This to me simply means we're failing with educational standards. Which, well, we probably are. At the same time, it's not as if professional development is a given with 'years of experience' and companies frequently fail to develop people in any meaningful sense.

There's merit to the idea of awarding a college degree if you can pass all the assessment, without necessarily taking the classes, but that's a different thing again. Ideally, college should be about introducing theory and reasoning which gives a solid understanding of the field in a highly focused manner that an employer almost certainly won't provide. I certainly know people who consider their college experiences extremely rigorous - electrical engineers and so on, so it's absolutely not the case that college can't be rigorous (for any field).

Another comment in this thread seems to have hit on one of the problems, Universities are focused not on vocational education, which is the reason most people attend university , and what most employers expect when they demand a degree from their employee's. Instead universities are focused on "academic qualification" which may have limited to no real world vocational value .

>At the same time, it's not as if professional development is a given with 'years of experience' and companies frequently fail to develop people in any meaningful sense.

I 100% agree with this, I know a few "experienced" people that are not really experienced, which is why I did not simply state that one should automatically attain this experienced based degree simply on chronological paid experience but rather experience + something else

Someone bought up WGU's method of crediting some life experience, that is a good start but I don't think WGU's program goes far enough but it is on the right path, and I which more institutions would start doing more things like them.

>I certainly know people who consider their college experiences extremely rigorous - electrical engineers and so on, so it's absolutely not the case that college can't be rigorous (for any field).

Again I agree here, some fields may lend themselves to an actual degree program, Doctors for example. I think my ideal society would be less than 30% of jobs requiring a post secondary education degree, the vast majority of employment should be encompassed by regular primary / secondary (k-12) education, and maybe direct vocational training (paid by employers)

Instead we pushed the narrative the most jobs need post secondary education or to be successful one must get a degree.

Allowing for experienced based degree's , IMO would start to open other avenues and maybe start a shift in human resources to start looking at other things that just a check mark for "has degree" true or false

Of course the extreme cost of education, and the debt crisis is also doing that slowly