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.