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So see your Toyota dealer today. We make it easy. Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm your host. Today on the show, I want to explain to you how you can get a college degree fast and cheap. You need a college degree. You want a college degree. How can you get a college degree fast and cheap? This can be applicable to you.

This can be applicable to your children. Today, I'm going to give you the lessons and the framework that you can use to apply in your life or in your children's lives so that you can get a college degree fast and cheap. Now, a couple of introductory comments, and we're going to get right into the heart of the strategy.

I'm not promising easy. Notice I didn't say fast, cheap, and easy. I'm saying you can get a college degree fast and cheap, and the ease with which you can get that college degree is going to depend very much on your personal capabilities. Also, I'm not promising that you can get the best college degree that is fast and cheap.

I don't even know how you define the best. There are a couple of different ways that you could think about what is the best degree. And there are many of us who will have specialized interests, desires, goals, career ambitions, etc., where our path will be fairly obvious, where we need to go for the best.

But I am going today to teach you how to get a college degree fast and cheap, and here's why. If you or your children are capable of doing academic work, I believe that today, in 2023, you should have a college degree. I believe this is an important step because it will lower your overall lifetime risk of unemployment.

It will open up many more opportunities to you, and it will provide you a pretty decent insurance policy against facing poverty. There are many, many people who have succeeded in every sense of the word, including financially, career-wise, etc., without a college degree. And it is much easier to succeed without a college degree in the year 2023 than perhaps it was in the year 1983.

However, having a college degree is still very important because those exceptions, those people that succeed without a college degree, are the exceptions that prove the rule rather than the new rule that we all aspire to. I always like to think of Bill Gates, right? Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard University and went on to become the richest man in the world.

The point is not that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and thus has no college degree. The point is that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard. And that tells you and anyone else who's ever interacted with him everything you need to know about Bill Gates. And it's similar with many people.

So there are people who can succeed in life very well without a college degree. But the data continues to be very clear that those who have a college degree earn more money and, more importantly, have a much lower unemployment rate risk than those who do not have a college degree.

And this factors in really at every stage of life. I'm not going to go into a long-winded soliloquy here on the worthlessness of a college degree, etc. I think there's a huge degree of variability. The truth has always been that as an autodidact with a library card, you can be better educated than the person with the fanciest degree.

But that doesn't minimize the importance of the college degree and its credentialization process in our society. It remains the case, while certainly it is true that perhaps Google is giving less weight to college degrees and Elon Musk is happy to hire some people who don't have college degrees, it remains the case that many job applications are screened based upon people having a college degree.

And that if you have a college degree, though it not be pertinent in any way to the career that you're going after, it will open up your chances and make them much broader for you. And so let me just give you a very personal example. I have two college degrees.

I have an undergraduate degree in international business and I have a master's degree in financial services and financial planning. I also have a long string of designations. I'm a certified financial planner, a chartered life underwriter, a chartered financial consultant, a chartered advisor of senior living. I am a registered health underwriter, a registered employee benefits consultant.

I'm a CFP, CLU, CHFC. Anyway, a couple others as well. I've forgotten them all. I pay every year several hundred dollars to maintain those things, right? The most expensive one is a certified financial planner designation. I don't care at all today about being a certified financial planner. There was a time in which it was very important to me.

I was very young. I didn't know a lot about financial planning. I really needed that education that came with becoming a certified financial planner in order to build my own personal confidence. That was the biggest thing that I gained from it. And certainly the CFP credentials are useful and valuable in the marketplace.

But I'm at a point in life where I don't really care. Other than in this context, I don't spend a lot of time talking about it on the show. It's on my website, sort of, but I haven't used any of that stuff in my email bio for a long time.

It's just not a big deal to me because all of my work is public. Anyone who wants to know what I know about financial planning can hear it every day. And so I don't care much about the credential. So why do I pay hundreds of dollars a year to maintain it?

I don't use it. I don't market it. Probably should, but don't. It's because of the backup plan. What if I went broke and I needed a job? Well, because of the credentials that I hold, I could get an interview at, I won't say every firm, but I could certainly get an interview at just about any financial planning firm or business that I wanted an interview at.

And I would have a whole bunch of options simply because of those credentials. And this is basically the way that a college degree works. Is that if you have a college degree, it can open up doors to you that otherwise can be difficult to open up. So I believe that everyone who is capable of doing academic work easily should have a degree because it lowers your risk of unemployment and your risk of poverty significantly.

It's a big advantage. Now, notice I'm distinguishing between those who are capable of academic work. For those people for whom academics come fairly easily, they're capable of doing it, they should have a college degree. But others who are not, they should not bother. They should go and maximize their non-college opportunities.

And so that may still involve some form of certification, but it might be a form of certification of competency as a mechanic, or competency with a certain kind of program, or competency with other forms of certifications and credentials that would fit their personal interests and their personal abilities. Credentialization, broadly speaking, performs the function that I'm describing, even if it's not a college degree.

So how do you go to college fast and cheap? The basic strategy is simply this. Gain college credit by taking exams that prove your knowledge and competence rather than by sitting in class. That's it. If you can take tests that show your knowledge and competence, then you can get a college degree.

Now, there are a couple different ways that you can take tests. I think the most useful framework that I have found for this, I have borrowed from a YouTube channel, a YouTuber named Ryan Swaite, who runs a channel called Nine Month College Grad. Ryan's story is, as he shares it, he had gone to college, signed up for college when he was a young man, dropped out, signed up later along the way, dropped out.

Just the concept of going to college, sitting in class and whatnot didn't work for him. It wasn't of his interest. It wasn't something that was important to him. Then he found himself, he and his wife, earning very little money, had a new baby, needed a college degree, and he decided to do something different.

He went through what's called a competency-based education program, and he was able to get a college degree, his undergraduate degree, in nine months. He teaches a way of thinking about this that I think is very useful, that you divide your strategies into strategy number one, which is to quiz out by taking exams, or strategy number two, which is to go through a competency-based education program.

There are variations on the theme. Both of them involve quizzing out, but you do it slightly differently using different providers. Let me explain how this works using his two frameworks. The first one of quiz out by taking exams. You've probably heard in the American system of doing things like taking AP exams or CLEP tests.

Those are the most well-known ways to get college credit by passing an exam successfully. Many high schoolers, especially the most academically oriented, they take AP classes in high school, and they sign up for an exam. If they can get an appropriate score on that exam, many colleges will grant them credit based upon passing the exam.

There is a also well-known version of these exams called the CLEP exams, college level examination program. What most people are not aware of is quite simply the fact that there are lots of other providers of these. The providers change over time, but there are some popular ones. By the way, I'm going to go through in this show, I'm going to go through a lot of details to help you.

