That's a pretty strong statement and I make it with a certain amount of reluctance. Let me explain how life experience degrees work (or seem to work when they do). Who purchases them? Perhaps most important, do they work? Then perhaps you will see why I say they 'suck'.

No one writes without bias, but seldom do they state it, and even more seldom do they even understand their biases. So, I have mine too. I am biased against something that doesn't work and is a waste of time, money and effort. I am biased in favor of something that works and is a good use of these precious resources.

Life experience degrees (L.E.D.s) purport to grant a degree from a university in exchange for a certain amount of money and the fact that you have sufficient related life experience to support the degree. It does make sense on one level and some real universities actually do this for a portion of one's academic credits, but only a portion.

Who buys L.E.D.s… mostly middle aged and older folks who have, for any number of reasons, not obtained a conventional college or university degree. There are plenty of people in that boat.

Why do they buy them? I think most of them feel like they have missed out in some way and a degree might be the answer. Maybe a job they seek requires one. They are almost never in the position to shell out many thousands of dollars and take out three or four years of their life to get a conventional degree. Otherwise they would have already done it. Now the big question, do they work?

In some cases they do work. If you are seeking a fairly low level job without much of a background check attached to it, you might successfully use one. There is only one problem, exposure at any time can be embarrassing and might cost you a pension or the huge investment of time and energy that you have put into a job. I don't believe sites that say you will be treated the same as someone with a conventional degree. Let's do the math.

You might pay anywhere from $400 to $1,000 for your 'paper'. How do you think that stands up against someone who paid tens of thousands or perhaps a hundred thousand dollars plus four years of their life? It doesn't really sound fair to me. Put yourself in an employer’s shoes. What would you do if you had to choose between these two types of job qualifications. I think it's pretty clear which would win out given that all other points were equal.

The problem is pretty straight forward, how do you get an L.E.D. and use it without your employer finding out what it actually is. When your employer looks up your old alma mater, don’t you want him/her to find out that it actually is, or was, a conventional college or university? When they contact them to confirm attendance, you want the school says 'Yup, he/she was a student, and a good one at that, want a copy of the transcripts?' Wouldn't that be the ideal circumstances? No fear of embarrassing exposure. All this sounds like impossible, but maybe it's not so impossible.

The reason I am writing is I was in similar circumstances. I used an L.E.D. and it backfired on me. I let my employer believe my little 'lie-of-omission'. He thought it was a regular college and I just let him believe that. It worked for just under a year. Human resources decided to audit the current employees to find out if there were any 'hidden skill sets' they didn't know about. Something was hidden alright, but not what they thought.

My employer was as embarrassed as I was, but he had no choice. I was out on the street. I took about six months to figure out how to do the impossible. It came to me in the wee hours of the morning, like most of my 'brilliant' ideas. Why not create a copy of a diploma from a closed college and back date it. I was pretty proud of myself until I looked on the net and found someone else was already doing it. They'd even taken it one step further.

I emailed them and after some back and forth I got my degree. It's absolutely bullet proof. If my employer wants to check it out he/she can go to a site run by the alumni and get confirmation of attendance. I'm back to work now and pretty pleased with my discovery. I know I am competent at what I do (designing irrigation systems for golf courses) and now I have a diploma to back me up. It got me a higher pay scale than I expected and I don't have to worry about exposure. I thought I had it all, but I found out there is something even better. Not that I need it now, I already have what I want, but it's an improvement on my theory.

If you'd like to know more, send me an email. I can be reached at secretseminars@gmail.com.

Bye now!