Degrees of Freedom

Designing your own graduate degree

While it may not be immediately obvious how to apply it, all Peace Corps Volunteers know that the experience they build managing community projects during their two years of service will be relevant in some way to whatever career path they choose. That said, that experience rarely translates into the traditional higher education model, which can be rigid in deciding how to evaluate the unique strengths of applicants to grad school programs.

But a small number of schools take a different approach to what can be considered non-traditional experience, enabling students to design their own degrees and turn prior work and life experience into academic credit. One standout in that category is Antioch University in Los Angeles.

“In traditional education, a student’s prior experience is not always relevant,” said Ashley Nielsen, chair of the Individualized Master of Arts (IMA) program at Antioch University. “The thinking in traditional programs is that it doesn’t matter what a student did before, because they’re a student now. Antioch’s IMA program respects the life experience that people have had and gives them the opportunity to receive graduate credit for those experiences.”

The IMA is one of Antioch’s oldest programs, dating to the 1970s, and was relaunched online in January 2020 to meet a changing educational landscape. In the IMA program, students can transfer up to 15 credits from other academic institutions, including universities abroad, and up to nine of those credits can come from professional certifications or through the program’s prior learning assessment (PLA), which converts work and life experience into academic credit.

“You take your life experience and we help you find a graduate course and a syllabus that matches that experience,” Nielsen said. “For a Peace Corps Volunteer, it might be something like community development or international development or intercultural communication to show they’ve already achieved learning outcomes relevant to a specific course.”

Through the PLA, students build a portfolio that describes what they learned and provide evidence for how it meets a specific course’s learning outcomes. As one hypothetical example, Nielsen suggested that an RPCV who taught in their host country’s school system could submit culturally sensitive lesson plans developed during service to earn credit equivalent to a course on international education.

Designing the Degree

After three foundational courses in self-designed learning, research methods, and specialization design, students in the IMA program choose whether to write their own course and syllabus with an instructor, join a course a classmate designed, take a faculty-designed IMA course, or enroll in a course from another Antioch program, such as the MBA. Students go on to earn a master’s degree in the humanities or social sciences. Nielsen estimated that about 90% of these students design their own specialization within the degree program.

“The self-designed approach enables students to develop a specialized degree that is unique to their own background and interests,” Nielsen said. “We match them with an instructor they want to work with, which sometimes means hiring an instructor outside of Antioch who has a terminal degree relevant to the student’s specialization.”

Selina Starling, who works for Antioch as a social media manager, is also a student in the IMA program. Before enrolling, she spent a semester in a traditional master’s program in marketing. A former journalist and copywriter, Starling is now opting to build a self-designed degree in contemporary media literacy.

“In my traditional higher education experience, it was more of just going into a lecture hall, sitting, listening, taking notes, and going home,” Starling said. “The IMA program is so much more collaborative and it is literally self-designed from start to finish. There’s no idea that is too big or too small. My degree is exploring the expansion of media and culture to include social media and artificial intelligence, and how we can be better literate citizens through these mediums moving forward.”

While the freedom of this type of program may be appealing, it’s important to remember that the self-designed approach requires accountability from students.

“I definitely think it takes a lot of self-discipline,” Starling said. “It’s not necessarily because of the workload. It’s just because of the thinking that you have to do. But the best part about the program is having that collaborative community that you can engage with.”

Nielsen noted RPCVs may be especially well prepared for the work.

“Peace Corps Volunteers have had these experiences that have changed their lives completely,” she says. “So they’re in a place in which they reflect on their educational process and they reflect on their life in a different way, perhaps, than someone that has not had that experience before. They’re able to tailor their program to that unique perspective and work with instructors who help them build on the skills they developed in the Peace Corps. It’s really ownership of your own educational journey.”

IMA students often use their capstone project to publish or teach before they graduate, and some are hired to continue work in their specialized field. Prospective employers also value the self-designed nature of the degree.

“They’re self-starters in so many ways, and that’s incredibly appealing to future employers,” Nielsen said. “It shows that students know how to take initiative and navigate challenges independently. They have strong communication skills, they’re able to define tasks and goals for themselves, and they know when and how to reach out for support. They don’t need to be micromanaged — they know how to take ownership of their work.” 

Stacking Credentials

While Antioch enables students to build their own specialized degree, Harvard Extension School lets students assemble a master’s degree in an established field from a series of individual credentials. The school offers more than 675 online courses taught by Harvard faculty and working professionals, and graduate certificates are available in fields relevant to Peace Corps service, such as international relations, nonprofit management, and project management.

Those courses and certificates are designed to stack one credential at a time. A student who passes two graduate courses with a B average or higher within two years earns what the program calls a “microcertificate.” Those courses can then count toward a related graduate certificate, most of which require four completed courses. Most certificates can be applied toward a Master of Liberal Arts degree.

So while students in the Harvard program don’t design their own specialized degree per se, they can decide which credentials to earn, in what order, and how to apply those to a full degree. A student who leaves the program at any point keeps whatever Harvard credential they’ve already completed, removing concerns of a wasted investment.

Learning ‘Without Walls’

The Antioch and Harvard Extension School programs are modern variations of a once-novel concept designed to build the learning experience around the student. One of the earliest iterations began in 1971, when the University of Massachusetts Amherst was one of 19 colleges and universities to launch University Without Walls (UWW) programs with federal funding. Today, UMass Amherst’s UWW program primarily serves nontraditional students who earned some college credit but did not finish a bachelor’s degree.

“The whole program was premised on the idea that knowledge and expertise don’t just exist on the college campus, but those are infused throughout the world and in our communities,” said Scott Davidson, associate provost for interdisciplinary programs at UMass Amherst and interim chair of its University Without Walls department. “The original spirit of the program was that it was going to be staffed not by professors, but by professionals who were working in fields off campus. We still rely on instructors who bring professional experience in their field into the classroom.”

Applicants need at least 12 college credits to enroll in the UWW program. Once admitted, students can transfer up to 75 credits and earn up to 30 more for prior learning from work and life experience. A separate review process can award credit for training certificates, and Davidson said that could include documented Peace Corps pre-service training. That makes the program an option for RPCVs who joined the Peace Corps without a bachelor’s degree and want to continue their education after their service.

Davidson said many UWW students use the program as a step toward graduate school. 

“We have a lot of students who already know they want a master’s degree,” Davidson said, “but they need to get their undergraduate degree taken care of first.”

The UWW model has not been without its challenges. Many schools with similar approaches have closed, including Goddard College in Vermont, which was known for its self-designed degrees and shut down in 2024 after years of declining enrollment. UMass Amherst and Northeastern Illinois University are among the few institutions still running programs under the University Without Walls name.

From Service to School

Davidson and Nielsen both said Peace Corps service builds the traits these programs require. Volunteers often have to identify a community’s needs on their own and plan their work with limited or ambiguous guidance.

“Those skills translate really well into success as an online learner, because a lot of your time is unstructured as an online learner,” Davidson said, while also pointing to the communication skills RPCVs develop. “The number one desired skill by employers is communication skills. So if you’ve acquired cross-cultural communication skills in your work as a Peace Corps Volunteer, that is itself a marketable skill that is transferable to the workplace.”

For RPCVs who spent two years shaping their own work in a host community, designing a degree may be a natural next step.

“We really help them get to a place where they’re not just designing an education, but designing their own lives,” Nielsen said.

Scott King is an RPCV (Grenada 2017–19) and founder and executive director of Regia Multimedia Services.