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.
Appealing to psychology when the root of people’s problems in this article is the economy, and more specifically societal organisation is exactly the mistake of chasing appearances without getting to the root of issues that Marx criticised.
When you are poor you become mentally ill due to poverty. When people are abused they are abused because they cannot afford to get away from people, they are abused because they are bound up in economical units like the family. When you are relatively rich or don’t have to work to survive you can afford to study phenomena in their isolation detached from the material realities that people face, you are able to psychologise and cut off science as a method of exposing causalities off at a specific point where you create cordoned off areas like physics, economy, biology, maths, engineering, an so on.
Communism may not primarily be a science in the way you think as it is a form of societal organisation, but communism is built on satisfying needs and therefore doesn’t deal with abstractions such as money and debt or phenomena understood to be internal when we can show that they are not. Communism is the society that gets together and consciously plans like an organism would in a concrete way that gets to the essence of things, i.e. is radical. As a result of this its study is inherently bound to a close pursuit of science.
But come at me again with your history when company towns make a comeback due to the shit housing market and you survive to work fulfilling the needs that are not yours, spending ten hours a day working a monotonous profession, two getting to and from work, another two for chores and maybe one hour of quality time and another hour for consuming a piece of media of your choice.
This is as real as it gets. Your psychology has psychoanalysts admitting that their work isn’t within the realm of science and your neurology can’t grapple with the fact that most research on consciousness, upon which a stupid amount of bioethics and therefore medical practice hinges, is not falsifiable.