There is popular ones like study.com, sophia.org is really popular right now, DSST exams are available, there's sailor.org, there's a number of different options. I'll go through some of these. The most well-known ones are CLEP exams and AP exams. The idea of quizzing out by taking an exam is simply you go out, take a bunch of exams, and then take those exams to a college and say, "Look, I've passed these tests, will you give me credit for these?" Some of the exams that are very widely known, you can get credit at most colleges.

An AP exam is a good example. Most colleges anywhere in the United States accept a successful grade on an AP exam and give credit for college course based upon passing it. Not all exams, every college has different rules, but most colleges will do that. The trick is there are some colleges that will give you many more college credits for more exams than others.

Let's talk for a moment about how a college degree is constructed. Generally speaking, to earn a bachelor's degree, you need to accumulate 120 credit hours in a university. The definition of a credit hour is simply the number of hours that you go to class during a semester of college.

Normally, a college semester in the United States is 15 weeks. A normal class would have basically 3 hours of instruction per week for 15 weeks. If you multiply 3 times 15, that is a total of 45 hours of class over the course of that 15 weeks. Of course, there will be more hours of homework, etc.

that you are responsible for. The way that you get credit for the course is to pass the class and then you are granted a number of credit hours based loosely on the number of minutes that you spend in class. So, every university has different programs. When I went to university, most of my classes were 3 credit hours and they would be split up on a different schedule whether they were Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Tuesday and Thursday.

So, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would go to school. I think the courses were 50 or 55 minutes long, something like that, a little less than an hour. I would have a class at 8am and go from 8am to 8.50 or 8.55, I don't remember anymore, and do that Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 15 weeks.

As long as I pass the course, that would give me 3 credit hours. Then Tuesday and Thursday, our classes would be a little bit longer. So, it would be an hour and a half on Tuesday and an hour and a half on Thursday. Slightly different schedule, but total it would be 3 hours for a week.

Then there are some classes that don't meet so frequently. So, you might have a biology class where you meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That gives you 3 credit hours. And then you have a biology lab that you meet once a week for an hour and that gives you 1 credit hour for your biology lab.

So, now you have 4 credits of biology, 3 credits of the class, 1 credit of the lab. Or you might take other classes. I took an elective when I was in college of scuba diving one semester. And so, we had a 1 hour, well, that being more, but we would go to class one night a week for scuba diving class.

And as long as I pass the class and got my scuba certification, then I got 1 credit hour as an elective for scuba diving. I did a salsa dancing class, etc. And that was just one night a week and I got 1 credit hour. And the way a degree works is that the college sits down and they lay out the different categories of classes that you need.

And so, you need a certain number of general education credits, you need a certain number of math credits, a certain number of humanities credits, etc. And the specific areas of study vary depending on what your degree is going to be in. And so, my degree, my undergraduate degree is international business.

And so, I had a certain number of general education credits, probably it was something like 60 credits. And then I had a certain number of business concentration credits or general business credits, that was probably something like 45 hours of credits or 45 credits. And then I had my international business specialty.

So, I probably had something like 10 or 12 or 15 credit hours that were required to be within my specialty of international business. That's how a college degree works. Now, universities will give you credit for CLEP exams, but they will generally have a cap on how many exams they will accept.

So, a common cap that you'll see of many, what I'm going to call normal colleges would be, we'll give you 30 credit hours, which potentially could be an entire year. So, my wife's story here would be a good example. She went to a traditional college where we met and it wasn't anything normal.

It was a traditional private Christian university. And when she came in, though, she had passed enough AP exams. She had done AP Spanish and AP English and AP Calculus and AP History, etc. That she was granted probably something close to 30 credit hours towards her degree. And so, her entire, she only spent a total of six semesters in school, three years.

And during that time, she was able to study abroad and do a major and do a minor because she came into college with basically a year of college already done through AP exams. But that's about the maximum number of credits that she would have been able to transfer into that university.

That university would accept up to 30 credits from outside sources, but they wanted most of your education to be delivered there on campus. And the more prestigious a school is, often the tighter their requirements are. So, let's say you're going to go to Yale University. Well, you can't go to your local community college for two years and then go to Yale for two years and graduate because Yale wants to know if you're going to transfer in, we're not going to allow in more than, say, 10 transfer credits or something really, really small.

And I've heard of, although I can't name the names, I've heard of schools that will allow in zero transfer credits. They want all of your classes to be taken there at that university if you're going to be granted credit and a degree from that institution. The key here for quizzing out is to note this.

Not all universities have this same requirement. Some universities will allow you to transfer in 30, 60, 90, sometimes as much as 100 or 110 credits into their university. And they'll grant credit based upon lots more exams. Now, there aren't a lot of these, but there are some of these.

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In some cases, a few of these schools will only require you to actually take about two or three classes that are from their school in order to graduate. But there is a catch. And the catch is that you still have to bring in enough credits that map to the outline of their 120 credit hours and how they're laid out.

And so if you had a highly specialized degree, that's going to require, say, 30 hours or 40 hours of degree-focused studies. How are you going to find quizzes for all of that? A good example here would be something like an accounting degree. You're going to take 40 hours of accounting.

How are you going to do that? There aren't quizzes out there you can take for all of them. You may be able to find one or two, very entry-level, Accounting 101. But how are you going to do auditing and tax, etc., without taking those courses at the college? But sometimes you can do something like a liberal studies degree.

And it is a bachelor's degree, but it's a very generalized degree or perhaps a humanities degree where there's lots of these available. So some of these institutions will give you credit for lots of coursework that's done at different places. And a little bit later in the show, I'll go through an example degree plan for some of these schools.

Now, there are kind of the big three or four, and here's what they are. The first one is a university called Thomas Edison State University. That's a government school in, is that one in New Jersey? It's up in the Northeast somewhere. Then there's Excelsior University, there's Charter Oak State College, and then there are a couple others.

There's Western Governors University, is often brought into this, although this can fill the second category. There's University of Maine at Presque Isle is a fairly recent one. And there are some other ones as well that can be brought in. And so these schools are accredited colleges, they're regionally accredited.

They'll check the box to say I have a college degree. But you can take lots of quizzes and tests in order to prove your competence. And if you can bring in enough credits, you can get your degree that way. So that's the first big category is simply you can get a degree by quizzing out by taking exams at lots of providers.

Now, related to this is what we can call a competency-based education program. And again, I like Ryan at the Nine Month College Grad channel. I like how he divides this into two different categories. Because it's useful to think about what is competency-based education. This is a word that is increasingly coming into use.

There's more and more schools that are signing up to provide this model. But let's talk about it. So I'm reading here an article from National School Board Association, NSBA.org. And here's their article published February 1, 2021, titled Competency-Based Education. Mastery of academic concepts model can spur academic achievement. Subhead.

