Life Experience Degree - A Scam?

You may very well have been approached via email with an offer of a life experience degree and not really understand what it means, or whether it is legitimate or not. Don't feel bad, there is a lot of misconception out there about these so called degrees, and it obviously seems to be very suspect on the surface when someone is offering you a degree where you do not have to take any classes, but simply hand over a large amount of money. I would like to try and clear up these misconceptions, explain to you the concept behind a life experience degree, and educational insitutions that are legitimate as opposed to bogus places that claim they can solve your employment woes.

Most adults will tell you that they don't remember a lot of what they learned in school. Sure, the majority of us can read and write as a direct result of going to school, but by far the most learning comes from everyday life. Your first job will teach you so many things that any school education will pale in comparison, yet all of this learning is not recognised in any formal way.

A life experience degree is basically a recognition of these learning achievements, and they are obtained by providing the educational institution with a background on your employment achievements and prior learning through college or university. The problem is that the vast majority of insitutions that offer this type of accreditation are giving you nothing more than a bit of paper, it is generally not recognised as a formal degree, and will usually be discounted by a potential employer as such.

How To Tell If A Life Experience Degree Is Legitimate

It's unfortunate, but there are many companies offering online degrees and diplomas that are completely fake. Before you fork over a whole lot of money for your degree, you want to ensure that the institution is legitimate and accredited. These insitutions go as far as to create their own accreditation boards so that they can claim they are accredited, and suck in many thousands of people every year that hand over a lot of cash and end up with nothing of value. A fake degree is not going to do you any good in the workplace, as most employers know f these scams and are on the lookout for degrees issued by these insitutions when vetting potential employees.

The bottom line is, if a degree looks like it is too good to be true, then it probably is. If you can get yourself a degree by simply providing your credit card details and an outline of your employment history, that degree is definitely NOT accredited. The problem is, what these institutions are doing is not illegal as long as they are run under specific guidelines. The very few cases that have gone to court have been thrown out simply due to the fact that the student was never offered an "accredited" degree in the first place. Further, the vast majority of websites that offer these degrees are based outside of the United States and therefore are not even answerable to US laws.

Within the United States itself, there are only three legitimate and educational institutions that offer accredited life experience degrees. These are Charter Oak State College, Thomas Edison State College and Excelsior College. Obtaining a degree through one of these colleges is an extremely long drawn out process, and tremendously expensive as well.

I'll answer that question with another question; Why do you think you need one? If you have spent many years working in an occupation that requires a specific skill set but offers no formal accreditation for those skills, then yes, you deserve some sort of acknowledgement, but it is questionable as to how much that degree will be worth in the real world. If you are applying for a job that requires the skills that you have previously learned, and other applicants for that job have your experience AND a life experience degree to back it up, then it's quite likely that the employer will chose them over you. If, however, you are simply after recognition of your prior achievements, or you feel confident that your skill set on its own is enough to get you the career you are after, then a life experience college degree will probably be a waste of your time and money.

If you do decide that this is something that you would like to pursue, go into it with an open mind. Be extremely wary of any life experience degrees online that offer you the world for little or no effort on your part, you could end up with nothing more than a very expensive piece of paper.