Transfer Calculus

College 101: How Degree Hacking Works

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Here on Transfer Calculus, our main discussion topic is the idea of “degree hacking.”  But what is degree hacking and more importantly, how does it work?  And are the claims accurate that you can finish an entire bachelor’s degree in a year or less?  Keep reading for answers to these questions and more.

What is degree hacking?

Degree hacking, in its broadest sense, refers to any method by which you acquire a college degree in a non-traditional way or accelerate your progress toward a college degree through similar non-traditional means.  Degree hacking can include, but isn’t limited to, alternate sources of credit and extensive use of transfer credit.  At its logical extreme, degree hacking can entail taking a bare minimum number of classes in residence and using a university as a credit bank rather than a source of learning.  This notion of “credit banking” – of getting a university to accept your transfer credits and put them on a transcript – is the usual notion of “degree hacking” for most folks.

If done properly, a student can earn a college degree for under $15,000, as quickly as they can complete the classes, while expending a fraction of the effort and spending a fraction of the time of a student at a residential university.

Within our community, until about 2024, there were three major institutional players in the degree hacking space.  These institutions are regionally accredited, offer (or once offered, in two cases) remarkably generous transfer policies, and award degrees that are respected within their local markets.  The universities are:

There are other universities with slightly less generous transfer policies, modalities permitting fast completion, or both.  Among these, the notable ones are:

At these schools, it’s possible to transfer as much as 75% of the credits required to graduate from non-collegiate sources.  As a result, these schools can be remarkably flexible for adult learners and can offer both first and subsequent degree seekers the credentials they seek at reasonable prices compared to residential universities (e.g., the University of Tennessee, East Tennessee State University, etc.).

My experiences will center on the schools I have personally dealt with for my own second bachelor’s degree, in particular UMPI, TESU, WGU, Excelsior, and SNHU.  I ultimately chose to go with TESU, a decision that I will explain in a future post, though the other schools definitely have their strengths for different kinds of students.

How does degree hacking work?

As you likely know, when you study at a school, whether it is high school or college, you receive a document called a transcript, which lists the courses you took, when you took them, and what grades you earned.

As an example, above is a screen capture from my own transcript at the University of Tennessee, showing the first 15 courses I completed at UT in pursuit of my bachelor’s in computer science.  Universities allow you to earn course credit in a variety of ways.  The most obvious of these is directly taking classes with their faculty, the results of which you can see above: you go to class, listen to lectures, do assignments, take assessments, and receive a grade indicative of how well you performed on those assignments and assessments.  This is a modality of study familiar to the vast majority of you since it is likely how you earned your high school diploma.  You can also earn credit by way of examinations.

At UT, for example, I earned 33 hours of credit through Advanced Placement examinations offered by the College Board (they of the SAT college entrance exam) and UT’s own departmental placement examination (for French 211 and 212, marked as “DP” on the above transcript).  Notice that my grade (the last column) in each transfer/placement course is marked as “S” – instead of a standard pass/fail system, UT indicates pass/fail courses as “S” (Satisfactory) for passing and “NC” (No Credit) for failing.

The key principle behind degree hacking is that you earn as much credit as your school allows via transfers.  But where do the transfer credits come from?  The usual source is through a provider accredited by the American Council on Education, better known as ACE.  ACE accredits private companies, employers, law enforcement agencies, and even the US military to provide training that is considered to be equivalent to that provided in a college classroom.  As a result, you might be able to earn college credit from:

  • Courses purchased through non-collegiate providers like Study.com, Sophia Learning, and StraighterLine Academy,
  • Exams taken through the College Board (AP, CLEP) or the Department of Defense (via its DANTES program),
  • Training sessions given by your employer (especially at a large company),
  • Training you received as a law enforcement officer, paramedic, EMT, or firefighter, or
  • Training you received in the US military that was reported on your Joint Services Transcript

There is a separate accrediting body similar to ACE called the National College Credit Recommendation Service (NCCRS).  NCCRS is run by the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, and as a result NCCRS offers different credit recommendations to those from ACE – and not as many schools accept NCCRS credit recommendations.  Thomas Edison State, Excelsior, and Southern New Hampshire are notable as schools that do honor NCCRS recommendations and thus award credit from NCCRS providers.