States are piloting competency-based education programs, offering an education model tailored to each student by shifting the focus from time-based credits to academic mastery. Stagnant academic achievement in the U.S. is well documented and the learning loss from COVID-19 is expected to increase the differences in academic achievement between middle class and low income students.

The question today is not whether innovation and education is needed, but how best to achieve it. NSBA recently announced its Public School Transformation Now campaign, which is working toward meaningful improvement and changes in learning in public schools. The campaign is focused on the future of learning, including exploring instructional models that can better prepare students with 21st century skills.

Blah, blah, blah. To achieve a shift to personalized learning, states can consider reforming traditional seat time requirements and developing a competency-based education. The traditional system, which awards academic credit based on a minimum amount of instructional time in a subject area, emphasizes time rather than mastery, which stands in fundamental opposition to personalized learning at its core.

On the other hand, CBE is "a structure that allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content regardless of time, place, or pace of learning," according to the U.S. Department of Education. How does CBE work? Competency-based education is a learning system based on students' individual needs. According to Aurora Institute, assessments in CBE are "meaningful, positive, and empowering." Now, of course, there NSBA is talking about government schools at the K-12 level generally, but this same exact concept exists in the collegiate world.

Competency-based education is how I completed my master's degree. My undergraduate degree was based upon time in seat. My master's degree was completed based upon proving competency in financial planning. The way it worked, very simply, I have a master's of science in financial services from the American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

American College is a specialized college that basically exclusively teaches financial planning. They manage a number of credentials, like the Chartered Life Underwriter, Chartered Financial Consultant, etc., a bunch of other stuff. And also, they teach the education requirements for things like the CFP exam. They also offer true master's degrees, like I have, a master's of science in financial services, as well as doctoral degrees, or at least they used to.

I assume they still do, but they have doctoral degrees in financial planning. So it's a very specialized college that works in the field of financial planning. So the way it worked is I would sign up for a class and they would send me a box. I would open up the box.

The box would have a textbook in it. It would have some CDs in it, in those days, and it would have some other things. Sometimes it would have a binder with a bunch of articles in it, etc. But basically, it would have a textbook in it and information on how to schedule an exam.

And I would take the textbook, I would read the textbook, or whatever other materials they included, and I would go and I would sign up for the exam. And if I passed the exam, I passed the class. And if I failed the exam, I failed the class. And I would retake the exam until I passed it.

And so this is how it worked. And the exam was not easy. It was time-consuming, a very long exam, but it was very doable. I had to know my stuff, but it wasn't insane. I didn't have to do all kinds of hardcore requirements. It was just a multiple-choice exam where I needed to know my stuff.

And it didn't matter whether I actually cracked open the textbook and read it or not. The question was, can you pass the exam? Now clearly, if I read the textbook, it was easy to pass the exam. If I didn't read the textbook, well, some were easy and some were not.

And then at the end of the degree, then they had their capstone courses. So I went to Pennsylvania for a week or two, can't remember. And we did a couple of intense classes there. It was like the capstone courses. But we did them over the course of a week or two and finished them up really fast.

So remember, back to 45 hours of instruction, three hours a week. Guess what? If you want to have a 45-hour class, you can also do it in just one week, even in person, and get the same number of seat time hours in. So competency-based education is basically your ability to pass exams.

Here's the cool thing. There are colleges that specialize in competency-based education that allow you to simply take their classes, and whenever you want to, you can take the exam. And as soon as you can pass the exam, you pass the class. And so your competence and knowledge with the exam or with the class will drive whether or not you can pass the exam.

Some exams that you know well, you might just click "Sign Up and Enroll in the Course," click "Do Final Exam," and click "Take the Final Exam," and if you pass it, you're done. There is nothing more required. Some classes, you might need to spend many weeks or months taking the class, listening to all the lectures, understanding the material, practicing, memorizing, etc., until you can take the exam.

But competency-based education allows you to get a degree as quickly as you can get it done. We'll talk about cost with some examples, but both of these options can be fairly inexpensive. The reason they can be expensive is just simply your costs are not based upon supporting a large institution and all of its costs.

They're simply based upon taking the exam. Now, there are costs for the exam. So a CLEP exam or an AP exam is something around $100. You might also have costs for making a preparation booklet, buying an exam guide or something for $40 or $50. But $150 to get three credit hours of class is usually a lot cheaper than all of your other options, and it may be a lot more efficient in terms of your time.

If you have $150 to get three credit hours, that means your total cost per credit hour is $50. And if you could do that over the course of your entire college degree for 120 credit hours, you would wind up with a total cost of $6,000 for the degree, if your average cost per credit hour were $50.

It can be done cheaper than this, but we're not talking free. We're talking inexpensive. But $6,000 for a degree is a whole lot cheaper than, you know, commonly you might pay $6,000 for a semester. And it's a lot less expensive and a lot faster. When you are looking at a competency-based education program, there is an additional benefit that can come on the price side.

That there are schools that will allow you to pay based upon a calendar time rather than based upon the number of classes that you can take. And they don't cap you on the number of classes that you can take. So a really good example here is Western Governors University.

Western Governors University is a government college. It is out in the western states. It's an official government college, accredited, etc. But their model is a model that is different than many traditional models. First of all, all of their degrees are online. And when you're paying your tuition, you pay your tuition based upon an amount of time rather than per class.

So you're not charged per class, you're simply charged based upon a calendar term. Let me read to you from their website. WGU's pricing structure. Most universities charge tuition by credit hour. If you take more courses, you pay more money. But not Western Governors University. We offer flat rate tuition.

That means that whether you complete eight courses in a term or 20, your tuition won't change. Our pricing structure boasts, one, flat rate tuition. Tuition is paid by six month term, not by credit. You pay one low price for as many courses you complete in a term. Two, better savings.

Our programs are competency based. That means you can complete most courses as fast as you master the material. The more courses you finish in a term, the more money you can save. Three, low overhead. Because WGU is designed without classrooms, quads, or sports arenas, we are able to keep our operation costs low.

We pass that savings directly to our students. We pay less. So do you. If you're curious about the numbers, for the School of Business, their tuition is $3,575. Flat rate for six months. So for one term of six months, your cost is $3,575. The cost per credit hour depends upon how many classes you can finish during that six months.

So if you could finish all 120 credit hours in six months, then your total cost for a degree would be $3,500. If you need a year to do all 120 credit hours, then your total cost for your degree would be $7,000. And it just goes on from there. Now, obviously, when Western Governor does their comparisons, they're assuming that you're going to go through on a normal four-year degree program.

But I think that assumption is ridiculous. And the reason it's ridiculous is quite simply that college, the normal way we conceive of college, very little time in a college student's life is spent actually in study mode. If you're in a very rigorous college and you're taking a lot of credit hours, yes, there is a lot of time studying.

