How Busy Adults Can Graduate College in 10 Hours a Week
If you’re busy with family and work, getting that college degree you want for your ideal job is daunting: online college degrees usually cost $51,000 and take over six years to finish! The good news is, you can do much better than that. You can work for just 10 hours a week on homework and still graduate college. So how long might it take to get your degree? Well, that all depends on how you decide you want to pursue it.
11 Years: Traditional College
Now, if you were to follow the typical model for college, with a 10 hour homework budget per week, you would graduate in 11 years. This is because (in theory) the average college student who attends in person during the day is supposed to work about 45 hours a week (15 hours in class and 30 hours on homework.) And if they do that for 16 weeks every semester for 8 semesters, college takes about 5,760 hours of work, which at 10 hours a week would take you about 11 years to complete.
6 Years: Realistic College
But let’s be a little more realistic here: the average college student actually only spends about 12 hours doing homework, and they sometimes skip class, so maybe some traditional in-person college students only spend 25 hours a week on school. So if you did college like they do, and took the same easy classes they’re taking, you’d graduate in about 6 years. For being as busy as you are, that’s honestly pretty good.
4 Years: Online College
But you want that degree sooner! So let’s say you do college online. Online college courses are shorter, let you work at your own pace, don’t usually include long lectures, and tend to be more affordable (while also giving you access to a wider range of professors in your chosen field). With online college, you could reasonably finish an entire course in about 50 hours of work, which would have you graduating in just 4 years.
3.5 Years: Work Experience College Credit
But you can graduate college much quicker than that. You’ve got work experience, right? Some colleges give credit for life experience! Let’s say you earn a pretty reasonable 15 credit hours for certifications and life experience you’ve already earned. That brings us down to 3.5 years.
2.5 Years: Alternative College Credit (CLEP Exams, Sophia Courses, etc.)
If you’ve visited our YouTube channel, you know all about alternative credit like CLEP exams, DSST exams, and Sophia and StraighterLine courses. In case you haven’t, it breaks down to this: these are American Council on Education accredited ways to earn college credit outside of the classroom. You take a test or pass a third-party course, and boom! You have credit. And the options above further streamline the process. We’re going to estimate high, but you’d likely average spending about 30 hours studying for each of these. If you play it smart and you pick the ones you have the best chance of passing, you’ll average 4 credits per test, and most alternative-friendly colleges will let you test out of all but 30 credit hours. So add 75 credits of alternative credit to the credit hours you got from work experience, and you’re now looking at graduating in 2.5 years.
2 Years: Competency-based Online Colleges (UMPI, WGU, etc.)
If you already work in the field your soon-to-be degree is in, that can help you get a lot of credits quickly at certain universities. There are these cutting-edge online colleges out there that use competency-based learning. Basically, they reject the idea that you have to spend a set amount of hours in a college class, and instead they believe that once you prove you know the information, you can just be done with that course. So, let’s say you go to a school like University of Maine at Presque Isle or Western Governors University, and you have to earn 30 credit hours in class (essentially take 10 courses). If you pick a major you already know something about (ie. accounting if you’re an accountant) you could be finishing those courses even quicker. Calculating all of that, you could be graduating in under 2 years.
CAN I GO FASTER?
We find that most of our clients commit somewhere between 2-3 hours per day to studying. Maybe they skip Mondays and work extra on Saturdays. But it averages out to roughly 18 hours a week. Theoretically, that could mean graduating in 1.1 years. Admittedly, a lot of things need to go right to hit that goal, but it’s very possible if your plan is solid and you’re ready to put in the work.
What’s the point we’re trying to make? You don’t have to quit your job or neglect your family to be able to graduate college. You just have to do college the right way.
And if you want help finding that right way, sign up for a consult with us. We would love to meet with you and help you graduate quickly and inexpensively so you can build a career you love.
