What, then, is the point?

I am very supportive of measures to help the American workforce be more competitive and to help adults make the difficult transition to college, but I can’t help but be troubled by this idea. It seems like degree-for-purchase. Experience and formal education are two different and inportant credentials. I’m not sure anyone is served when we create degree holders who haven’t actually gone through the academic process of earning a degree. We won’t fool the market for long. So then, what is the point? What have we accomplished? The experience stands for itself. The education should too or else it all becomes a bit meaningless, no?

J, at 9:25 am EDT on August 14, 2006

Craig, I am curious as to what you mean by “nationalizing.” I lack the qualifications to be a political pundit, but perhaps you can give some specifics.

J, In general, I agree with you. I phrase the argument like this: if non-traditional students are so smart, then they should have no trouble easily taking for-credit classes and getting good grades. If a student, say, wishes to avoid required courses the procedures already exist to “test” out of them, and get a higher level of education.

Larry, at 12:15 pm EDT on August 14, 2006

Prior Learning Assessment

I am the Director of a Prior Learning Assessment (PLA) program at an adult-serving university in Oregon. One thing that the article did not make clear is that most programs like this — legitimate ones, anyway — don’t provide credit for “experience” but, in fact, credit for college-level learning that learners must document and provide evidence of. This is an important distinction. Additionally, the process is academically rigorous for learners, and yet also very rewarding as well. CAEL (the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) has published academic and administrative standards for such (based on their 30+ years of this work), and regional accrediting bodies also have standards related to PLA to ensure academic quality and rigor. I would suggest accessing some of this information and research about PLA prior to making judgements that it’s about buying a degree or taking the easy way out. In fact, it’s about honoring adult learners’ wealth of learning experiences and helping them reflect on and make meaning from those experiences in signficant ways. In most cases, the credits they earn are, as many of us in PLA programs say, the icing on the cake.

Melanie Booth, Director, Prior Learning Assessment Program at Marylhurst University, at 2:35 pm EDT on August 14, 2006

Prior Learning Assessment

That students can learn, outside the college classroom, knowledge and skills comparable to the outcomes of a college course is not a new idea. Students have long been able to “challenge” courses – for example, through the College Level Examination Program. Prior Learning Assessment offers students the opportunity to petition for credit for their college-comparable knowledge and skills that they acquired outside the classroom. As several people have stated, this is NOT “credit for experience.” It would be ridiculous to assume, for example, that 2 individuals who have each worked 5 years as a supervisor should get an equivalent amount of credit for that experience. We don’t know what they know about supervision! We all have known workers who skim along in their jobs and others who are “sponges:” who reflect on and learn from their experience, who take advantage of organizational training, who make an effort to learn. Should someone who has been an effective supervisor for a number of years and who can articulate principles of supervision (e.g., motivation, employee development, organizational behavior and communication, etc.) have to take a course in supervision? Six months after such a course is over, how well can the average “C” student, whose knowledge was derived from lectures and reading, articulate principles of supervision compared to the supervisor in our example whose knowledge was acquired through work-based learning and was documented through prior learning assessment? You might say, “well, not every supervisor is like the one in the example” – and you’d be right.

Prior learning assessment makes discriminations between knowledge and skills that are appropriate for college credit and knowledge and skills that, although valuable and useful, are not appropriate for college credit. Institutions with prior learning assessment programs have processes to help students screen what kinds of experiential learning may be appropriate for assessment. In my 30 years’ experience with prior learning assessment, rarely have I seen adult learners earn more than about 1.5 years of credit for experiential learning. A more typical award, after a great deal of work on the students’ part to articulate and document their learning, is between 15 and 30 semester units; the larger awards are typically earned by students with 15-20 years of varied and substantial work experience as a basis for their learning. Even so, those students still had 75-90 semester units of credit (i.e., 2.5 to 3 years’ worth of credit) to earn to qualify for a bachelor’s degree, which they typically met through course credit earned when they were younger or through additional college courses they took outside work hours. Time and money are especially precious to working adult students who balance their school work with their jobs and families. If there were a way for these students to shorten their time to earn their degree and to invest their time and money in courses that represent new learning for them instead of learning they already have, why shouldn’t they have that option? Institutions that have prior learning assessment programs, along with regional accreditation agencies and organizations like the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, work hard to maintain the quality and credibility of prior learning assessment so that is does NOT become just “credit for experience.”