You're getting a math degree or an engineering degree or something like that where you need to do three or four hours of homework for every hour of class. That's fine. But for most degrees, right, a business degree, I mean, I never did an hour of homework to an hour of class ever.

Should I have? Probably. But let's start with that. So let's calculate the time requirements. A full-time load in a traditional college is considered to be somewhere between 12 and 18 credit hours. And so as little as 12 credit hours, let's say you had a good student that was doing two hours of homework for every hour of class.

That would be ridiculous for any kind of degree, again, except in math or physics or something like that. No one does that in the business school or in the school of education or in the school of graphic design or anything like that. Nonsense. But if you did 12 credit hours and you did two hours of homework, you would have a total of 36 hours a week that you're engaged in actual academics.

The rest of it is everything else that's associated with college. Now, what about a maximum full time? Well, 18 credit hours. Easily you can take 18 credit hours. And you can easily do that and do very well. So my senior year of college, when I was actually serious about studying, my senior year of college, I took 19 credit hours.

And I also worked 40 hours a week and took 19 credit hours and was better prepared to do all my papers and my homework and everything for my senior capstone courses and got straight A's. And so I don't know if I did 20 or 30 hours of homework, probably somewhere in that range.

But you have a huge amount of time that is available to you. So if you do a time audit and let's say you have 168 hours in a week, let's assume that you sleep eight hours per night. So that's 56. So 168 less 56 is 112 hours. Let's give you, say, two hours a day of ablutions and meals and exercise, et cetera.

That's 14 hours. So we're down to 98 hours available. And let's say you take one day completely off. So let's just drop off another -- you do a six-day week. So we're down to something like 88, 85 to 88 hours per week that's available for study. If I have 85 to 88 hours a week and I'm not caring for children, not going anywhere, I'm just sitting in front of a computer and studying, and I'm pretty decent with academics, man, I can knock out these classes fast, especially if I'm studying something that I'm inclined towards that I know.

And that's the point. So back to Ryan, he is a nine-month college grad. He did his in nine months. Here's a guy who dropped out of college twice, but then he got serious. And by the way, he was working full-time, and he had his college degree in nine months because he just sat down and studied and learned and studied for the test and got it done.

So you can get this done fast and cheap through a competency-based education program and through a combination of these. And, again, these flow together. So what kind of degrees can you get this way? Well, I would say the degrees that work best for this kind of educational model are degrees that are knowledge-based, not degrees that are skill-based.

So a business degree. A business degree is largely knowledge-based. It's can you pass exams? Can you answer questions the way that the textbook says they should be answered? A business degree is not assessed based upon your competency in business. Ridiculous, I know, but it's not. You could be the worst businessman in the world and get a business degree, and the fact that you're a bad businessman has no relevance to your ability to get the degree.

You could be a great academic and get a business degree. On the other hand, there are degrees that are competency-based degrees. So here I use mathematics. A mathematics degree I don't think is going to work for this because you need to prove your competence in mathematics, and that's a skill that builds over time.

You can't rush that competence. You have to sit, you have to do the work, you have to do the problems again and again and again until you build the skill. You're not going to get a -- assuming that today you don't speak any Japanese -- you're not going to get one of these degrees in Japanese studies or Japanese linguistics.

Japanese is a skill, and while you can learn Japanese very quickly, you're not going to be able to learn it in six months. It's going to take you a lot of time to develop the skill. So degrees that work are simply degrees that are knowledge-based, not skill-based. But within that world, there are lots and lots of degrees available, and there are lots and lots of universities available that offer this.

When we get to the world -- so let's talk about some specific options, and I want to give you some example degree plans here. And then at the end, I'll show you -- I'll share with you my plan for how I intend to prepare my children for this, because one of my ambitions is that my children have an accredited undergraduate college degree basically by the time they leave my home or by the time they're about 18 or thereabouts.

And I'll explain more details on that in a little bit. So let's start first with the schools. When it comes to schools that will take credit by examination, the answer is in what schools will do that. Most schools will take it, especially if we're talking about the well-known exams such as AP exams and CLEP exams.

But most schools will have the limit that I described to you of up to potentially 30 credits or 40 credits or something like that. Most schools will not allow you to quiz out of three and a half years of university. The ones that will are those ones that I said -- Thomas Edison State University, Excelsior University, Charter Oak State College, et cetera.

Now, when you go into the world of competency-based education, there are many more schools that actually have bigger names. And so if I go to the web and I search "competency-based college," you find different things. And so here's an article that I'm reading from a website called mydegreeguide.com. I just found it on a web search.

And mydegreeguide.com, here is a list of schools that you can get a degree from. This is schools offering competency-based degree programs. Anderson University, and I'll read what they say. You can get an online bachelor's in human services or in nursing, RN to BSN. Capella University, online bachelor's in accounting, business administration, health care management, human resource management, project management, teaching and learning.

An online MBA in health care management, human resource management, project management, or other. Indiana Wesleyan University, an online master of social work. Northern Arizona University, bachelor's in computer information technology, liberal arts, management, nursing, small business administration, computer information technology, nursing, et cetera. Purdue University, business administration, cloud computing, information technology.

I'm going to skip the degrees now. Rasmussen College, Southern New Hampshire University, Texas A&M University, commerce, Thomas Edison State University, University of Louisville, University of Massachusetts, Global, University of Wisconsin, Walden University, Western Governors University, Westminster College, et cetera. Now, you'll notice some of those names are names that would sound very ordinary.

For example, I said, Walden University will give you an online bachelor's in early childhood studies or in nursing or health care administration or business administration, strategic communication, et cetera. University of Wisconsin, you can get an online bachelor's in business administration. University of Massachusetts, Global, you can get an online bachelor's in business administration, general business, or information systems management, or management and organizational leadership, or marketing, or supply chain management and logistics, or information technology, or you can get a master's in organizational leadership.

And so these schools are schools that are not-- University of Louisville, you can get a bachelor's in organizational leadership and learning, health care leadership, specialty. These schools are schools that don't sound like-- they're just normal schools. And that's the key. So as you're choosing between these, interestingly, in a moment, I'll go through some of the ways to quiz out, and I'll give you some resources there.

But one of the interesting points that I learned from Ryan at his channel is the concept of basically how these appear on your transcript. Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. So Ryan is a big fan. I've always been a big fan of quizzing out using CLEP exams, etc. Ryan, he of the 9 Month College Degree channel, and he is a fan of getting people to go through and offer-- and go through just one university's program.

And his point is that when you do that on your transcript, you have a perfectly ordinary looking transcript. Your transcript will show that you have all of these classes with credits issued by this university. And you're the one who knows that you just lined up and did the classes fast, fast, fast.

