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 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.
I dont know how I feel about this.
On one hand, degrees are somewhat good for education in lots of industries.
On the other hand, I would fire someone instantly if they had cheated their degree like this.
Degrees are also very expensive.
I guess if it was a useless degree then it wouldn’t matter in the first place.
Degrees are very expensive in the us* most European countries the cost is much less. I think liberation of the yoke in the us is liberating to be honest. I think going to higher education physically however is more than just doing the content, but also doing the soft stuff — learning how to communicate clearly with others. This is lacking this, and then you have AI ofc which makes it difficult regardless
why would you fire them for this? that seems absurd. I make pretty good money and I don’t have a degree at all
Thats because you have the sellable skills, which is the most important thing. Degree is helpful in some areas, essential in others and has no use everywhere else (outside of proving that a person is capable of learning and persevering).
Cheating is not a sellable skill, and a huge red flag.
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.
I’ve seen some of the videos online. Some degree mills will let you CLEP (and adjacent services) your way to a degree in General Studies (or Liberal Studies, or Multidisciplinary Studies, or whatever). A lot of the time, it’s a degree in nothing in particular from a school nobody’s heard of. It’s not particularly useful, but better than nothing.
You get what you pay for. I’m not sure who is cheating who: the students, who think they’ve found a way to beat the system, or the schools, who make a quick buck in exchange for a degree of dubious value.
I know people who lied about having a degree, could do the job, and never got caught. I suppose speed running a degree from a degree mill yields a similar level of education, except with a piece of paper.
I finished my degree a couple years after I started the job that my degree got me 😉
Can’t they fire you if they do somehow find out you don’t have a degree?
If that’s the case, there may be an actual benefit to the degree mill piece of paper.
In the United States? They certainly can, and “fired for lying about credentials” gives the employer a reason to contest unemployment. But apparently there are enough employers that don’t cross-check that it can work as a strategy.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. On one hand, I value honesty and want to see dishonesty deterred. OTOH…if you can do the job, what’s the point of having the degree as a checkbox on the job application? Bullshit metrics should be removed.
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.
Well said, my thoughts exactly
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.
Country of origin?
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.
Can you use it in a song?
Can you run Doom on it?
If it’s just a checkbox, “yes, has a degree”, to get you to the next round of the interview, and it really doesn’t mean anything for your field, then do it.
Eventually, if you need the knowledge taught, and you don’t have it, you’ll be discovered and fired. This is true whether you have the piece of paper, or not.
If it’s just a checkbox, “yes, has a degree”, to get you to the next round of the interview
Lie.
I returned to university a decade ago to get a degree. I’m not sure I would trust many of the younger graduates to really understand what they studied. They were very good at memorization and most exams had enough MC questions that they could pass but if they were confronted with written long answer questions, the class average went down dramatically. I can only assume that fully online degrees are of this calibre student. Great at memorization, poor at understanding.
The long answer questions were always my favorite in school because I suck at memorization. I can explain a concept well, but never pick the correct answer out of a list because it wasn’t my version of the answer.
That’s the kind of student that grade focused test prep “education” systems are designed to provide.
Yes, but also on the flip side, I have sat thru classes where the teacher did not know the curriculum and I had to explain things to the students. I also built the infrastructure for a computer lab and then had classes in that very lab. When the teacher couldn’t set up the conditions for a test, they consulted me to troubleshoot it (in this case, the teacher was not at fault, it was the equipment).
I tried to CLEP, but most of the time (for me) i failed many because I was either bad at the test, covered material that I was never taught, or the course could not be CLEP. The annoying thing is that in almost every case, there was stuff that wasn’t in the CLEP that I was taught, or vice versa after taking the course.
If the course doesn’t teach you to understand, then the metric being measured is not “understanding”.
No doctor… we were supposed to remove his appendix - not cut off his balls and dance around with them on a stick while drinking from a beer hard hat.
: /
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.
Nothing can go wrong
“Lots of tards living kick ass lives!”
- I can say tard, because i am a tard.
I’ve already spent more than 4 years in college with little to show for it. If speed-running college to get that piece of paper at the end is what it takes. more power to them.
I can see that, if you think that just getting the paper is enough. It is contrary to the idea that university was a place to learn how to learn and gain knowledge that could then be used in your life. Undergrads didn’t lead to employment, they led to further career or education opportunities. If all a diploma mill generates is slips of paper without the student gaining knowledge, even $4000 is a gross overpayment.
it’s not that getting the piece of paper is enough as much as it has become a minimum standard for gaining jobs that frankly-shouldn’t require it. The guy that has “some college experience” looks the same in the eyes of the employer as the guy who never went to college, because they don’t have a piece of paper.
Completely lost sight of the purpose of education, which has nothing to do with being an effective corporate drone… unless you get a business degree, in which case 4 weeks is too long.
It’s been gone for a long time. “They literally just need a certificate” sums up the whole point of the education system as it actually operates, not the fantasy version we wish it was
People like saying lately “the purpose of a system is what is does” or something like that, so if we’re being realistic here you’re on to something.
Pretty much. I’m totally disillusioned with the education system and I want something totally diffrent
There is no “fantasy,” just indifference. I have no clue what everyone else is doing, but I didn’t fight my way from homelessness and into college “to get a job.”
The point of paying for a college degree is to get a job. Education can be done for free, or the coat of printing out pirated textbooks at most. We don’t need institutions to learn
You kinda do for hard stuff. There’s lots of stuff where just reading a book isn’t enough to learn the material.
For your own sake, I hope you don’t actually believe this.
EDIT: seriously, other people and cultures can’t dictate your purpose for doing anything.
