 In this video, I'm going to show you how you can get a special education and elementary education dual degree from WGU in less than a year. Now this is a bachelor of arts and special education and elementary education and it's a dual degree and the school you're going to be going to is WGU also known as Western Governors University. Now the reason why you want to go to Western Governors University is first of all, it's in the top 10% of universities, it's well respected. It's also regionally accredited, it has a great reputation online with lots of reviews. And the second thing is, it's what's known as a competency-based university. And what that basically means is instead of having to spend 5.1 years on average going to college, if you know the subjects, you can basically test out of them based on your competency. So traditional colleges try to fit everybody into that four-year model which ends up being 5.1 years on average and probably longer for the harder degrees. So whether it's an incredibly rigorous degree, like an engineering degree, something along those lines, or it's a relatively easy degree like communications for instance, they all try to fit it into that four-year model. But WGU and other schools like it are different because they test you based on your competency. So if you are able to excel at a certain subject, it's much easier for you to test out of those classes and get through WGU as fast as possible. And I'm going to share you these strategies that make it even better. And these are strategies that until now, until I've done this series, I've only shared with my consulting clients. So this is really powerful stuff. And I even created a cheat sheet to make this whole strategy as easy as possible. So if you appreciate all this hard work and me giving you so much value for free, go ahead, gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so at this point, I'm assuming that you have chosen the degree you want to get, which is the first thing you want to do. And then you've also chosen that you want to go to WGU, right? And WGU is a great school. There's a lot of pros to it. There's also a few cons, right? So there are certain reasons why you wouldn't want to go to WGU versus other types of schools, and there are also alternatives to WGU. So I highly recommend you check out this video right here because I kind of go over the pros and cons. But with that being said, you know the degree you want to get, you know what school you want to go to. What you want to do next is go ahead and contact WGU and transfer in all of your existing credits. That is step one. Now, the cool thing about this is WGU is extremely gracious about what they accept. For instance, there are cases where they accept military experience. They accept work experience. There are many different certificates and certifications they accept. And of course, if you have previous college credit or you took AP or IB classes during high school, they accept that as well. And then, of course, the typical stuff that schools usually accept, such as CLEP exams, WGU is also going to accept those as well. So make sure you take your time on this step because a lot of people are surprised at the classes that they can actually test out of. So once you got your transcript together, you have all those credits, you send it into WGU. They're going to go ahead and send you back a list of classes that you still have to take. And don't worry because here in a minute, I'm going to go through it literally step by step and show you an actual example of what it would look like in real life. And again, I'm going to be showing a cheat sheet, which is going to make this whole process insanely easy. So I'll put that in the description as well as the pinned comment below. All right, so step number two is you are going to take the remaining classes and you're going to use third party companies to test out of them. Now, you're not going to be able to test out of all of them, but you will be able to test out of a significant amount. And keep in mind, you are not enrolled in WGU at this point. The counselors might be kind of pressuring you to do this. Don't do it yet. Now you might be asking, why is it that I need to take these classes at third party companies when I could just take the classes at WGU? And put very simply, the reason is because it's cheaper, faster, and easier. Now there is a bunch of different companies that offer this service, but the three companies that I have had the best experience with, with my consulting clients as well as other people who do this and help people with it, are going to be straighterline.com, study.com, and Sophia.org. Now, the one that I have had the best experience with overall is going to be study.com. It seems to have the best UI. It seems to actually kind of teach people, it like actually helps them and it's relatively engaging. And there's just not that many problems with it overall. Whereas people that have taken the classes have run into problems with the other ones. So yeah, study.com is the main one that I recommend. I would say Sophia.org is probably second and then straighterline tends to be third. But some people get really strategic with this and they're like, I'm gonna take five classes from study.com and three classes from straighterline and another four classes from Sophia.org. So some people get super strategic with it, but I mean, if you wanna get complicated and save a few bucks here and there, you can, but if you wanna keep things simple, study.com is awesome. So for this particular major, you do have to take 46 classes, which is actually a lot. There are some majors where you only have to take like 35 classes. But you can very comfortably, even if you're super busy, you've got a full-time job, you've got a family, et cetera, using these third-party companies, test out of one class per week. And if you have a lot more time, in many cases, I've seen people test out of one class per day, even multiple classes per day. And that's especially for the easier entry-level classes. Now, like I said, there's tons of different reviews you can look up online. Here's a person who got a special education degree and they said, I had a great time completing my degree and truly believe that WGU is the best choice I ever made. And the great thing about taking these classes from third-party companies or taking them at WGU is you don't have to buy expensive, overpriced textbooks. You don't have to buy clickers or buy access to some kind of test bank sort of thing online. You also don't have to show up to class, do group projects where if your team members don't care about it, you end up doing all the work yourself, all the BS that you have to deal with in a normal school you don't have to deal with at WGU or using these third-party companies. And like I said, you can knock these classes out extremely fast. So for instance, here's somebody that said I completed 13 classes in one month at one point. So a single month, they were able to complete 13 classes. So after you have completed all these classes, transferred them into WGU, you're gonna get another list back of the classes that you still have to take. And at this point, you still don't wanna enroll. What you wanna do is take those classes and pre-study them. So you wanna go ahead and pre-study all of the curriculum that you have left. And there are several different sources that I recommend for doing this. The top