And so this is a great way of passing through the gauntlet that some of us are worried about. What if Thomas Edison State University is not an appropriate, you know, not a well-known school? Well, University of Massachusetts Global is their competency-based education arm of University of Massachusetts. And so if I get an online bachelor's in business administration and marketing, and I do it based upon their structure, I can do this very quickly and with lower cost because I'm doing it online and through this program.

And yet at the end of this day, my entire transcript has University of Massachusetts classes on it. It's not a hodgepodge of different places. Let's pivot back now to the concept of quizzing out. The best resource for you on this topic is a great online message board called degreeforum.net.

degreeforum.net. This is a web community of people who are all interested and extremely knowledgeable in this. And they come together and you can read about different programs. They'll help you design a degree based upon things that you have already, opportunities that you have and that you've learned, classes you've taken, and they'll tell you basically where to get your credits.

So if you're an adult and you don't have a college degree, but you think you'd like to have one, this is a good place for you to go and hang out. They also have a really useful wiki that is hosted at degreeforum.miraheys.org. Just find it on degreeforum.net. You can click through to it.

And on the degree wiki, they answer most of your questions. And I forgot to mention, one of the ones that inspired me years ago is there's a great website called BAin4weeks.com. BAin4weeks.com. And I read this years ago. It's a little out of date now. But the guy who put up this website basically sat down and he showed how he quizzed out of a bachelor's degree in a total of four weeks, four weeks of testing.

And he listed all of the tests that he took, how he prepared for them, the books, et cetera. And he examined how he did it. Now, some of these techniques are out of date, but it's a really good website to show kind of the ultimate example of what's possible.

Remember that I discussed for you, and I said this can be fast and it can be cheap, but it's not easy. Notice, you do need to be able to -- you have to have some ability here to take exams. People who can't take exams, they're certainly not going to work for them.

But BA in Four Weeks is an inspiring website to show how smart people who can take exams well can get this done very, very quickly. On the degree forum wiki that they host, we have an example degree plan that is just an example of something that I have mapped out.

So -- and I'll explain my strategy with my children in a moment. But they have -- one of the more interesting ones is that they have a Thomas Edison State University, a sample BA in Computer Science, as well as a BS/BA in CIS, a double degree plan. There's a reason for it, but basically, if you can reach the requirements for a Bachelor's of Arts in Computer Science, you can also reach the requirements for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems with only four more courses.

And on this, they go through and they explain how to quiz out. So let me give you just some examples to bring it into focus for you. So first, you have the BA in Computer Science, the general education requirements. So you're required to have English Composition 1 and 2.

And so they have mapped that you can take a course from Sophia.org and you take English Composition 1. And when you pass that course -- by the way, I think the fee there is something like $30, something extremely modest. But when you pass that course, you can get credit from Thomas Edison State University for that course.

Then you take English Composition 2 from Study.com. Again, very inexpensive. Some of these can actually be free from these websites. Then public speaking is a requirement. You need three credit hours of public speaking, so you can take the Study.com course of Communications 120, Presentation Skills in the Workplace. College Algebra, you can take a College Algebra class on Sophia.

Critical Information Literacy, you take that class from Thomas Edison State University. Introduction to Sociology, Ethics in the Digital Age, American Government, you can use Study.com or a CLEP exam or Saylor. Knowledge of Human Cultures, Sophia.org, et cetera. And so you go through, you take your general education, you take your computer science courses, you take your computer science electives, you go through and you can build this degree out with putting together all of those things from those sources.

Very inexpensive and depending on how good you are at taking these tests, very, very quickly. So that's a great example of how it can be done. Now, I see kind of a middle pathway. Because while I think these degree options are really powerful and great, they certainly are not the best fit for everybody.

Leaving aside those who are not really skilled at reading and learning and taking tests, who are probably better prepared for some other endeavor, leaving those people aside, we still get to the issue of, well, what about the other aspects of college? What if my child is not just looking for a general business degree or a general accounting degree that he can get fast and cheap?

What if he really wants to study something really specialized? What if he wants to study at a great university, et cetera? What if he wants the social environment? What if he wants the networking effect, et cetera, from a great university? All this is completely valid. And of course, if you have young children, you don't know what is going to be appropriate to them.

So here is how I think about it and what I am doing. I don't know what will be right for my children in terms of college. Consider the minimum standard that you need a college degree for the reasons that I stated opening the show. You need to have a college degree.

If you don't have a college degree, it puts you into a place of vulnerability that is just, as far as I can see, unacceptable. It's silly and it makes you too vulnerable. There are too many people out there who don't have a college degree and they just are not succeeding in the workforce.

They are stuck in low-paid jobs. They are stuck in careers that aren't going anywhere and they are too vulnerable. Now, if you are listening to this podcast, you are not one of those people. You are one of those people who would go and open a hot dog cart and make $100,000 a year.

But there are a lot of people that can't do that, that are genuinely vulnerable, that they don't have any interest in that. I recognize that just because you would go and make $100,000 a year shining shoes doesn't mean that everybody else can. I don't want my children to ever be vulnerable.

I want them to be protected. A college degree can open them up to a good job. That good job can be a lifesaver. We are often so quick because of the—me, I am included in this—because of our aggressive personality and the fact that we see opportunities at all sides.

I have been guilty many times of being quick to just wave my hand and say, "Ah, there is no point in a good job. Go on to something that you love." A good job is a great thing. A good kind of middle-level job or a good government job or something like that is a lifesaver for so many people.

We need to be careful before we just wave that away, even while acknowledging that it is not a great fit for everyone. A college degree can open our children up to a good and safe life of good earnings, et cetera. It still is valid, and I don't see that the system is going anywhere anytime soon.

What I am seeking to do is to prepare my children, and the minimum standard is to have some college degree. I don't put much stock in the necessity of learning from these types of degrees. I believe there is good value in the learning that you get from an engineering degree or a math degree or a physics degree or a chemistry degree.

There, the learning matters. But for all the rest of the 85% of degrees that are just generalized stuff, I don't think the learning so much matters. What I think is just the credentialization that is the most important thing. Now, to the extent you learn, great. It is just that our careers are changing so quickly.

Very few of us work in the field that our degree is in. It is not as relevant to our lives as perhaps it was thought it was going to be many years ago. I don't think that -- I am trying to keep this focused, so let me just continue on.

The other thing I have observed for many years is quite simply there has been such a tremendous -- do I call it inflation? Devaluization is probably appropriate, but just an inflation that has been applied to academics that all of the educational standards have changed dramatically. If you go back 100 years, 150 years in the United States and you look at the knowledge that a student acquired in, say, eight years of primary school, it is in many cases college level of what today we understand to be college level.

