About Life Experience Degrees
Inside Life Experience Degrees
What are Life Experience Degrees?
The Life Experience Degree is essentially a job search tool. It is not really something to put on your walls and display proudly as if you were showing off your years in the trenches with all night study sessions popping Vivarin and early morning cramming for exams. It's a tool. It can help as you will see if you continue to read this website. As you learn about Life Experience degrees you will find they are not as effective as a traditional degrees, but they are much cheaper and best of all you can have one NOW.
Are Life Experience Schools Fully Accredited
When the Life Experience Institution advertises "ACCREDITED" degrees, they are not lying. Yes, they are all accredited. But the question you think you want to know is if they are REGIONALLY accredited and recognized by the US Government. The answer is they are not. None of them! Some of these schools fully disclose their accreditation status and some try to fool you into thinking they are regionally accredited. See www.degreeinspector.com for more on the disclosure issue.
Now if you think you are getting a REGIONALLY ACCREDITED Life Experience Degree from one of the websites listed on www.degreeinspector.com you better think again.
There are only THREE schools that offer Life Experience Degrees that are fully accredited and recognized by the US Government. They are Thomas Edison State College; Excelsior College; and Charter Oak State College. But don't think you are going to jump on one of their websites one Saturday morning and get your life experience degree. First, let's look at the reality of it: Their evaluation fees are enormous. They charge roughly $300.00 PER CREDIT for the evaluation. (120 credits required to graduate -- now you are at $36,000.00). They also require you to pay the $2000.00 enrollment fee even if you are not enrolled. Second, you will spend about 10 hours documenting your experience for EACH COURSE. To get a bachelor degree, you need about 40 courses - about 400 hours of documentation. But it's really worse than that. 99.5 percent of applicants quickly learn that they do not meet the prior learning standards for most courses. After all, it is a lot to ask to have the experiential crediting that meets core course requirements such as 'Western Civilization' or 'Anthropology' (especially if your major and work experience are in 'Accounting', for example). How many of us can meet the equivalency requirement of 'World Philosophy'? Finally, nobody really graduates strictly on Life Experiences from these three schools. Most people wind up enrolling and taking courses that fill core course deficiencies. When you enroll, you are required to pay additional fees that amount to well over $6,000.00 per year.
Let's be honest here: If it's midnight and the guy on the
corner is selling "Dolce & Gabbana" handbags off the back of a van for $15.00, there's a good chance
they are knock-offs. Does that mean they are bad handbags? Not necessarily. They might be well made handbags and they may serve your needs.
If you learn the next day that they were not really "Dolce & Gabbana" handbags
but a good looking knock-off, will you be surprised? I think not. It's the same
with the Life Experience Degrees. The cost of a Life Experience Degree is about
1 to 2 percent of the cost of a traditional 4-year college. However, the success
rate of finding gainful employment with your Life Experience degree is about 60 percent of the success rate you would have with a traditional college degree. For many people, the Life Experience Degree is a better buy for the money.
The vast majority (over 99 percent) of students in the United States with Life Experience Degrees did not earn them from these three REGIONALLY ACCREDITED schools named above.
Therefore I am only focusing this entire website on those life experience
degrees offered through the non-regionally accredited schools such as those listed on the www.degreeinspector.com website.
On a side-note here, do you know what a small college pays each year to get and maintain their REGIONAL ACCREDITATION? For a small college with 3,000 students, the government imposed accreditation fee is roughly $2 million per year. That's over $600.00 for (or should I say 'from') each student, each year. Hence, the traditional 4-year degreed student has paid $2,400.00 of his/her total tuition just so the school can keep its regional accreditation.
About Life Experience Degrees - do these schools have any Requirements for Approval?
I assume you are either considering or have already received your degree from Almeda University or Suffield University or Redding University or Belford University or one of the other non-regionally accredited players that claim to be offering you a life experienced degree. Well, before you read any further, don't get too full of yourself here. Their requirements for approval are either moderate (as in the case of Almeda University and Suffield University) or non-existent at all (Universities in this group include Rochville a.k.a. Affordable degrees a.k.a. Speedy Degrees, and Belford)
Get real here! In your own head you must realize that this degree is not really earned - although you can make a great case for your life experience.
Watch out for the trap here. You may spend hours documenting your experiences only to find out you could have literally written "blah, blah, blah" in the document your experience section of the school's application and still have been approved. For example, Belford has an instant approval. After you document your experience, you go immediately to the payment page. It never gets reviewed.