BA in.. how long?

[AngelaP]

When I read your question, I thought you were talking in generalities. I do not think it is "realistic" for most people to get a four year degree in six months, much less two, starting from scratch. In addition, I think it is a disservice to those who may hire you and you yourself if you are concentrating on working your plan instead of actually learning something. Lastly, I don't believe anyone that comes to this forum is looking for "the college experience".

Again, I was speaking in generalities as no one here can know the individual's capabilities or depth of knowledge on the other side of the screen.

[dfrecore]

In addition, I think it is a disservice to those who may hire you and you yourself if you are concentrating on working your plan instead of actually learning something. Lastly, I don't believe anyone that comes to this forum is looking for "the college experience".

First, the college experience thing was a joke.

Second, if you have 10+ years of experience working and just need a piece of paper to check off an employer's requirements, there is no way you can say that someone is doing them a disservice by getting their degree quickly. I worked for years in Accounting, HR, Compensation, 401(k) Plan Administration & Stock Plan Administration. I have never once needed Statistics, Macroeconomics, Chemistry, Death, Dying & Religion, the History of Modern Art, Motivational Theory, or Intro to Business Computing (all classes I took, none of which were relevant to a single moment of any of my jobs over the years). Even in Financial Accounting, I took that AFTER I started working in accounting and already knew most of the information. I'm studying for the Managerial Accounting exam now, am a third of the way through the book, and haven't learned anything I didn't already know. Every single thing I learned in my jobs (for which I did not have a degree), I learned on-the-job, from a colleague, from a boss, from a previous job, etc.

If I decided to work a plan and take class after class, and get my degree in 4 weeks or 2 months or whatever, I would honestly NOT think that I shortchanged my employer OR myself. I wouldn't spend one minute worrying about what I had or hadn't learned, because I know that none of it was important to my career. NONE. Except getting that piece of paper.

[AngelaP]

Again, I was speaking in generalities, don't take it so personal for heaven's sake. There are more important things in the world than a post here.

[Leherself]

When I read your question, I thought you were talking in generalities. I do not think it is "realistic" for most people to get a four year degree in six months, much less two, starting from scratch. In addition, I think it is a disservice to those who may hire you and you yourself if you are concentrating on working your plan instead of actually learning something. Lastly, I don't believe anyone that comes to this forum is looking for "the college experience".

Again, I was speaking in generalities as no one here can know the individual's capabilities or depth of knowledge on the other side of the screen.

Oh, I was definitely speaking in generalities. The proposed six-month plan was a theoretical mental exercise, and the college experience stuff was definitely meant to be tongue in cheek.

My actual method of getting a degree has involved mostly taking random courses and tests as interest has guided me for the past decade, accumulating random military credits in the meantime, and looking around occasionally and thinking, "considering I've never actually gone to college in the traditional sense, I sure do have a buttload of college credits. I should probably get an actual degree at some point too."

I agree with dfrecore that the reason I can take so many tests with little to no study is because of my life and work experience. I took the geography dsst earlier this week for instance - not because I needed to, but because it's free for military and I wanted to. A lot of people have warned that it's a difficult exam, but I scored a 463 with almost no formal preparation. But what about my informal preparation? Well, I've got 10 years of working in military intelligence where it's been my full time job to understand current events, international affairs, human behavior, global development, world religions, foreign cultures, etc. I know the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam and where they're located because it's my job. Likewise, that's also why I've studied the impacts of colonialism and independence on the Indian subcontinent. I'm professionally familiar with diverse events like the rwandan genocide, falklands war, and the greek economic collapse. For a while I had a supervisor who required that we had to randomly pass map tests where we had to be able to label every country on the planet, and the states or provinces as well as all the major cities, roads, and waterways for any country we were focused on... Lets just say there's a reason one of my highest scores ever was on the dsst geography exam! Really, most of my CBE has been fun and easy to accumulate for exactly those reasons.

A bachelor's degree is supposed to be equivalent to four academic years of study that an average person can finish by age 22. As far as employers should be concerned, my ten years of real world study and experience should by far outweigh any interest they might have in that little piece of paper. Lets remember that the original purpose of testing was to "get credit for what you already know." That has by and large been exactly my experience with testing - the reason I picked the major I did was because it was in line with my pre-existing knowledge and skillset. It's also why I've considered and discarded the idea of testing out of a business degree - it's just too far outside my wheel house, and I don't think I'd have much luck with it.

Now I'm looking at finally graduating sometime this summer (more than ten years after taking my very first college course when I was 17), and possibly pursuing a career change out of military service and into teaching high school social studies. Teaching high school students is not terribly different from training junior soldiers (other than I'll have to learn not to use the f word as a punctuation mark) and that's been one of the most enjoyable aspects of my current job - guiding people toward a greater understanding of the world around them, and teaching things like public speaking skills, how to create good research papers and presentations, and other skills like detecting media bias and reading between the lines, understanding how past events influence current ones... Honestly, I'm really looking forward to it.

Even in a new career field though I expect that my life experience will be of more use to me than my formal college learning. My partner, who has been a high school teacher for over a decade himself, constantly complains that teaching degrees don't actually prepare people for the experience of being in charge of a classroom, and that a lot of their fresh-out-of-college new hires are almost completely ineffective because they don't know how to manage a classroom, communicate effectively in a cross-cultural situation, deal with diverse personalities in a productive way, and so many other things that you only really learn through experience.

There are lots of posts on this forum that have pointed out that the approach someone should take with a young student who is learning things from scratch is very different from how a mid-career adult might approach the process of acquiring a credential that validates him/her in a field they've already got years of experience in. The BA-as-quickly-as-possible has always been intended for the latter group, not the former.

My original question for the forum was that just considering the logistics of a degree - evaluation time, administrative processing time, test center availability, course registration cut-offs, etc. what is the shortest amount of time you can get through graduating from one of the big three. My personal experience with TESU is that six months is pretty much the minimum if you're using the per-credit tuition plan and enrolled in a major that requires a capstone course, even if you're starting with 100+ credits. Excelsior's capstone is only 8 weeks instead of 12, so if someone's in a hurry that might shave some time off for them. So if you were going to come up with a new catch phrase - BA in ____ months is probably a better one than the old BA in 4 weeks. The vast majority won't actually finish that quickly, but it's fun to play around with what's possible. Kind of like the WGU MBA in 4 months thread - it's cool to know that can be done, but I'm not going to try it!

[cookderosa]

Oh, I was definitely speaking in generalities. The proposed six-month plan was a theoretical mental exercise, and the college experience stuff was definitely meant to be tongue in cheek.

That's a shame. You don't think athletes thrive on beating someone else's best time?