I have no dog in this race (zero affiliations with A&M0 but I have to agree with twoinanddone here.) I have a friend who is a Dean at a different institution (but a big, public U) and based on her experience, these certificate programs are usually in response to student/parent demands. How to make a plain vanilla degree in statistics more “marketable”? Add a certificate in “Business Analytics”. How to make a nervous parent feel better about their kids employment prospects with a degree in Early Childhood Ed? A certificate in “Family Counseling”.
Never mind that the certificates don’t actually do much- in many states, you need some sort of licensing (via an MSW, PsyD, etc.) to do counseling which is absolutely not what four courses as an undergrad is going to do for you. Or- the certificate is window-dressing- a young graduate with a degree in applied math does NOT need a course to figure out how to do entry level analytics- i.e. a less rigorous version of a course he or she has already taken. So in her experience (based on one very large institution only), the parents/students demand, the U complies, it requires hiring another administrator (which of course parents hate because non-instructional staff is seen as wasteful) and the cycle continues. The institutions that DON’T hire a staff person to keep the balls in the air on the certificate programs get tagged as “non-responsive” when the kid doesn’t get an email returned in an hour with questions like “If I drop one of my certificate courses after the drop date, will it show up as a W on my transcript even though it’s not my major?”
It’s a vicious cycle.