two are going to be the WGU subreddit as well as Facebook groups. And the reason for this is because there are many people doing this and they will share strategies and tactics on how to study for and pass these tests as fast and efficiently as possible. So typically, you're gonna get some really good recommendations if you do that. There's also some really good free resources online. YouTube is great, of course. I've learned so much stuff from just randomly Googling or YouTubing stuff. Then you've also got great resources like Khan Academy. If you're a textbook type of person, you can order an old textbook for like $20 online. There's just a ton of different resources for you to pre-study this material. Now, once you pre-studied it and you feel really confident about it, at this point, you are finally gonna move on to the last step, which is go ahead and enroll in WGU and knock out those classes as fast as possible, right? So this one is pretty self-explanatory. You still want to go ahead and leverage those resources that I told you about, the WGU subreddit, as well as WGU Facebook groups. And you basically wanna go ahead and knock those classes out as fast as you possibly can. Now, the reason that we do this is because when you enroll in WGU, you basically pay per term. And of course, the price is gonna change, but it's typically somewhere around $3,500 per term. And each term is six months. So it's gonna be best for you if you knock out as many classes as you can within that term. And there are many examples of people who take these strategies to the extreme and they're actually able to knock out all of their classes within one term. And in extreme cases, two months or less. So my friend Josh Matikor, for instance, took the computer science degree at WGU, which is arguably the most difficult degree. And he actually knocked it out in two months enrolled at WGU. So that is, of course, a pretty extreme example of using these tactics and strategies. Most people are not gonna be able to do that, but very realistically speaking, you can get your degree down to two years or less. And that's if you have a full-time job, a family, and you're very busy. If you take these tactics really seriously, you can get that down to an even shorter amount of time. Now, I have consulted with people where they were going to a school where their education degree took seven years, right? They literally were just getting a bachelor's and education degree because they wanted to become a teacher and they went to one of those schools that just drags things out and they were a smart person. Like this was not a dumb person by any means, but the school dragged it out so much that they ended up taking seven years to get a bachelor's degree in education. And I really don't mean to be rude. I hope this doesn't offend anybody, but a bachelor's degree in education is not one of the harder degrees and it should not take any more than four years max. And in this particular case, going to a school like WGU, you can easily do it in around two years. All right, so let's go ahead and jump into that cheat sheet. I'm gonna take you through a step-by-step example of exactly what you would probably be looking at doing if you decided to do this degree and use the strategies that I've shown you. All right, so we are in the cheat sheet now and I'll quickly go over this. So on the far left here, you've got the class ID. So that's the ID of the class at WGU. Then you've got the course name and this is gonna be the course names of the classes at WGU. You have the amount of units. And then in this row right here, or sorry, this column right here, you're gonna have the study.com classes that you can transfer in to WGU. Now keep in mind in the future, I may be updating this. So if there are better classes like the straighter line or Sophia.org, I will be putting those in here in the future. So make sure you check it out and I will try to keep this updated. Now with that being said, if you want to use these strategies yourself, it's as easy as going file and then make a copy, right? So you just make a copy and then you can edit all this stuff yourself. So the very first step in this process is you would want to go ahead and transfer in classes that you have already taken, right? So if you have any outside classes that you've taken, maybe AP classes in high school, classes at different colleges, maybe you took like a semester of college, et cetera, this is where you would want to transfer those in. So for instance, let's just say you took AP biology during high school and you also took AP calculus. And so you're able to transfer in math 101 as well as biology 101. And then you took one semester at community college. You decided you kind of didn't like it, but you did finish some classes. So you knocked out communications, art, astronomy, as well as health 101. So you go ahead and you transfer those classes in to WGU. And then you're going to go ahead and move on to the next step, which is testing out. So you're going to go ahead and test out of all of these classes at study.com. Now I'll be honest with you, these are not the hardest classes for the most part. There's a few that might be a little bit difficult, but they're not too hard and they're going to be even easier using study.com. And unfortunately, this is one of those degrees that has a ton of classes. So yeah, that kind of does suck, but at the same time, these are going to be relatively easy classes compared to a lot of the other degrees. But with that being said, when you go to study.com, go ahead and use the checkout code Shanehummus if you want to save 30% off of your first three months. They were nice enough to go ahead and give a discount to people who use their service through me. And if you appreciate all of my hard work as well as Josh's, cause he helped me create this, then go ahead and use that and it does help the channel out a little bit. So at this point, you have transferred all of these classes in. You want to move on to the next phase, which is you are going to pre-study the remaining classes. So you go ahead, you pre-study all of these classes and then when you feel really confident about it, you're going to move on to the last phase, which is you enroll in WGU and you knock these classes out as fast as possible. And then you're going to move on to the actual last step, step five, which is you brag to all your friends about how fast you were able to graduate and they all think that you're a genius. Now I just wanted to state one more time, WGU is a phenomenal option for a lot of people out there, but it is not for everybody, right? There are some downsides to going to WGU. I'm just going to straight up say it. One of the downsides is if you are planning on going to a master's program or getting a doctorate, you end up getting a 3.0 GPA from WGU. Now some colleges know the WGU model and they don't care, they'll accept you anyways, but some colleges might look down on you for having a lower level GPA. Another downside is that it is completely remote. A lot of people end up losing motivation because they don't have somebody breathing down their neck telling them to get assignments done. It's remote and it's flexible so you can get assignments done whenever you want. So you have to have that self-discipline, right? So I highly recommend you check out this video right here where I talk about the pros and cons of WGU and I'll see you there.