Can You Earn Your Degree With Work Experience?
I attended college for 4 years but did not finish I was 28 credits short. That was 18 years ago. I have always wanted to finish it but it always seemed either to expensive or that it would simply take too much of my time. A few years ago I decided that I needed to finish it. I had a few questions, could I get credit for all my work as a professional over the last 15 years. Would my old college credits apply to my new degree? How long was this going to take and how much would it cost? I want to share with you what I have learned.
There are several ways to gain credits toward your degree work, government and military experience included.
Prior experience, licenses and certifications
You can gain college credits through licenses, certificates and corporate training.
ACE www.acenet.org also publishes guides for credit recommendation for licenses, certificates and corporate training. Most colleges and universities, including online colleges, will accept ACE recommendations of credits. Some licenses and certificates have recommended college credits, including: Dale Carnegie, Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals, American Management Association and Learning Tree, among many others. Training classes from American Bankers Association, Berlitz International, FAA, College of Financial Planning and many others are included in the guidebook or the website. The first step is finding out where you want to go to school, what you want to study and knowing what career to pursue then you can use this resource to see if you will qualify for credits upfront to help you get your degree work experience taken into account.
Previous Military Experience
Obtain college credits through military classes and training can count toward your degree work experience included. If you have served in the military and have a DD 214 or DD 295, you might receive some college credits for that military experience. Even basic training might earn credits toward health or Physical Education at some online colleges. If you have taken classes, training or served as an officer, your military transcript will reflect these training courses. The American Council on Education (ACE) reviews the training classes and recommends college credit for classes, training and your Military Occupation Specialty (MOS). You may already have a transcript of the ACE military credit recommendation in your SMART or AARTS report, if you have been in the military recently. Keep in mind that every credit toward your degree work related is one less class you have to pay for when beginning your journey toward a college degree and a new career.
Gain college credits through corporate courses.
Some online colleges will review your corporate classes (those courses not in the ACE Guide) and grant credit toward your degree work and training taken into account. Usually the rule is “one credit for each 40 hours in the corporate classroom”, but can vary depending on the school. So, a corporate class that was 2 full weeks (80 hours) might be worth 2 college credits.
A combination of military credits, certificates, licenses, corporate classes and other prior learning will shorten the time to complete a college degree. Make sure you ask the online college representative if any of your prior learning could be evaluated to see if it could be converted to college credits. Most reputable online colleges will require that at least 60 credit hours be earned at their school to obtain your degree. When you come across ad for schools says get your degree work experience counts 100%, degree available in 7 days don’t pay the fee, run. My recommendation for you is to research several schools get their information, will they take these things into account? How much is their tuition? Then calculate the cost and the time involved between multiple programs and make an informed decision.
These are all excellent ways to use your previous life and work experience towards your degree but actually getting a degree solely on past experience is really worthless as discuss in the following article life experience degree which covers the legitimacy of diploma mills claiming to offer accredited degrees without any additional studies or course work.