It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months.
The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s – in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.
Since then, she has coached a thousand other students on how to speed through the state college, shaving off years and thousands of dollars from the usual cost of a degree.
“Why wouldn’t you do that?” Williams asked. “It’s kind of a no-brainer if you know about it.”
Many U.S. schools have been experimenting with ways to speed up traditional college programs to reduce the burgeoning cost and help students move into the workforce faster. Some offer three-year bachelor’s programs, reducing the number of credits needed for a diploma by one quarter. Many more allow students to enroll in college classes while still in high school.
But the breakneck pace of the fastest online programs concerns some academics, who say there is a big difference in what students can learn in weeks or months compared with three or more years.
The phenomenon – sometimes referred to as degree hacking, college speed runs or hyperaccelerated degrees – has spawned a cottage industry of influencers making videos about how quickly they earned their degrees and encouraging others to follow suit.
Supporters of the approach tout it as an affordable, convenient way for people to earn credentials they need for their careers. Others, including some online students and academic officials, expressed concern about what the super-accelerated students are missing, and whether a quick path devalues degrees.
I have several mixed opinions on this.
University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).
Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.
Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.
Online course generally implies online assessment.
The level of academic misconduct in those is insane; I caught 35% of my cohort cheating (using a method (one we never taught) they could not replicate in an in-person test) one year, and those were the ones I could prove. Online assessments just test what a search engine/AI knows really.
(For those about to tout “lockdown browsers”; it’s called “a second laptop” or just “my phone”)
When young people face a system explicitly designed to extract as much wealth out of them as possible, nerfing their economic potential well into adulthood via crushing debt, is such a response really that unexpected?
My only concern would be a question of retention.
It’s easy to pass an exam if you’re writing it almost immediately after taking in the information. But remembering the information at the end of the school year when you’re writing your final exam and it’s a topic you learned in the first week takes a different kind of study skill.
It boils down to the old Cram for midterms question. How much do you retain?
My take is that retention comes from revisiting a topic multiple times over the course of a year. One and done studying to pass an exam doesn’t leave an imprint on the memory that’s going to last.
To be fair, when job listings require any university degree to apply, regardless of its relevance to the job in question, it becomes obvious the actual knowledge and education are secondary to simply checking a box. No wonder so many people are allowing AI to do their thinking for them. Any system defined by its technicalities is going to have loopholes.
You’re talking like my main man John Thorndike and his fundamental principles of learning.
The principle of Recency: Memory fades with time, skills and knowledge practiced in the distant past tend to be more difficult to recall than those practiced recently. This is why we review at the end of chapters, units, classes.
The principle of Exercise: What people mean when they say “practice makes perfect” though I take issue with that phraseology, when training instructor candidates I make sure to stress that one can learn to do something wrong. When I was in 7th grade, my band teacher handed me the all-county band audition music and told me to go learn it on my own. I took it home, misread the sheet music, and became adept at playing something that wasn’t the assigned piece. I was not accepted to all-county band. “practice” requires a regulator, either a teacher or coach, or a student who has the means and ability to detect incorrect performance.
But who gives a shit? These college programs aren’t about learning anything, they’re about extracting money from young people.
The tests are designed to be crammed by students who are required to show up to lecture halls in pajama bottoms to listen to someone who has never worked outside an academic setting speak too fast. Learning is an active process, lecture halls encourage passive behavior, such lectures are almost entirely a waste of time. Professors know this, they know only their students who already give a shit are going to actually study, so they design their tests to be crammable otherwise UNC would have 3 graduates a decade. So students sit in a lecture hall almost falling asleep then they spend the last half of December and May cramming.
So why not do all the cramming back to back to back and graduate in 3 months? What’s the point of stretching it to 4 years? Because universities have very lucrative housing and food service divisions.
This should be your call to read communist theory. Education should be about learning and creating knowledge, not cramming and being put off from pursuing your passsions!
…I’m pretty sure reading about psychology or neurology would be more relevant than reading about communism. Communism might be interesting in a historical context, but it’s not science.
What happens when education becomes commodified.
I’ll consult a historian.
expressed concern about what the super-accelerated students are missing, and whether a quick path devalues degrees.
Nothing devalues degrees more than spending a small fortune, taking on a lifetime of debt, only to find that finding a real job that pays a living wage is nearly impossible.
This is what happens when you tie education to the job market
My brother is a bona-fide math genius, and the summer after he graduated high school, I walked past his room, and there was a 2 foot stack of math textbooks next to his bed. I asked what that was about, and he had driven to every local library and checked out all their books on advanced math, and was teaching himself advanced trig and calc before he started college in the Fall.
When he got to school, he took a bunch of tests, and started college halfway through his sophomore year. He graduated with his bachelor’s in 3 years, then got his masters in one more.
Being smart enough to get through college quickly has always been an option. Colleges today don’t like it because they are more interested in the money than education.
I feel like you’d be potentially skipping some of the best years of your life, but that’s pretty awesome!
What’s he do now?
As someone with severe ADHD. This is the only way I could deal with college. And even this might not work.
I think the headline is wrong. It’s not that educators are alarmed because educators don’t offer a college degree in a few months. These are scam programs run by and taken by scammers.
