College credit awarded for lessons learned outside the classroom is associated with higher graduation rates, according to a Council for Adult and Experiential Learning study published last week.

The study by CAEL, a non-profit organization that partners with employers, higher education bodies and other organizations to aid working adults seeking education, looked at 62,475 adult students who were 25 years of age and older in 48 colleges and universities around the country.

The study compared students who had taken a Prior Learning Assessment to receive credit from material learned on the job or from other life experiences to those who had not, and found 56 percent of students who had received the credit from the assessment got their degree in seven years or less.

Of non-PLA students, 21 percent graduated within seven years.

PLA measures college-level expertise gained from experiences that include the military, workforce or independent study. The assessment can take the form of a portfolio, standardized test or evaluation of military transcripts.

Pam Tate, president of CAEL, said PLA increases postsecondary affordability because students do not have to pay for superfluous courses and can speed up the time needed to graduate.

Tate specified students do not gain credit from life experiences alone, but from passing the assessments and proving they gained college level knowledge through the experiences.

She said while the study looked at adult students, there is a trend of younger students taking College Level Examination Program tests, a type of standardized PLA, for credit.

While no University of Wisconsin System schools participated in the study, there are 33 different CLEP examinations, and UW offers 13 of them.

UW also grants some credit for completing basic training in the military.

A public university that counts on the number of enrolled students for federal funding may not want to offer CLEP testing or any other type of assessment that could potentially take students out of seats in a remedial course, Tate said.

“If you grant a credit for prior learning, you don’t have someone in the class and you don’t get as much funding on the public institution size,” Tate said.

She said there is a small amount of professors who feel if material is not learned in the classroom, it is as good as not learned. While this trend of reasoning is declining, she said it is a small part of why universities could be resistant.

According to a statement by the UW System, UW does not award credit for life experiences, but it does consider granting credit to the completion of basic training in the military and allow students to take the CLEP test.

Tate said a lot of universities and colleges offer PLA, but not many students know it is available to them. Increasing the publicity of the PLA and the different types of assessments is one of the goals of CAEL.

“[PLA] is a hidden treasure,” Tate said. “You only find out about when you dig, and it should be a visible option for people.”