I have a set of McGuffey readers, which were the standard on the American frontier and all across the United States for decades, if not -- I can't say centuries, but for decades and decades and decades. I still use the McGuffey readers. If I give you the fourth, the fifth, the sixth McGuffey readers and have you look at what students of that era learned if they got to that level of readers, there are many college students who would simply not be able to comprehend the level of English ability that was there.

Those McGuffey readers are and were incredible. I have a set, a complete set of Ray's arithmetic, which was an arithmetic program that was in some ways in many schools a companion to the McGuffey readers. If I give you that arithmetic program and I show you what a student mastered, if a student mastered even just the beginning Ray's arithmetic books, those students had a higher competency with arithmetic and what today I think we'd call consumer math than really many graduating college students who've done college algebra have.

Then if we go into the algebra and geometry and other books that are included, then they're very, very high level. Then you look at the placement exams, the college placement exams and what was expected of students. Basically what we call what used to be done in six by sixth grade or eighth grade in three or four months a year of school, now we've extended it out to 12th grade or possibly 14th grade, right?

An associate's degree, which I call 14th grade. And we've just dramatically devalue devalued the learning. Similarly, what we now call or what used to be called high school level has now become college level. You look at what a high school graduate was expected to master in a kind of just a normal but decent government school 50 years ago and you compare that to what a high school graduate today is required to master.

It's just what we call it until college level today. So there's been this massive devaluation of educational requirements and scholastic standards across our system. That's not to say there are not still very high standards in some places, but speaking generally, those standards have been dramatically lowered. So if we do it right and we expose our students to a rigorous elementary and middle school education, by the time we arrive at adolescent years, early teen years, our students are perfectly capable of what we generally call college.

You see this in by going, you can do this in government schools or in home schools. There are many, many people who succeed in the dual enrollment system, which I'm not covering here because I'm not trying to make a comprehensive discussion of all the options, but it is a good option where high school students go and teach college classes and they often don't struggle.

Now we're not talking about the median student, we're talking about the upper tier in the government school system, in the home schooling system. We're not talking about everybody, we're talking about students who had a rigorous education, but it's very, very plausible that many teenagers can succeed in a college at the college level.

So my plan is basically with my students to get rid of the concept of high school and substitute a college degree instead. And one more caveat and disclaimer. As a parent, you are always responsible to make sure that what you are doing for your student is the right thing for that student at the right time.

So I try to label my stuff as ambitions, these are ambitions that I have, these are goals that I have, but I am not committed to these. If I observe that something that I'm doing is not right for my student, I won't do it. I need to guide each individual student.

But by starting with an intentional vision, we'll probably get closer to it than if I don't start with an intentional vision. So my plan, again, for high school is basically to tell my students, "Alright, you're doing high school and the requirement that I have for you to graduate this high school course is to pass this exam." Now most likely that will map primarily to CLEP exams or AP exams or whatever system exists a decade from now.

I don't know what that will be. But it'll be something like that, a well-known, widely accepted program. And I just don't think these things are that hard. And I'll explain why in a minute. But I remember in high school how hard I thought these exams were and how I didn't pass all of them.

But now I look at them with more perspective and I realize that they weren't actually hard, I just had bad coaching. I didn't say bad teaching, I had bad coaching in exam prep. No one ever taught me how to learn to study for exams. And so today I don't think they're that hard.

If we get good studying habits in place for exams, and I'll talk about that in a moment. So I've mapped out the high school curriculum and then that I think will just simply map to a college degree. And what I've done is I've taken one or two of these college diplomas that we can get.

So for example, the computer information systems version is one of those that I've looked at. And I've laid it out so that I have a whole map of how those exams work to the degree requirements. And assuming that I have students who have modest proficiency at least with these computer subjects, then here's a perfectly useful degree.

You'll have a bachelor's degree, you'll take these exams, and then as you get closer to that age, you'll go ahead and wrap up with the capstone computer science stuff. And in the same time that you're graduating high school, will graduate college. And that's my intention. Now that's not easy, and I'm not promising that it's easy, but I think it's very doable.

It's very doable for students, especially if those students are academically inclined and if they have had a rigorous education before that. So here is my strategy to make this very possible. The first thing is I believe that it's valuable to expose students to all of the necessary concepts that they'll later master at the youngest reasonable age.

And so that exposure is not intended to try to require them to have mastery, but it's simply to awaken them to certain concepts. So I think if you are awakened to concepts and you start to learn the basic grammar or the basic vocabulary of a subject at a young age, then you start to build a mental framework into which you can prepare the...

you can add in all of the necessary details down the road. So here's a practical example. One of the things that I've done is I've gone through all of the AP exams and all of the college level courses, and I've tried to find resources for each subject that I incorporate into our homeschool now.

So let me give an example like microeconomics and macroeconomics. There's an AP exam for microeconomics and macroeconomics, also a CLEP exam. And some form of economics course is a necessary component of studies. And so I started with... I found this really great set of books called The Cartoon Guide to Microeconomics.

And a wonderful cartoonist wrote these books, and I bought these books. And basically we read one book over the course of a 12-week term, and these books have about 14 chapters, so it winds up being a chapter a week. And my nine-year-old loves them. He thinks they're hilarious. They're cartoons.

And he thinks they're funny and they're interesting. And so reading a chapter of a book takes about sometimes I guess 20 minutes, and we go through them at a rate of about one or two chapters a week over the course of a 12-week term. But if I go through the table of contents, you'll see that every basic economic theory has been introduced in that course so that something like inflation is no longer something that is completely unknown, or what is supply-side economics versus demand-side economics, etc.

These concepts are introduced. There's zero chance that my nine-year-old could pass an AP exam on the subject today. Zero chance. But there is a good chance that my nine-year-old, by being opened up to the subjects and having his brain opened up, will understand a little bit of what is out there, and then will fill that in over time.

So I've gone through and mapped out other levels as well. So here are just some examples. I'm looking at my map right at the moment. But if I look at other courses that I have identified, so the next one, the next introduction to economics is that I've chosen that I plan to use.

I've chosen all the caveats about adjust every year, your father, your mother, you should adjust your students, blah, blah, blah. I've become a huge fan of the Life of Fred series of books. I had heard the name, never knew what they were, and then one day I was out looking for personal finance curricula, and I stumbled across the Life of Fred personal finance book.

And I looked at the table of contents, and I was blown away at what I read in the table of contents. And I said, "This guy is teaching stuff that I'm the only one in the world that I know that teaches this stuff." And it was so good. And then I started looking at his other books, and I came across his entire math series.

And he's written, Stanley Schmidt has written this math series of these ridiculous, totally goofy, zany books. Like they're absurd. That's why the children love them. They're totally goofy and absurd, but he's written this math series to go from one plus one all the way through college-level math, linear algebra and high-level, literally undergraduate-level math.

