Degrees of Separation: Why We Must Redefine What Counts as Education

It started with a question.

“What college degree do you have?”

Tasha had just been released and was sitting in the intake office of a reentry nonprofit, hoping to land a job as a peer navigator. She had three years of harm reduction work under her belt, ran a support group inside for women with trauma, and knew the court system like the back of her hand. She could de-escalate a crisis in seconds, had taught dozens of women how to safely manage withdrawals, and knew how to get housing vouchers in less time than it took most caseworkers to return a call.

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But none of that was on paper. So when she answered “no,” the woman across the desk smiled politely and moved on to the next applicant.

Tasha wasn’t unqualified. She was just uncredentialed.

The Gatekeeping of Formal Credentials vs. Lived Experience

For criminalized women—especially those who’ve survived trafficking, incarceration, and generational poverty—the idea of “formal education” often feels like a fortress: high walls, locked gates, and a very specific key held by someone on the other side. If you didn’t get your high school diploma at 18 or walk across a stage in a cap and gown, you’re somehow seen as less equipped, less capable, less… educated.

But let’s break down how that gatekeeping actually works.

Gatekeeping happens when institutions set arbitrary standards for who gets to be seen as legitimate. It’s when a woman with years of hands-on experience supporting overdose survivors gets told she can’t lead a workshop because she doesn’t have a master’s degree. It’s when a survivor of trafficking who’s navigated the courts, social services, and housing systems is asked to speak on a panel—but only if she lets a credentialed academic “frame her story.” It’s when job applications require a GED just to qualify for a peer role, even though the applicant has been doing that work in her community for years.

This isn’t about qualifications—it’s about control. Gatekeeping is how systems maintain power. It’s how universities, nonprofits, and funders get to decide who’s “professional enough” or “safe enough” to represent a cause. It’s how the people most impacted by injustice get reduced to case studies while their labor and knowledge are filtered through layers of "experts."

But here’s the truth: degrees don’t guarantee wisdom. And lived experience doesn’t need a syllabus to be legitimate.

Tasha’s leadership came from necessity. She became a crisis responder because no one else showed up. She learned systems navigation because no one else explained it. She became an educator because her life depended on it. That knowledge is not secondary—it’s primary. It’s forged in urgency, sharpened by survival, and refined through service.

“We can’t just invite people to the table—we have to build a bigger table.” — J Leigh Brantly

“Street Smarts” Are Just Education by Another Name

Why do we criminalize women for having the same skills that nonprofits later call “cultural competence” and “community trust”? Survival skills—like knowing how to spot a bad date, manage a trigger, or stay safe during a bust—aren’t just useful, they’re life-saving. But because these lessons don’t come with a certificate, they’re often dismissed as irrelevant.

And let’s be clear—hustle isn’t limited to prostitution. The ability to negotiate, read people, sell a product, or pivot under pressure is the backbone of countless professions. A woman navigating underground economies is using the same core competencies as a stockbroker making split-second trades or a car salesman closing a high-pressure deal. The difference? One gets a corner office and a commission check. The other gets criminal charges and a mugshot.

Institutions often package and resell these grassroots, embodied knowledges through harm reduction trainings, social work degrees, and DEI workshops. Suddenly, “lived experience” becomes a trendy credential—as long as it’s framed by someone else’s PowerPoint. The only difference? One version is accredited. The other is criminalized.

Until we recognize that resourcefulness, emotional intelligence, and adaptability are not crimes—but forms of expertise—we will continue to lock out the very leaders we claim to uplift.

Redefining Leadership and Expertise

When we only recognize certain kinds of knowledge—usually academic, white, male, and institutionally approved—we erase the expertise of those who’ve lived through the hardest lessons society has to offer. We privilege polished credentials over raw experience, overlooking the fact that surviving systemic violence, navigating criminalization, and building informal economies require levels of leadership, critical thinking, and innovation that can't be taught in a classroom.

It’s not just about inclusion—it’s about recalibrating the lens through which we view power and knowledge. Leadership isn’t always a podium and a title. Sometimes, it’s a woman managing five people in a trap house to ensure nobody ODs. It’s a trans sex worker who becomes the go-to person in her neighborhood for conflict resolution, wound care, and emotional support. It’s a mother inside a prison teaching others how to draft clemency letters and appeal denials. These are not passive roles. These are the foundations of resistance and survival.

We need new metrics. New definitions of who counts as a leader, a teacher, a change-maker. We need to build systems that recognize peer educators, harm reductionists, jailhouse lawyers, and community organizers as the experts they are—not as a token gesture, but with funding, decision-making power, and institutional support.

Because in reality, the women we work with aren’t just “clients” or “recipients”—they’re already doing the work. Leading peer circles. Training others on overdose reversal. Organizing legal clinics. Building safety networks from scratch. Running workshops, setting boundaries, holding each other accountable, and dreaming up new worlds in the margins of a broken one.

They’re not waiting to be empowered. They’re already leading. We just need to catch up.

The Illusion of Protection: What IRBs Really Do

This brings us to the duplicity of so-called ethical research standards. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are designed to ensure ethical standards in research involving human subjects—but in practice, especially when it comes to studying sex workers and survivors, they function less as guardians and more as gatekeepers.

Their real job? Protecting the institution from liability.

As Naomi Lauren of Whose Corner Is It Anyway? has said, IRBs don’t protect participants—they protect the university. That becomes especially harmful when the people being studied are already criminalized, stigmatized, or traumatized. IRBs often require research proposals to water down the realities of participants’ lives to fit bureaucratic comfort levels. They block compensation citing “coercion,” and reject peer-led research models, even when those are safer and more ethical.

This gatekeeping replicates the very hierarchies that academic research claims to interrogate. It prevents community-rooted inquiry, dilutes hard truths, and reinforces the idea that knowledge must be extracted from, not co-created with, those who’ve lived the struggle.

What Counts as “Real” Education?

Let’s name it: GEDs, college degrees, and vocational training are essential—but they’re not the only forms of education. If a woman learned conflict mediation in a prison dorm, taught harm reduction in the rec yard, or mentored young women in a street outreach program, that counts.

It’s time we funded these forms of education with the same urgency we fund traditional schooling. That means:

• Paying peer educators for their labor

• Creating certification pathways that validate lived experience

• Building leadership pipelines for formerly incarcerated women

• Ensuring harm reduction and organizing work are funded—not just praised

  
  

The Gap Isn’t Just in Access. It’s in Recognition.

We’ve spent decades trying to get women in prison access to basic education. But access alone isn’t enough if we don’t also expand what we recognize as education.

When we ignore the leadership of survivors and criminalized women, we don’t just miss out on talent—we reinforce the very systems that locked them out in the first place.

It’s time to bridge the gap. To honor the educators among us. To stop asking, “Do you have your degree?” and start asking, “What have you lived, taught, and survived?”

Because that’s the knowledge that saves lives.