I like the concept but got burned hard by my experience going last decade. It’s way too expensive to just go for self enrichment. If you have motivation you can teach yourself. It’s never been easier, and you could hire a tutor to help you through at places for a tiny fraction of the price. Big institutions generally are breaking down and not working right.
When conservatives say that folks can teach themselves they’re hoping for the exact opposite.
Because not everyone can “teach themselves.” In fact, almost nobody can, otherwise we’d all be geniuses and not a bunch of dumb apes.
They’re right, cry about it
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If you can complete a masters degree in five weeks, it’s a degree mill and not a real degree. The average in-person masters degree requires 30 credit hours with 24 credits being above 500 level (graduate classes). Let’s do the math:
If you take 15 credits per semester (5 classes typically), that would be 15 hours of class time for 12 weeks. For a 3 credit class this would be 3 hours per week of class time. If you condense this down to 5 weeks, that would be 36 hours of class time per week for five weeks.
But remember, this is only half the required credits. So you have to multiply this by 2, leading to 72 hours per week of just class time.
This does NOT include any outside work. Typically, 500 level classes give homework that can take 5-10 hours per week since it is a graduate level class. Let’s assume five hours to be generous.
That would mean for a full semester (15 credit hours at 5 classes) one would be looking at 15 hours of class work per week plus 25 hours of homework/projects per week (5 classes x 5 hours of work per class). For a total of 40 hours per week.
Condensing this down to 5 weeks would multiple this number by 2.4 (5 weeks instead of 12 weeks). And then multiplying it again by 2 since you would have to do both semesters in five weeks. That would be 192 hours of work per week for five weeks. There are 144 hours in a week. These places are degree mills.
I did a summer “mini-mester” for my undergrad Fluid Mechanics class where the class was condensed into 4 or 6 weeks but you met every day and it was FUCKING BRUTAL even though I was only doing that one course. I can’t imagine doing that for a full 15hrs of coursework. This smells more like a click through the classwork once randomly, figure out the right answers from the online quiz when they pop up at the end, then click the right answers the next time type of situation but for a whole program.
How this got accredited (if it actually is) is beyond me.
You did an intesive for fluid mechanics?! Are you insane, or a masochist?
He just really likes pressure.
I go with the flow.
You seem like a dynamic person
To make it worse, I was working full time at the time. It was the only way I could get to the next course in the schedule since certain classes were only offered in certain semesters so if I had missed that window, I would have been set back a year. It was awful.
Agreed, I did something similar where I did 3 courses in 7 weeks and that was by far the worst and most stressful time of my entire degree. Anything more probably would have caused a nervous breakdown.
But, but, if… degree mills exist… then…
Recruiters would have to do actual work, to vet that!
Clearly you haven’t been on LinkedIn enough to understand how the job market actually works.
Same way it’s always worked. Your best shot is by knowing someone in the field who can get you in the door for an interview.
But you don’t understand, we live in a meritocracy that rewards hard work and skill!
The problem is that many “legit” colleges are already degree mills, albeit at a slower pace. In the US at least, colleges are run like businesses. More students means more money. As long as they can maintain an okay reputation, they’ll churn as many students through as they can. The places that let you fast-track like this are just taking the next logical step, and letting the mask slip a little further. The whole system is broken; this is just another symptom.
Not every institution is this way. In my area, there are one or two schools that consistently produce people who actually know something. But it’s a pretty small percentage, all things considered, and I expect the overton window will gradually lessen expectations at those places over time as well.
Certainly not untrue. Many schools have gone the way of business. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.
I’m guessing some areas/industries are better or worse. Mine seems pretty bad, at least in my area. Being involved in hiring co-ops and new grads has given me a good taste for what the expectations are like, and it’s not great. So my view is probably a bit dismal.
That is a good point. You are probably right that it is area based. My degrees were in physics and to my knowledge, there aren’t too many online degrees for it. It’s pretty hard to fake your knowledge in this area. Even if you could, you’ll be found out quickly once starting a job.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s only a small percentage that are real degrees these day but it’s definitely lower than it should be.
I agree. I think a lot of degrees are still real degrees, but the entire ecosystem has been degraded to the point that quality across the board has diminished. So, the most “rigorous” degrees now are equivalent to a run-of-the-mill degree a generation ago and so forth. Ultimately, the run-of-the-mill degrees of yesteryear are now just diploma mill degrees.
I hate to say it, but a lot of it is e-learning and online degrees. It’s a lot harder to engage with material, with a class, or with the professor themselves behind a screen hundreds of miles away. Even when you put everything into the work, it still just is not as engaging because you don’t have the same dynamic because you can’t just drop by your professor’s office for office hours or get the same level of help or group learning. In undergrad, I used to help others in my classes, and vice-versa, while also going to office hours to clear up details. Online, if it’s not impossible, it’s at least orders of magnitude more difficult. So, the quality of learning drops a ton.
If I go back for another Master’s or a Doctorate, I will only do in person classes.
I largely agree, but one situation I can think of where condensing the work makes sense is experienced professionals who already meet the learning outcomes. Their goal is to prove that they know the material, then have a degree to show as proof, not to actually learn the material.
This should always be an option. making sitting through and paying for years of courses is predatory and locks so many people out
Kind of, but that would be a fault in the system that ideally would be charged. Maybe with some sort of verification to ensure they have the skills already. Maybe that’s even what this is abusing and they’re not examining enough / tolerant of LLMs yet. But agreed that is something a flaw with credentials
Anything that can be cheated by LLMs can Also be automated away with the same tech, rendering it worthless
Corollary: if you have the capability to complete the requirements in a short period you should be allowed to.
