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 keep saying it about AI written essays, but it applies here: College as we know it is bullshit and I hope this technology sparks the fire that burns it down.
The business model of quasi-requiring all young people to spend 4 years going into massive debt for the privilege of mostly repeating high school needs to die.
This shit about “become a well-rounded individual” also needs to die. That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil, that in the future, George Jetson spends 3 hours a day, 3 days a week putting his feet up on his desk, so schools should teach art and music and literature classes to give people healthy hobbies so they know what to do with all this time they have. Wash that through the baby boomer intellect and it comes out “EXPLAIN THE THEMES IN WUTHERING HEIGHTS OR DIE A DITCH DIGGER.”
No such reduction in toil has happened. Artificial, gaseous toil has been created that expands to take up all available time.
We cling to this idea that “You are young. This is school time. You learn until you’re adult. When adult, you stop learn and start work. Never school again only work.” Which is the dumbest thing ever. We should offer all kinds of classes to all ages of people. You should be able to take a sociology class as a 38 year old man as casually as you can take yoga. Formal courses of study should be for earning certifications. You want to fly a plane? You need to complete this entire syllabus and take and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently crash into a neighborhood. You want to be a civil engineer? You need to complete this entire syllabus and pass this lengthy practical test so that we’re sure you won’t negligently sign off on a building that will collapse.
Humanities classes, arts and crafts, fine arts, culinary skills…this stuff needs to be available to anyone who wants them and not tacked onto technical training as a way to wring more money out of students.
I disagree with a lot of what you are saying. I actually think it is very important to be well-rounded individuals and think general electives should be required (even though I absolutely hated them when I was in college). There is a reason why left-leaning people are more likely to have a college education and right-leaning people are less likely to have a college education. It isn’t because people on the left are smart enough to go to college or have the money to, it’s that more move to the left afterwards because going to college teaches you about life outside your small area and teaches you about people who are different from you. The same thing happens in humanities classes, whether you take them at college or not. They broaden your experience outside of just technical stuff. I think that is very important to building a society of people who care about other people and who want to make the world better for others besides themselves.
I also think you have it wrong about “That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil.” Universities were almost COMPLETELY about creating well-rounded people for a thousand years. It is only in the last hundred or so years that college has been about creating a targeted workforce. The first trade school wasn’t “invented” until 1823, and they didn’t become a big thing until after WWII in the 1940s. Universities pumping out engineers became a thing with land-grant schools in the late 1880s. Basically, the industrial revolution in the 1800s shifted college from creating well-rounded people to being focused on careers. “Majors” weren’t invented until 1885 (at Indiana University, which seems weird to me that it was invented there). Before that, you just took a whole bunch of electives based on what you were interested in or whatever your advisor was interested in. In the 1600s when Harvard and Yale were built, they were built for the reason you specifically say came about in the 20th century.
It is true that requiring a general education as part of a set curriculum came about in the early-20th century, but that’s only because so many people were only going to college to get professional skills that schools needed to figure out a way to structure and standardized what was never structured or standardized in the past.
I do agree with you that we should make available to anyone at any age humanities classes. And I do agree trade/certification schools are an awesome way to create a better life for yourself or simply to get to do thing you want to do with your life. I also agree that requiring going into massive debt at expensive universities just to get basic jobs needs to die… but I want it to die by having universities be free to attend so anyone can have access to those basic jobs while also having access to a life-broadening experience.
Expecting students to pay thousands for each course for vague “personal enrichment” is unreasonable and is just gatekeeping job credentials.
The question I’d like to ask is, do you need an expensive big formal institution like a university for general purpose personal enrichment? What alternitives could work? What do they look like? Student debt and GPAs surely can’t be the only way
The “well rounded person” shit is only ever given as a justification for forcing STEM majors to pay for liberal arts courses. I’ve never seen it go the other way, and it should. For every credit hour a STEM major spends in a humanities course, a liberal arts major should have to spend in a technical course.
Because guess what? That “just technical stuff” is the society we live in. Your ability to put current events into context because you studied the collapse of the Roman Empire won’t stop you from bleeding to death from multiple puncture wounds to the face, throat and chest caused by the rhinestones you glued to the hub of your steering wheel, turning your airbag into a claymore mine. You might not have crashed at all if you’d have taken your car to the shop when it started squealing every time you stepped on the brake pedal, you were relieved when it stopped that on its own.
The amount of staggering stupidity I’ve seen out of allegedly educated people…
Absolutely! I say this as a Comp Sci major who loves the humanities (and almost studied History). General education should encompass introductions to both the STEM and humanities areas. It is equally frustrating when I can’t walk through a 7th grade level algebraic function with someone with a Master’s degree in International Relations and when I can’t reference a fairly common part of mythology with a software engineer.
You mean like how a History major at Purdue is required to take 5 Science courses, while an Engineering student is required to take 5 Gen Ed courses (only 3 of which need to be in Humanities)?
As a victim of the education system, I’m totally in favor of starting from first principals and redesigning the whole system from the ground up.
I kinda agree. The problem is college became the way to get a job and it was never meant for that. Everything used to be las and then majors pulled off into their own schools because there was just to much to learn in the actual major. If someone is going to do research or education then they are going to need that broad grounding in things outside the main field but like every job should not need that. An LAS school I went to people talked about how at one point it only had a few majors. Pre law, pre med, theology, math, and sciences.
“The way to get a job.”
The way to get certain jobs, like doctor, lawyer, scientist, engineer. Professions.
Don’t put education on some kind of pedestal. The very few people who were wealthy enough to attempt that shit had servants. They were rich enough to pursue the capstone of Maslowe’s pyramid. Nearly no one else is. The rest of us require a trade or profession to make ends meet. Until you solve scarcity, one way or another, reject as decadent the image of the angelic lofty scholar who learns for the sake of learning.
No, fuck that. I will continue to consider learning for its own sake among the most interesting and important things a person can do.
As adorable as that is, hunger and cold have ways of asserting themselves.
yeah that is exactly what im saying. it was never meant for every job to require it but it kinda became that way at some point. Never should have happened.