 What's happening guys, it's Shane here and in this video we're going to be talking about how to shave two years off your college degree, aka how to get a bachelor's degree in half the time. Now most of the people on this channel are interested in getting bachelor degrees or four-year degrees, but this can also be applied to six-year like master's type degrees or doctorate degrees as well. And I used a lot of the principles that I'm going to be talking about in this video to get my doctoral degree in about five years and nine months instead of the usual eight years. But a lot of the stuff I'm going to talk about in this video I didn't even know existed back when I was trying to save time on my college degree, so you could do a lot better than that. Now saving the time that it takes to get your college degree down to two years instead of four not only is going to obviously save you money, but it's also going to save you time and even more importantly, probably the most important thing of all in my opinion, it's going to save you what's known as opportunity cost. And opportunity cost according to Google is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. And basically what that means in this situation is you can do other things with those two years of your time. So while your peers are still in school doing the last two years of their college work, you could be starting a business or getting your first two years of real life work experience. While they're paying money to go to college, you're going to be making money. And the way I'm doing this video, I'm going to start off with the ones that you can do at the earliest age, right? So the ones that you can start doing if you're still in high school, for instance, and then I'm going to move on to the ones that you can do in high school and college, and then I'm going to move on to the ones that you can only do while you're in college. And by the way, guys, I go in a lot more detail on exactly how to do this in my college one on one course. You can find that down in the description below. But starting off with the very first one on the list, this is one that pretty much everyone probably knows about. And that's going to be AP or IB classes. That's going to be advanced placement or international baccalaureate classes. These are basically advanced classes that you can take while you're still in high school, that if you score a certain amount on a test after taking these classes, you can actually have that as college credit before you even start college. Now, the way these classes work is you take them during high school. They're going to be a lot harder usually than a typical, you know, high school level class. Then after you've done that class for an entire semester, you get an option to take a test. And usually these tests are pretty difficult. They're scored from one to five in the case of AP classes. And depending on the college you go to and some other factors, if you score a three, some colleges will actually accept that as college credit. Some actually require you to score a four or in very rare cases, a five. Now, scoring a three, especially if you've actually paid attention and you study for it, probably isn't all that difficult. I'm sure everyone watching this is capable of that. But some colleges require four, some of them require five. That can be a lot harder. And on top of that, you have to go through an entire semester of class in order to even have the option to take these tests, which again, can be very difficult. That takes up a lot of your time. These classes are not easy. And in high school, you already have so many things pulling you in a million different direction. You've got sports, you've got extracurriculars, you've got class. A lot of people get a part-time job. So something taking up even more of your time, which you don't really have all that much time anyways, can be a drag. Still, this can be a good option, especially if you're taking a class that you wanted to take anyways. And I think this will kind of get you ready for the level of difficulty that you're going to come in contact with when you go to college. Because usually college is much more difficult than high school. At least that was my experience. I thought high school was not very hard at all. At least the high school I went to. Then when I went to college, it was way more difficult. Also, you have to pay $95 in order to take an AP exam. Sometimes it's up to 150 if you take it in a weird location. And on top of that, if you aren't able to score a three, a four, or five, whatever your college requires, and you fail it, you're going to have to wait to retake it. But if you are able to pay the 95 to $150, I think it's like $143 in some areas, then you will be able to test out of that college credit, which would probably save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Next one on the list is going to be taking college courses while you're still in high school. And there's several different ways that you can do this. And the way that you can do this is going to vary on a bunch of different factors, depending on what country you live in, what state you live in, the district you live in even. So basically the way this works is it's dual enrollment. You'll be taking high school classes and college classes at the same time. And sometimes you might have to seek this out on your own. I advise you asking your high school counselor or somebody in charge of your high school what your options are. But it's basically just dual enrollment. And sometimes they have a dedicated program for this. So for instance, in Washington, they have the running start program. And this is basically a program in this example where juniors and seniors in high school can take classes in college where they're getting their high school credit and their college credit at the same time, taking the same exact class. And they basically partner up with community colleges and they're able to get that credit while they're a junior and a senior. Now again, this is going to be different depending on the area you live in. This is just an example of Washington. But you could in theory earn four semesters worth of college credit while you're still in high school. So right there you would pretty much be saving yourself about two years of time before you even begin college. Now realistically, most students aren't going to go full time and earn those full four semesters worth, but saving yourself maybe a semester or two semesters, maybe even three is going to go a long ways. And on top of that, these classes are going to prepare you for the difficulty of college. And another thing is it's going to look very good on your transcript. So it's going to make it more likely that you get into your favorite college