I thought of that, but my problem is I had to manually add my first list item to the HTML before section of the menu control. Reason for that is because the way I had my path set up my root menu item wouldn't appear in the menu, so I had to manually add it.
Example:
Home / Programs & Courses / Academics (WANT SET TO ROOT OF BELOW LIST)
(How list currently appears, but wanted to add "Academics") as top menu item)
* Academic Departments
* Accounting
* Business
* Chemical Dependency Counseling
* Credit Programs
I set my path of the menu to /{0}/{1}/{2}/%, so the menu will always start at the "Academic" level, but with doing that never actually includes that level on my list, but only its children. So, because I wanted that level added I manually got the text to display, but wasn't sure how to get its URL since it's not really considered the "first" item in the hierarchical menu.