The Institutional Plateau in Microcredential Adoption: A Hybrid Review of Peer-Reviewed Evidence and Practitioner Reports in Higher Education

Micro-credentials have attracted intense scholarly and policy attention, yet recent practitioner evidence, most notably the 2026 UPCEA survey of US institutions, the catalyst for this review, suggests that institutional commitment has plateaued even as individual engagement deepens. This hybrid review examines whether the peer-reviewed literature can account for that pattern. Sixty-five peer-reviewed studies (2020–2026) and eight major practitioner and policy reports were coded against an identical six-dimension framework spanning adoption, purposes, integration mechanisms, enabling conditions, barriers, and evidence of value. The two evidence streams proved strikingly complementary—and strikingly disconnected. The scholarly literature richly documents purposes, enabling conditions, and barriers, but measures adoption rarely, examines integration mostly in proposal rather than operation, and contains no direct study of the plateau; systematic adoption evidence resides almost entirely in practitioner reporting. Across both streams, recognition emerges as the binding constraint: employers, learners, and quality-assurance systems consistently condition the value of micro-credentials on the credit-bearing integration that most institutions have approached only tentatively. The review concludes that micro-credential value is conferred by institutional integration rather than intrinsic to the credentiaand proposes a research agenda centred on longitudinal adoption trajectories, verified outcomes, and integration observed in practice.