And the entire thing is done in the context of narrative with a really interesting story that, a really interesting story that wherein the protagonist, Fred, basically always needs a certain math concept in his life before the math concept is taught. So I love this because it's narrative teaching, and it's a component of, and teaches some of the thinking behind mathematics and the reason for mathematics.

And he does this even at calculus, differential equations, etc. So he has a pre-algebra series, and what he's done with his pre-algebra series, he has Life of Fred Pre-Algebra Zero with physics, Life of Fred Pre-Algebra One with biology, Life of Fred Pre-Algebra Two with economics. And so in his Pre-Algebra Two book, then he incorporates his pre-algebra concepts with a discussion of economics.

He's an incredible teacher. So I have that laid out for a year or two from now. Then the next economics course is, I am a big fan of Gary North's economics course at the Ron Paul curriculum. So I intend that as we get closer to these years, these teenage years, then I'll go ahead and have my students go through the Ron Paul curriculum course on economics.

And then finally, we cap that off with the Khan Academy course on macroeconomics, microeconomics, that are preparation for the exam. Any one of those classes is probably enough, but I have, let's call it half a class with the first book I mentioned, half a class with the Life of Fred book, and then one class with the Ron Paul curriculum, one class with the Khan Academy, etc., plus other preparation books, right?

Here's a Princeton review, AP microeconomics or exam book that you need to learn and study. This should be fairly simple and straightforward. So my basic strategy is take the subjects and expose the concepts at a very early age so that the student is aware of those concepts. And I've seen this work many times.

A couple of examples, right? It makes a much bigger difference when a child watches Mary Poppins, the movie, the classic movie, if the child associates the concept of a bank run with what he's already learned in economics versus going through his whole childhood having only a modest understanding of what a bank run is from a movie, never having that backed up by an academic book.

Same thing I mentioned on yesterday's podcast where I was reading this series of Father and I Were Ranchers by Ralph Moody. The Little Britches series. It talks about there's no money. And so I noticed my children, especially my nine-year-old who's read these economic books, why was there no money?

Now that's obviously a question that a child would ask at any point, whether there's been any exposure to a structured book, curriculum about macroeconomics, but it's easier when there's some kind of framework for it. And so most subjects work like this. Most subjects, once you're aware of the concepts, you become alive to the fact that they exist.

But the problem is in the industrial school system, students are generally only exposed to those subjects in an isolated way. So if you have an economics class at all, you have one class, and here you are in 10th grade being exposed for the very first time in your life to a macroeconomics course.

The first course I ever took in macroeconomics was in college, I think freshman or sophomore year. And those were the first time I learned about a supply curve and a demand curve, etc., and tried this basic grammar. Now you can pass it. The problem is when you only live with a concept for a short period of time, number one, it's hard to absorb very much, and number two, it's hard to retain very much.

So let's imagine that you had a goal of getting fat. It's very hard to get fat in one meal or one day or one week. I don't want to go beyond that because you can get fat in a month. But it's very hard to get fat if you're only overeating for one day or one week.

You just can't physically fit in enough food to get fat that fast. So if knowledge is like--if the goal of acquiring knowledge is like the goal of getting fat, you can't fit that much knowledge in in a few weeks or one semester or 15 weeks or 12 weeks just because your brain doesn't have enough time to metabolize it, to store it in long-term memory, to make all the necessary connections, etc.

The way you get fat is by a little bit of overeating over a long period of time. If you overeat on average by 500 to 1,500 calories a week over the course of 100, 200, 300 weeks, you're going to be very fat because of that small amount of overeating.

And the same way with knowledge, if you can put knowledge in a little bit here and there, intentionally at an early age, at a middle age, and along the way, by the time you arrive at the point of testing, that knowledge is fairly comfortable. And in the learning process, your brain has had time to store those concepts away into long-term memory.

Your brain has had time to really ponder them, to think about their application. You've had time to draw that web of connections between all the living stuff around you and how you see those things work out when you're reading a biography. You have the background of economics, so if you're reading a biography of Soch and Such and their economic problems, etc., you're engaging with those things and bringing them in.

And so my strategy is expose all of the concepts at a very early age in modest, pleasurable, measured doses in order to activate the awareness of the student to their existence and to stretch out the time of exposure to a maximum amount of time so that there's a little bit here and there where you're touching on it.

And then this is basically a method of interleaving. I don't know if you're familiar with the neuroscience concept of interleaving versus block scheduling. What I've tried to do is take the concept of interleaving and apply it out over a 10 or 12-year course of education rather than doing block scheduling, which is what our industrial school system functions on, where you don't read much about economics in second grade, you do that in 10th grade or you do that in your sophomore year.

The next strategy that I have is to do my best to teach the concepts with living materials that stick, that are stickier than a textbook. So here I don't have yet a great living book on economics, but if I use a book on chemistry, so I've done the same thing with chemistry, right?

I started with a cartoon guide to chemistry. And by the way, I also have in our library lots of chemistry books. My children enjoy looking at them, these encyclopedias and whatnot where the basic material is covered just in the encyclopedia format, all the amazing DK books. And children enjoy looking through them and they absorb little bite-sized pieces here and there because they're there to continually browse little bits of information in the way that I've just described.

Now back to living books. So I have some of those kind of more fact-based books, but also we have a whole series of living books planned. So a living book is a narrative, a narrative that is written by somebody who's really passionate about the subject and brings in all of the details that make the subject come alive.

So this year we're doing a book called "The Mystery of the Periodic Table" by Benjamin Weicker. And this is a classic living book that takes the reader through the discovery of all of the elements of the periodic table by telling the stories of the people who did it. And, you know, it's von Helmont and Boyle and Stahl and Priestley and Cavendish and all the others who discovered the elements and it creates a story of something like the periodic table.

And the way we do this in the Charlotte Mason tradition is we do this many times with many different books. And so I believe this is one of the most powerful ways of retaining something like science, is to learn it by going along the journey with the scientist who created it in the first place, because it sticks so much more.

I remember my high school chemistry class, the first time I ever saw a periodic table was when I showed up in high school chemistry class and was introduced to the periodic table. And I understood the basics of it, and I understood that there was the growth of the number of electrons, etc.

I understood the basics of it, but it took a while for me to understand it. But if you introduce your third grader and your fifth grader and your seventh grader to these concepts by introducing him to the people who actually did it, then he's lived with these concepts of chemistry for a very long time.

We just finished this amazing biography of Marie Curie, written by her daughter, Eve Curie. And so the whole concept of radioactivity is something that is very firmly entrenched into the mind of my eldest student, because he's lived with Marie Curie herself for 25 weeks now, and he's gone with her on the entire journey of her and her husband and how they discovered radium, and they discovered radioactivity, etc.

