UnTraditional Path

Watching a Steven Spielberg movie, you'd naturally assume that the man behind the camera holds a college degree that helped him realize his visions. You would most likely think the same reading a treatise from famed anthropologist Richard Leakey.

You would be wrong. Neither these men, nor a lot of other of the biggest names in professions across a wide spectrum of experience, attended traditional four-year colleges and obtained degrees. They got out into the world and made their own paths, proving their worth the old-fashioned way: by working hard.

Surely it would be safe to say that Spielberg knows far more about making movies than someone fresh out of college with a degree in filmmaking. By the same token, Apple Computers founder Steve Jobs is far more savvy in his field than someone holding a computer science degree from the finest technical school.

Life experience is a far better teacher than mere academic instruction. Ask anyone who's tried to learn a foreign language from books rather than by immersion among native speakers and they'll tell you nothing replaces hands-on experience when it comes to learning.

This is a message you won't get from guidance counselors or the mainstream press. They'd like you to believe that the only way you'll ever be taken seriously in the wider world is if you're wrapped in one of their sheepskins. Without their help, they tell you, you'll be condemned to an existence flipping burgers or emptying bedpans.

If your life experience makes you more knowledgeable in your field than someone fresh out of a conventional college, it stands to reason that you should get some sort of tangible credit for that experience. To say that four years of book study outweighs years of real-world experience is not just folly, it's downright insulting.

Of course there is a structure in place to ensure that you, with your hard-won knowledge, are kept in your place, degreeless and on the outside. Colleges, in league with local and national governments, have accreditation boards set up supposedly to ensure that only "quality" schools get the imprimatur of official approval. This was in fact their original purpose, but now they have become exclusivist clubs, determined to keep out all advocates of nonstandard learning and independent study.

Life-experience universities are flourishing as more and more professionals who chose to go out and seek their fortunes rather than follow the traditional path are seeking the recognition they deserve. The traditional colleges and universities, seeking to preserve their profits and what they see as the keys to the kingdom, are fighting back with every weapon in their arsenal. They deny accreditation, spread rumors and use allies in the mainstream media to convince the public that life-experience universities are nothing more than diploma mills, where anyone can walk out with the degree of their choosing.

The fact that these rumors are untrue doesn't hinder them. In fine capitalist tradition, they are pulling out all the stops to protect their profit base.

What's that, you say? Universities are nonprofit organizations? Let me leave you with one small fact:

The president of Yale University, Richard Levin, was paid over $560,000 in 2001

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