McKinsey team on the significance of recognizing the learning happens outside the classroom:

Giving adult students credit for the knowledge they’ve earned outside of school can reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a degree. Governments can partner with higher-ed institutions and the private sector to encourage testing and credentialing centers that award college credit for college-level learning in non-classroom settings.

Veterans could be the biggest immediate beneficiaries of this common sense approach. Today there are medics and mechanics who acquired skills on the battlefield, but can’t land a job back home as a paramedic or mechanic because they don’t have a diploma or certificate that proves what they know. We need to develop ways for colleges to recognize the academic value of such prior work.