that a credential automatically produces enrollment growth. Rather, removing unnecessary repetition can make it easier for students with existing proficiency to enter and continue in advanced coursework.
Research on AP Spanish credit cited in the higher ed materials similarly found that awarding credit for demonstrated proficiency did not reduce upper-level enrollment. Instead, upper level enrollment grew as students who might otherwise have stopped or avoided redundant coursework continued into more advanced study.
For institutions, that creates a potentially important pathway:
proven proficiency → appropriate placement → advanced coursework → continued language study.
Making progress visible can support retention
Recruitment gets students through the door. The next challenge is keeping them moving.
Microcredentials have become increasingly common in higher education. The Micro Credentials Impact Report 2024 cited on the Global Seal’s higher ed page reports that 51% of higher education institutions already offer or integrate microcredentials, while 68% of institutions that had not yet adopted them planned to do so within five years.
The appeal is straightforward: students receive recognition for achievement along the way rather than waiting until graduation. Stackable credentials support and incentivize growth. A University of Texas at Austin study found that nationally, about 40% of certificate earners go on to “stack” additional credentials.
The same principle can apply to language learning.
The Global Seal offers three stackable certification levels: Functional Fluency, Working Fluency, and Professional Fluency. This gives students opportunities to set a next goal as their proficiency develops.
At Denison University, for example, students are proficiency tested at the beginning and end of the major. As the university reports:
“Many of our students entering the major earn a Functional Fluency Seal, and this has motivated them to set their sights on achieving the Working Fluency Seal.”
That is a different message from “You have fulfilled your language requirement.”
It says: You have achieved something. Here is what it means. And here is the next level you can reach.
Pacific University has likewise reported that students take pride in their achievements and that faculty have observed, anecdotally, improved retention. The evidence is not yet sufficient to claim that the Global Seal by itself causes higher retention. But the credential can create several conditions associated with persistence: visible progress, attainable milestones, appropriate placement, and recognition of achievement.
Language proficiency belongs across the curriculum
Perhaps the most important shift is recognizing that multilingualism is not just for language majors.
At San Diego State University, Global Seal recipients represent diverse fields including dual language education, engineering, international business, and mathematics education. As Alkhawaja notes, these students demonstrate that multilingualism supports success “across fields, not only in education.”
That matters because language proficiency can complement preparation in education, health care, business, STEM, public service, and international work.
It also creates an opportunity for institutions to recognize a population that traditional language programs can sometimes overlook: students who have significant language abilities but are not pursuing a language degree.
A bilingual engineering major, multilingual nursing student, future teacher, international business student, or heritage speaker may never identify as a “language student.” But their language proficiency can still be an important part of their academic and professional identity.
A portable credential makes that skill visible. Higher Ed language programs that offer a pathway to document language skills can become a cross departmental enrollment engine, attracting students from across campus, not just language majors, to build, certify, and leverage language proficiency alongside their primary field of study.
Complementing, not replacing, language education
Some faculty may reasonably question whether an external credential could reduce language learning to a marketable skill or encourage students to bypass coursework.
Those concerns deserve consideration.
The Global Seal should not be viewed as a replacement for language study, a language major, or the intellectual work of the humanities. Proficiency is not the same thing as literary analysis, cultural interpretation, historical understanding, intercultural inquiry, or critical thinking.
In fact, documented proficiency can help students reach the deeper levels of study that make those experiences possible.
The goal is not to end language learning once a student earns a credential. It is to give students an incentive to continue: to move from Functional to Working to Professional Fluency, from basic coursework to advanced study, and from classroom learning to meaningful application.
In that sense, the Global Seal is best understood as an entry point and motivator, not an endpoint.
Turning language skills into opportunity
The broader higher education landscape is moving toward credentials that make learning more visible, portable, and connected to outcomes. The Global Seal applies those principles to a skill that students already possess or are working hard to develop.
For institutions, it can provide a way to:
attract students who arrive with demonstrated language proficiency;
recognize heritage, less commonly taught, and self taught languages;
support placement and competency based credit decisions;
create stackable milestones that encourage continued study;
connect language learning to majors and careers beyond the language department; and
give students a credential they can take with them into employment, graduate school, and future education.
And because the Global Seal is free for institutions and students to implement, with testing costs paid separately to independent testing providers, it can be incorporated without creating a new institutional budget line.
The opportunity is therefore bigger than adding another line to a student’s résumé.
It is about changing the narrative around language study.
Students should not have to choose between learning a language and preparing for a career. Higher education can show them that the two are connected.
The Global Seal does not solve every challenge facing language programs, nor is it a guaranteed solution to declining enrollment. Its value is more practical: it gives institutions a mechanism for recognizing achievement, supporting academic pathways, and making multilingualism visible to students, faculty, and employers.
When language proficiency becomes something students can prove, share, build upon, and carry forward, the language requirement can become something more.
It can become a credential.
And a credential can become a pathway to opportunity.