And it’s pretty easy to see how this will burn the students who thought that they had saved a couple of years. If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them? … Or maybe you’ll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?
Of course it’s partly the student’s fault, but it’s much more that money making scam artists who created the scams fault. It’s easy to prey on young people who think they have a quick path to cash, and it should be a crime to do so.
Do employers ask for transcripts? I’ve never had that happen before, and I’d find it incredibly odd if I got that request.
I had 1 employer ask for transcripts. I told him my university does not keep transcripts for students over 30 ago… archived records can be searched for a large fee with no guarantee records would be found. So i told them no transcripts. They hired me anyway.
I’m amazed at how many employers who hire graduates from my lab do ZERO due diligence or even ask me for an opinion. Six figure jobs.
If an employer asks for a copy of your transcript, what are you going to give them?
That’s half the joke, though. The employers are using automated tools to sift for staff. Why would prospective staff not use automated tools to bump themselves up in the queue for a job?
Or maybe you’ll falsify a transcript, but if you were going to do that then why did you pay $4,000 for your college diploma anyway?
Because then it’s not a “false” transcript. It’s real and true, fully accredited and identical to a transcript issued by a four year school.
Of course it’s partly the student’s fault
This is a structural failure. It isn’t the fault of any single (non-billionaire) individual. As we pull more and more humans out of the bureaucratic chain and dump more and more automation onto lowest-bidder third parties, we accumulate technical debt. That technical debt exposes vulnerabilities in our bureaucratic systems. And then people naturally move in to exploit those vulnerabilities when they can’t get what they need out of a normally functional bureaucracy.
I always say that if you rely on metrics (like does the applicant have a degree or not), you will get people who have optimized for just the metric. It’s a lot like paying programs for the bugs they fix. It just doesn’t go the way you planned.
The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.
I went back to college because I felt inadequate profrssionally and left feeling college was inadequate.
It is a pay to win, group orojects to drag everyone over the line
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is actual learning vs just gaming the school’s systems. And how much of it was just getting an LLM to fake it even more.
Define “credentialism?”
cre·den·tial·ism kri-ˈden(t)-shə-ˌli-zəm : undue emphasis on credentials (such as college degrees) as prerequisites to employment
While you’re taking googleable requests can you explain to me the pronunciation guide
What’s with the the upside down e
I’ve never seen on of those those pronunciation things that make the word easier to understand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Basically: It’s a way to distinguish same looking, but different sounding letters
Since many letters and letter clusters can map to the same sounds in English, it’s just a way to make a one-to-one mapping instead. ə is the ‘uh’ sound that starts the word ‘about’ for instance.
The ˈ marks the main stress syllable and ˌ marks any secondary stresses.
That’s cool and makes sense.
We should just write like that all the time
Country of origin?
Can you use it in a song?
Can you run Doom on it?
I tracked its first use to a series of papers written in the 1960s by S. M. Miller, sociology PhD with Syracuse University, New York, USA.
So I actually got my BS CompSci from WGU so I probably fall in this category. Did 2.5 years at community college for a math associates, ran out of money and joined the military, then finished the degree online in my last year in. I suppose all together it came out to about 4 years and it’s accredited so {shrug}
I have mixed feelings about the degree, it got me the job I have now working as a Linux Sysadmin for a robotics company and working towards a role with the robotics Dev team but the education was thin.
Strictly speaking, if you did all the supplemental material you were given the classes were actually dense as hell but the problem was it was way easier to cram for each test.
That being said, I know a lot of CS grads that don’t know what an array is so honestly I think I’m on the side of “maybe cramming all your education into 4 years is worse than just slowly picking at it over a lifetime”.
I think I’d like to see a system like that. Like IT certs but not complete shit.
I can only applaud people who do that in the US: the cost of education is outrageous.
Here in Germany people prolong their education by years, since it’s almost free, you can work part-time, and there’s no need to rush.
If the US system won’t be robbing young people of hundreds thousands dollars, they wouldn’t feel compelled to try and hack the system.
State funded adult education seems like a really sensible investment in the future. I’m in my 50s, never did a degree - wasn’t really interested when I was younger. But I’d love to have the opportunity to study now. Can’t afford it, though.
Certificates and goal based stuff is more useful than a generic paper degree.
I’ve never met anyone with a certificate that knew enough about the subject matter to deserve a certificate.
IT certs are a joke.
Oh yeah, I agree. I’m just saying that now that I’m later on in life I have a clearer idea of my interests and an actual desire to learn, as opposed to when I was of ‘university age’. Back then I was only into sex, drugs, and techno. The opportunity was wasted.
Everything you said is absolutely true and thoroughly shit. It’s just a shame that the system’s solution is to now rob them of an actual education as well.
The only thing keeping America on any kind of footing at all is that exposure to classical education largely deprograms the religious bullshit most American kids grow up with. Oh, and it actually educates them, as opposed to whatever AI assisted bullshit “workers” this is going to end up giving us.
Edit: although… religion is dying here anyway, so optimistically, maybe kids these days will need the deprogramming less and AI will improve dramatically. We could theoretically end up with a net benefit.
The fundies have their own colleges where premarital sex gets you expelled, including being a rape victim, so the bubble isn’t nessesarly popped.