Readers wanting to know more about research into prior learning assessment might find the following article interesting: LeGrow, M., Sheckley, B. & Kehrhahn, M. (2002). Comparison of problem-solving performance between adults receiving credit via assessment of prior learning and adults completing classroom courses. The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, 50(3), 1-13.

Annalee Lamoreaux, Chair, Prior Learning Assessment and Adult Development at Saint Mary’s College of California, at 7:40 pm EDT on August 14, 2006

Prior Learning Credits

I am astouned by the smug discourse regarding this subject. I am a former Pennsylvanian and a recipient of applied prior learning credits — and I have found the number of hoops a person must jump through to recieve such credits at most institutions to be the real crime.

Prior to returning to school full time at the age of 27, I was recruited by organizations such as the Coro Center for Civic Leadership for training in a post bac. program in public affairs. This was a highly accademic, highly intensive learning experience that makes the majority of college coursework that I’ve had seem flacid and wan. Yet the wrangling and hoo-ha that I had to endure in order to even get someone to consider this an option for credit was ridiculous. Not to mention that I have a tremendous distaste for the the amount of cash that the institution wanted to count the experience as credit worthy.

I am a bright, motivated and articulate individual who is increasingly driven to apoplexy by the self-serving smugness of those in higher ed who think that the world revolves around their sort of learning. I have come to find that the higher ed is a recipe for myopic egocentricity rather than a roadmap to societal enlightenment.

Attempting an organizatoinal assessment of the minds which shape the institution at which I am currently enrolled would be quite like conducting a colonoscopy. Heads waaay up there. Using my experience navigating the bureaucratic fecal precipitate as a heuristic for what the others could be experiencing I remain horrified and I say, “Enough!".

Working adults should have affordable access to higher education AND the ability to make it through without sacrificing their dignity, lapping at the loafers of insecure entrenched faculty and staff who are merely trying to create job security for themselves in the mouldy officious caves of academia.

r, at 7:45 pm EDT on August 14, 2006

Distinctions must be made

r and others would do well to note that it is not faculty but administrators who determine what will and will not pass for credit.

I have worked as a Testing Coordinator for a private post-secondary institution, and I have to say that the units granted were limited only by the willingness of students to take exams (we were migrating from CLEP to Armed Forces exams when I began) and the ability of students to pass exams. The only other factor was money. Factor in a policy that provides tuition-free retakes of any class not passed, and we really do have degrees for sale. While this is, I hope, the exception rather than the rule, it is a frightening one.

Andrew Purvis, at 6:20 am EDT on August 15, 2006

Can we have an active full-time faulty member explain who should get credit for work experience. The protestations of administrators whose job it is to “run” these programs have a certain credibility problem.

Ms. Lamoreaux, Do you really expect people to believe that something is too complex to be articulated? You are essentially asking that professors abdicate their role, in favor of criteria that you refuse to provide specifics about, except for one vague allusion to someone who was interested in the Vietnam war. Of course, this person doesn’t seem to have actually done anything that could be evaluated from an academic standpoint, but you don’t seem to care. The fact that she impressed a couple of people with war stories is good enough.

In general, many people, via work experience gain considerable knowledge in some fields. They might know more about something than someone who took a college course. But this doesn’t mean that 1) they went about it in the same disciplined way that academics do (or should do); and 2) that they had to acquire the knowledge in the same way, and have the same depth of knowledge.

Strangely, most people I know that have published (that is, peer-reviewed or similar journals – including law reviews of these purposes) on subjects with liberal-arts parallels don’t see the need to get undergraduate credits. Instead, the people demanding credits generally have made absolutely no contribution to the literature and generally think that just because they have been working rather than going to school entitles to them to some credential. Perhaps if they would set aside their pride and actually take a college course they would see how much they really know.

If these people really want to learn, they can. There is just no reason why they need to buy college credits.

Larry, at 2:05 pm EDT on August 15, 2006

Credit/Discredit

How about establishing an exam for those that are graduates with degrees who do poorly in the workforce. After evaluation, credits are taken away from their education until such time as their number of credits is below the threshhold for a degree, at which time their degree is rescinded.

It could be a fun time.

Jim, at 9:05 pm EDT on August 29, 2006