Backdoor to Stanford University Master's Degree

[Daithi]

There is no guarantee the following would work, but I don't see why it wouldn't.

Stanford University has a program called the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) that partners with businesses. They also have another program called the Honors Cooperative Program (HCP) that allows students who are employed by one the businesses that are in the SCPD program to attend Stanford part-time to earn a Master's Degree, and nearly all these courses are available online.

So, your first step is to start your own company. Once you have your company up and running apply to Stanford's SCPD program to become one of their member companies. For a company with only 1-50 employees the fee to become a member is only $500. It takes only business 10 days for Stanford to confirm the acceptance of your application (I have no idea they accept any company or not). For our purposes, we'll assume your company is accepted. (Here is a link to apply to the SCPD program.)

The second step is apply for admissions to Stanford's HCP program as a student where you are an employee of the company that is in the the SCPD program. You will need to have taken the GRE, already earned a bachelors, and you'll need to meet the prerequisites for the Masters degree in which you plan to enroll. I am assuming it is easier to accepted via this route than applying directly to a Stanford masters program, but I don't know this for a fact either. (Here is a link to applying to the HCP Master's program.)

Here is a link to the different Master's degrees they offer. These all look pretty technical, but this is Stanford.

Now the bad news. It looks like tuition is $1340/quarter unit and you need 45 quarter units to earn your masters, so $60,300 for a masters from Stanford. I also don't know what if any programs are available to reduce these costs. (Here is a link for tuition.)