or the college of your dreams. So this is a fantastic option. A lot of people don't even do research on this stuff in time to take advantage of it. I was looking at the statistics with these different programs. And again, there's a lot of them, usually less than 10 or less than 5% of people in high schools even take advantage of them. So if you're like a freshman, a sophomore, even if you're a junior or senior in high school watching this, definitely check it out, see what your high school has to offer. See if you can take college classes while you're still there. If they don't offer anything themselves, keep doing research, don't give up, contact maybe a local community college, see if you can take classes while you're still in high school. Next one on the list is going to be graduating high school early. So this is another thing you can do. It's going to be pretty difficult to do it if you're like a junior or senior at this point. But if you start off right off the bat, like freshman, sophomore year, thinking about this stuff, it's relatively easy for you to graduate maybe a semester early or even a year early. So basically what you have to do here is, again, first step, talk to your high school counselor, figure out the exact classes you have to take and the exact order you need to take them in, right? So in some cases there might be, you have to take X class before you can take Y class and Y class before you can take Z class, right? So you want to make sure that you take X class as soon as possible. Sometimes your high school is going to offer maybe zero hour or even an extra hour at the end of the day where you can take extra classes there as well. Sometimes high schools will offer programs for especially gifted students where you can basically skip certain classes or test out of them. So if you're like a future Elon Musk watching this, first of all, send me some Bitcoin when you get rich, please. I don't know, I mean, like, I mean, I was a... Second of all, you can test out a lot of these classes and sometimes in extreme cases, you can even, you know, start taking college classes when you're like 12 years old. I don't think that's going to apply to like 99.999% of the audience, but I thought I'd throw that out there. I did have a professor when I was going to pharmacy school who was one of these like genius kids, these gifted kids, and he actually got his doctorate in pharmacy when I think he was like 18 or 19 years old because he basically like graduated high school, I think 12 or 13, started college and was able to do like an accelerated route. And then he, you know, became a doctor when he was like 18, 19. That is a super extreme example though, probably not realistic for most people. Even if you are that smart, you have to have parents that kind of like seek that sort of thing out and really go above and beyond to try to get you into these programs. Sometimes the programs don't even exist and you have to kind of like lobby them to create them or like go to a different school district that does have one. So even if you are a genius, chances are you're not going to be able to take advantage of this, but in rare cases you might be able to. Next one on the list, number four is going to be taking CLEP courses during high school or college. So CLEP stands for college level examination program. This is a great way for you to test out of certain classes that you think you already have the required knowledge for. So the website for this, I'm just going to straight up read it off. CLEP.collegeboard.org slash CLEP exams. Each exam costs $89 at least at the time of recording this video for you to take. Many, many colleges, I'd say most colleges accept CLEP exams as credit, but that is something that you need to check with your college on just to make sure you're not wasting your time. Now you might be thinking these sound exactly like AP classes or IB classes, and actually they are similar in some ways because you do have to take the exam and you have to pass it, but in my opinion they are much easier. First of all, you only have to get about 50% on the exam in order to pass. You don't have to take a semester of your time to take a super hard class and pass that class first and then have the option to take the exam, which you might have to score a three, a four, or a five on. You can just simply take the exam, score 50% on it, and you're good to go. At the time of recording this video, according to their website, they offer 34 different exams right now, and many of these exams are the ones that would be like your entry-level classes that you'd have to take in college, so your 101 courses. And getting 50% on these exams usually isn't as hard in my opinion than scoring like a passing score on an AP exam. The website also offers study guides for you and practice tests as well, so that's gonna help you quite a bit in scoring that 50%. And if you do fail the test, you can always just retake it three months later. Now, I personally know people who have taken these tests without studying at all and have passed them. Probably don't recommend doing that. Some of them are gonna be harder than others, so you probably wanna study for them and make sure that you're gonna pass it, but I'm just giving you some examples to show you that they're not all that hard. And if you don't pass that test, it doesn't stop you from taking a different test right after that. But you do have to wait those three months. Now, I'm not saying that you should do this, but what you could do is basically take a new test every week. And if you pass it, great. If you don't pass it, you know you're gonna have to put a little more time into that one and study harder for it. And the great thing about CLEP exams is you can actually take them during high school and college. So these are super flexible. You can basically take them any time. These are probably out of all the options on this list. It's the easiest one for anybody to do. A lot of the other options, it kinda depends on where you live, like if they offer kind of a running start program in that area, for instance. But CLEP exams are a lot more open and flexible. Now, next one on the list is one that I think a lot of people know about, but they don't really understand how to go about doing it. And that is taking extra classes while you're in college and also structuring your classes in a certain way. So first of all, when you're in college, some colleges operate on what's known as the block system. Others operate on what's known as the credit system. Some colleges are going to stop you from taking a certain amount of credits, right? So they're gonna say, you can only take this many credits. Other colleges, if you go and talk to the counselor, explain your circumstances, sometimes they'll