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.

Nothing can go wrong

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.

: /

“We can’t make as much money off of them!”

The part of me that hates credentialism loves this but the part of me that knows how fucking stupid people are hates it.

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.

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 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.

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.

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'm of two minds about this. So many jobs out there require a college degree when the work itself doesn't really require a college degree to do. People who can't afford to go to college but are able to do the work are locked out of that more comfortable life. This makes it easier to get that foot in the door.

At the same time, you learn A LOT about life and people in those 3 or 4 years at college. It's a shame for someone to miss out on that experience. Also, this speed run absolutely could not work for a STEM degree.