And so you can't live with somebody like that over the course of 25 weeks and 400 pages and not have a deep connection with these topics. And so I've taken the materials or the later subjects that will be studied and tried to bring them back with living materials and living books and living stories, etc., that the child will live with.

And so by the time the child arrives at high school chemistry, it's something that is very familiar and has been for 10 years, because it wasn't done with block scheduling as this is your 10th grade chemistry class, but it was that interleaving process. Then the next strategy is to differentiate with all of these kind of college-level courses between are we talking about knowledge-level stuff or skill-based stuff.

Knowledge-level stuff, like passing a macroeconomics exam, there's no skill involved. It's just simply knowledge. So we introduce the concepts at an early age if possible, and then as you get closer to a test, you engage in specific test-based preparation, and you drill the knowledge for enough time until you can pass the exam.

So when I think back to my experience taking AP classes in high school, first of all, no one ever taught me how to study. I didn't have anywhere near the study tools that we have today. I had a book, and I was too lazy to make my own flashcards, so I basically just read the book a bunch of times.

It's a very inefficient study technique. No one taught me how to study, and I didn't know what I needed to study. So today, if you give me a high school student and we're preparing for an AP exam, it's so easy to put these facts aside using fact-based stuff that we need to know.

If there's understanding, the facts fit better. But even if you just have to memorize facts, if you've got nothing other than Anki, and you make flashcards or just go online and download a flashcard deck and memorize the flashcard deck, then you'll have the basic knowledge that you need to be able to pass the exam.

So that's where we're living. The world is so incredible for studying. You can go, download an Anki deck, and just study it. Now, remember that the average high school senior who passes has what's called a year of class, which turns out to be eight months of class, something like that.

And only a few weeks of that is devoted to actually studying and preparing. But what if that same high school senior, during the entire eight months of his AP US History class, is drilling five minutes a day of Anki flashcards? By the time he arrives at the exam with five or ten minutes a day, he's going to easily have all of the fact-based knowledge committed to memory, and it's going to be very secure in his long-term memory where he's very confident in it.

So when he rolls into his essays or he rolls into his topics where he has to show mastery, it's going to be relatively easy. Now, what if that same student had a teacher or parents who started him on that memorization process three years earlier and said, "Here's the Anki deck that we're going to be studying for your exam that's coming up in three years, and we've got three years to master this.

Let's put in two or three study sessions per week of, say, ten minutes here and there as part of your normal class and do it over the course of two or three years." So you have a long amount of time. Well, if you have twice the amount of time to memorize stuff, then it's half as hard as if you have a much shorter time.

So all this college-level stuff of the memorization stuff is pretty simple if you just give yourself two or three years to study it and if you have a guide who's knowledgeable and can direct you along it. On the skill-based stuff--so there are skill-based exams, right? If you're going to go again, take the Japanese AP exam.

Well, you're not going to cram that in with Anki in two weeks before the exam. It's not going to work. So the skill-based stuff is where you want to introduce it as early as possible so that there's maximal amounts of time to build the skills. So if you're preparing for the AP Calculus BC exam, then the way you prepare for that is by diligently doing math every single day, working the problems, learning the concepts, and doing that for eight years without ever missing a day in between.

Then by the time you arrive at the exam, it's easy. But it takes you eight years to get there. It's just a matter of consistency. So with skill-based stuff, the consistency is the key of building the skill. Hey, you're going to take the Japanese exam. Okay, you don't speak Japanese today and you're 10 years old.

Great, you got eight years. Eight years is plenty of time to learn Japanese if you're consistent and if you can engage in good study materials, etc. And you basically learn the language, and at the very end, you add in just a little bit of exam prep along the way.

So with this approach, your children should be very well prepared to pass the quiz exams necessary. And with this same approach, they should be pretty easily able to dedicate some time in the summer, some time maybe the year after they graduate high school, and wrap up a college degree with focused, distant study.

But either path is open to them. So the strategy for children, I think, is maximize the widely accepted exams, AP exams, CLEP exams, etc. Set a goal, again, for academically competent children, set a goal for a minimum of 30 credits by examination. That would be 10 AP exams or CLEP exams or some variation of that.

You're obviously going to choose the exams that are the best fit for the child and is best fit for the child's goals as you can find. And maximize those because those can be accepted at any school that is appropriate. And then if the child doesn't have some clear burning, "I must go to Stanford and study such and such." Okay, fine.

Go to Stanford and study this thing that you want to study. But if the child doesn't have a clear vision for college, and an obvious school that this is definitely the school that you should take, do one of these online programs. So at least the child has a college degree.

And then if the child wants to go back later and study something different where they have a real passion for it, great. Go do a second bachelor's degree. If you want to go to a prestigious school, go get a prestigious master's degree. When it comes to prestige of university, it's the last degree that counts.

If you went to a local state school but you have your MBA from Harvard, it's the last degree that counts. But at least this way we can prepare our children to get a college degree fast and cheap so they have that insurance and then open up other things for them.

In conclusion, I have not covered in any kind of exhaustive nature all of the strategies that are available. I haven't talked about dual enrollment, a powerful strategy. I haven't talked about community college. I haven't talked about free colleges, University of the People, great college. I haven't talked about the massive online courses.

I haven't talked about--I mean there's so many things I haven't discussed. I'm trying to keep it really, really simple. But this is a way that you can get a college degree fast and cheap and that your children can get a college degree fast and cheap. And I believe that's a smart thing to do.

It's not right for everyone. There are many people for whom college is not right for at all. And those people should not be on this path. Those people should be encouraged into a different path. It doesn't mean they're dumb people. You may be a skilled welder and be extremely smart and enjoy reading philosophy books in the evening in Latin or Greek or whatever you read in.

Those things are not incompatible. But there's a whole wide swath of our students who are kind of forced into colleges where they're not getting the beauty of a high-level liberal arts education. They're not getting the beauty of a high-level engineering degree. They're not getting the beauty of a law degree or something like that.

They're just getting a degree. And why would you go out and pay $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 and worse spend four years of your life to get a degree that you could pay $6,000 for and get done in nine months? Why not? It's useful to know about it as an option.

Hope this has been useful for you. I will link in the show notes today to degreeforum.net. Remember, you can link through from there to their Wiki, which is useful. I'll link to the Wiki as well. I'll link to the YouTube channel by Ryan that I mentioned, Ryan Swaite, where he spends a lot of time promoting the idea of competency-based education.

There's many universities that offer this, and I think more and more universities that will offer this in the future. We are in the middle of a complete reshuffling of the entire world of education. The industrial education model that we've had in the past is not working well. We all see it's not working well.

We all know it's not working well, and we don't know what the future is going to hold. So I can't tell you what's going to be appropriate 10 years from now, but today this is what I see, and I hope it's useful to you. As I go out on today's show, my closing ad, I want to mention to you my hack-proof course.

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