let you take more credits. Some of them don't really care, they'll let you take as many credits as you want. So basically what you can do here is during the semester itself, you can take extra credits. A lot of the time colleges are gonna want you to take about, on average, 15 credits per semester. And then if you take that out over eight semesters, that's gonna be about as much as you're going to need in order to graduate in four years. But if you were to take, like let's say an extra three credits per semester, if you take that over eight, eight times three, that's 24, you're basically taking out a semester, which is 15, plus almost another semester, which would be 30 total. And then if you just take an extra three credits during summer break, for instance, for two years, that would equal 30, and that would save you an entire year. Now I've seen people take this through the extreme, people who are super hardworking or super smart, they can take like 21 credits per semester. For me, that's, no, no, no, that's crazy. That I would definitely not do that. The most I ever took personally during undergrad was 20, and for me, that was way too much. Now, just stating the obvious here, not all colleges work on the semester system. Some of them work on kind of like a trimester system. Some of them work on like a quadmaster type system. On top of that, some colleges are much more friendly for people to try to kind of excel and get ahead and do a lot more work. Whereas some of them are basically gonna make you do things in a certain way, just like everyone else. So that's obviously something that is worth checking and evaluating when you're choosing what college you wanna go to. Also, what I'm gonna say is a lot of people probably want to enjoy their college experience. Can be a little bit difficult right now because most of college classes are online right now. So you're not really getting that college experience. Hopefully we can get back to normal pretty soon. But there is something to be said for having that college experience and loading yourself up with a ridiculous amount of credits is going to be stressful. It's gonna take up a lot of your time. So it might not be the best choice for everyone. But if you do want to do this, what you wanna do is first of all, figure out the exact course map of the classes that you have to take in order to graduate with a degree. And in order to do that, you have to figure out what degree you want to graduate with, which is another thing that's very difficult. A lot of people end up changing their major. But luckily, the way it works is most colleges, the first one and a half to two years or so, you're mostly gonna be taking prerequisite classes. And usually, these prerequisite classes will transfer over depending on what major you're going into. These are basically just general classes that are kind of like surface level 101 type classes where you're kind of just sampling a bunch of different subjects. But once you've decided what major, what degree you're going for and you know exactly what classes you have to take, the next thing you wanna do is talk to a college counselor and figure out what classes you have to take in order to take the next class. So this is another one of those things where sometimes you have to take X class before you take Y class and Y class before you take Z class. So you have to be very smart, very strategic about the order in which you take those classes. And sometimes what makes it even more difficult is there might be a certain class that's only offered during spring semester or fall semester. And so these are all things you need to figure out because if you have to take X class before Y class, but it's not offered that semester, then that's gonna mess everything up. So you really would just wanna take out an Excel sheet and write down all of these classes by the semester and figure out what order you need to take them in. And what makes this a lot easier is talking to your college counselor. Now I have to say some college counselors are more helpful than others. A lot of college counselors are not going to like you trying to take extra classes. So sometimes you have to kind of take their opinion with a grain of salt, but hopefully you find one that does actually want to help you. I have personally had college counselors tell me information that's completely false. Some of the people that I coach, some of the people that have taken my course, for instance, have also had college counselors tell them information that's false. I don't think they're trying to lie to them. It's just that they haven't really looked into it or they don't really get educated by the college itself because let's be honest, people graduating early means the college is going to make less money. And so they're kind of incentivized in many cases to not help people graduate early. Not all of them, but in many cases, I think that's true. So taken to an extreme here, if you use just this method alone and you took like 21 credits per semester and then you also took summer classes, you could realistically graduate in somewhere between two to two and a half years, just doing that on its own, right? So just doing some basic math here, 15 credits per semester, you're doing eight semesters. That's 120 total credits for you to graduate with your degree. Again, sometimes it's going to be a little bit different than that. So if you were to take 21 credits for five semesters, that would be 105 total credits. And then let's say you started the summer before college, you took your first college class then and then you took another one after your first year and another one after your second year. And let's say you took a five credit class each time, that would be 15 total credits. So there you go, that would be 120 credits. Now that is kind of an extreme example, like I said, but it is possible for you to do. I realized making this video, it's already running a little bit long in my opinion, but there's a lot to be said for all of these. I'm basically just sampling these a little bit. I go into much more detail in my course, for instance, and maybe I'll make a video on each of these individually. If you guys want that in the future, let me know down in the comments below. But yeah, the next one on the list is going to be dual enrollment while you're in college. So the most common way of doing this is you take online classes at a different college while you're attending a certain university, right? So you're attending X university and you're taking online classes from Y university. Now this is very tricky because you have to make sure that X university accepts the credits from Y university. But generally speaking, the reason that people do this, and I'm just gonna be very frank here, is