Obviously, you can transfer credits between universities as well, and also from community colleges to universities.  Many community colleges indeed have articulation agreements with local universities such that certain course transfers are guaranteed, allowing you to take your general education (“gen ed”) courses at a community college and transfer them to a university where you can concentrate on your major for your bachelor’s.  As an example here in the Knoxville area, the community colleges near Knoxville (overseen by the Tennessee Board of Regents) have articulation agreements with the University of Tennessee and even offer specific associate’s degrees that are easily transferred to UT and calibrated for the needs of specific degree seekers.  Thus, students in Morristown (Walters State), Harriman (Roane State), and Knoxville (Pellissippi State) can transfer first- and second-year classes to UT, usually without issue.

The way that it works is that each university maintains a list of course equivalencies for courses it has evaluated from outside sources.  Some college systems publish these equivalencies for public review, such as the University of Maine System:

The above screenshot shows two ACE equivalencies for BUS 440 (STAT 0030 being offered by Statistics.com and IBM 0018 being offered at Coursera), a data analytics course required of many business majors at UMPI, as well as a variety of equivalencies at other schools, including other University of Maine campuses.  So, what you do is take courses, get the credits onto a transcript, and then have that transcript sent on your behalf to the institution where you want to transfer the courses.  The usual means of doing this is by using what is called a Credly transcript, so named because it is offered through the Credly service run by Pearson Education, a major textbook publisher.  Each course you complete and have transferred to your Credly transcript gives you a digital badge signifying that you completed the course and earned the course credit, if ACE credit is available, for that particular course.  As an example, consider my Google Advanced Data Analytics Certificate issued in March 2025.  I finished the certificate on Coursera and received 9 semester hours of college credit for my efforts, which translates to three courses.  I currently have 37 badges in my Credly badge wallet, of which 26 are publicly visible, and you will notice that I have completed quite a few Sophia and Study.com courses at the time of writing.

You repeat the process until you either max out your ACE credits and have to start taking regionally accredited courses or complete your degree, whichever comes first.  That is the process that Transfer Calculus is here to help you succeed at, because that is where you run into issues based on the school you’re attending, the degree you’re pursuing, and your appetite (or lack thereof) for deep learning.  Next time, I’ll delve into the process of figuring out what courses you need, what you can transfer, and what it’s probably smarter to take in-house.

Does it actually work? And how long does it take?

Through these methods, someone with no other obligations can conceivably earn a bachelor’s degree, starting with no prior college credit, within a year.  If you choose a liberal studies degree that just ticks the box for a bachelor’s requirement at many companies, you can very easily start from nothing and end up with a full bachelor’s in nine to twelve months.  There used to be ways to go even faster, and if you are willing to work very hard and progress very quickly, there still are – but for the sake of your education, I would encourage you to work at a slower pace and target completion in 18 to 24 months.

Unless you really want to take it so slowly, you do not need to spend four years pursuing a bachelor’s degree, and that is what I want to make abundantly clear to the readers of this website: even two years is substantially faster than most university degrees.  Collegiate studies are meant to be savored and meditated over, not speed-ran like you’re trying to set a completion record in a video game – but even so, savoring the experience doesn’t require four years of your life.

Coda

To recap, degree hacking refers to any method whereby you accelerate completion of a college degree.  It’s a proven effective way to get a higher education credential in less time and for less money than traditional methods, and it works by making aggressive use of non-collegiate course providers.  Getting the most out of this modality requires considerable thought, planning, and effort – and it is not for everyone.  There are alternatives out there for those of you who simply want to earn a degree quickly and are happy to let someone else take control of what classes you take and in what order.  And while it is possible to complete a bachelor’s in less than a year, I don’t recommend it.

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