because they're taking a class that they don't necessarily like, or they're taking a class that's kind of like a little bit difficult to them. And so these online classes are, they kind of tend to be easier. So for instance, you might be at a university but take an online class from a community college. Community college does tend to be a little bit easier. On top of that, taking a class from another university is likely going to be less expensive as well. So if you're somebody who, you know, you can't take like 21 credits at a university because that's too difficult for you. Even 18 credits can be a lot. This might be a very good option for you because you could take, let's say 15 credits and then a very easy online class on the side. And this online class tends to be a little bit more flexible as well. So you can kind of, you know, just do the assignments anytime you have the time. Whereas if you're taking classes in person, for instance, or even online, but at a brick and mortar university, a lot of the time you have to, you know, be in a certain place at a certain time. So it's not nearly as flexible as some of these online classes that are offered. Another reason why this might be a good option is like I said before, sometimes you have to take X class before Y class and Y class before Z class, but if your college isn't offering X class at that time, or if they are offering that class, but for some reason you really don't like the professor, like they have a lot of bad ratings online or something along those lines, then you can take that class at a different community college, get the credit for it, and then transfer that credit in to your college so that you can then take, you know, Y class the next semester after that. Again, a lot to be said about this one. I definitely have just touching the surface on this. There's a lot that I haven't said because I don't want this video to be an hour and a half, but the next one on the list is going to be an accelerated program. And by the way, this is the last one on the list that I'm gonna be talking about. At the very end of the video, I'm gonna give several examples, both personal examples, as well as examples from people that I've known. And these examples are going to show you how powerful this can be, how you can save a ridiculous amount of time and money and opportunity costs on college. So there's two different examples of this. So for instance, in the pharmacy world, for instance, most people who become PharmDs, get their doctorate of pharmacy degrees, are going to get a four-year bachelor level degree. Sometimes it's even gonna take longer than four years. And then they're going to go to pharmacy school, which typically takes four years as well. But what a lot of people don't know is there are programs out there where you can go, for instance, straight in from high school into a program that takes about six years in order to complete your PharmD degree. So that's kind of like a second option that a lot of people don't know about, but you can actually take that one step further in that a lot of pharmacy schools, and most people had no idea that this was the way that it was. When I went to my pharmacy school, for instance, people didn't even know that was possible. They didn't even realize that it was an option. And that is that you can do what's known as the pharmacy school track, just take those classes that are required, and then many pharmacy schools out there will let you enter without having a bachelor level degree. So that's exactly what I did. I just took the first two to three years, generally it takes about two to three years' worth of classes while I was in college. And then what I did on top of that is I transferred specifically to a pharmacy school that had an accelerated program. So I did three years of undergrad instead of four. And to be honest with you, I could have done it in two years. I was very close to being able to do it in two years, but I didn't plan ahead quite enough, and some things happened, and so unfortunately I had to do it in three. But after I did that, I then transferred to a pharmacy school that takes about two years and nine months instead of four years. So it was an accelerated program. Now this accelerated program was very difficult, right? So you still do the four years' worth of work, you just do it in two years and nine months. So it was extremely difficult, at least for me, some geniuses in the class where it was really easy, but for me very hard. But with that being said, I saved myself almost a year and a half worth of time there. And so total it took me five years and nine months in order to get my PharmD degree. And I was able to graduate with a doctorate as a pharmacist at 24 years old. Now if you think that's impressive, there was a girl that was in the class above me that used a combination of all of these things that I've talked about. Her mom was like a genius or something and like knew about all this stuff and really helped her out. And she used a combination of basically every single thing that I talked about on this list. And she was able to graduate with her doctorate at 21 years old. So I don't know the exact specific details, but basically from what she told me, first of all, she graduated high school early. So she was able to graduate at 17 years old. On top of that, she took classes while she was still in high school that counted as college credit. So she only had to go to undergrad for about one year. So she's 18 years old when she gets into pharmacy school. She gets into pharmacy school and then it's two years and nine months. So by the time she graduated, she was 21 years old with a doctorate in pharmacy. Super impressive. Again, that's kind of an outlier type case. Most people aren't gonna have the opportunity or the ability to do that. But if you're somebody who's watching this video, maybe you're 14, 15, 16 years old, this is something that realistically you could do if you really plan ahead. But this is why I always emphasize so much that you really have to plan ahead. You have to figure things out. Don't just assume, for instance, like so many people did, that you have to have a bachelor degree before you go to pharmacy school. A lot of pharmacy schools do require a bachelor degree, but many of them don't. And this is a very specific example of a specific career track, but you could apply this to so many different things. So I think this video has gone on long enough. I'm gonna end the video right here, but yeah, check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you. Go ahead, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell, and comment down below any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera, that you have on the video. And I'll see you guys next time.