I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

Living expenses is a flexible item. You learn to keep your living expenses down.

As a full time working adult, WGU was _amazing_ for getting a degree, at my own pace. Which was a lot faster than a standard brick and mortar school. You can see the course catalog here [0]. My work paid tuition for my degree, but they had an upper limit on reimbursement. WGU was what I found that they approved, and came in under cost (I didn't want to pay out of pocket).

I really do recommend WGU for experienced professionals, and self-guided and motivated learners. I would not suggest it for a brand new high schooler, or people who have no experience in the industry they're trying to get a degree in.

[0]https://www.wgu.edu/about/institutional-catalog.html

Here in the US we also take a good hard look at bootcamp graduates. Code school/bootcamp graduates I’ve found to be good enough to do most of the mundane web work broiler-plate we have to write. It gives them experience, it give us that broiler-plate code no one wants to write.

Bootcamp’s here like Turing or Galvanize cost $20k and take 4-6mos but you’ll get an entry level Dev job at $75k or more when you’re done. It’s been a really good experience. Some have been really good programmers, others not so much. Same could be said of any demographic. There’s performers and under performers.

I agree that this is a much better title. I actually also attended WGU during the pandemic and got a degree over the course of 6 months for about the same amount of money as the author. I came in with 42 transfer credits, so I completed 90 credits at WGU to complete my degree.

The degree took me 6 months for about the same number of classes as the author. So I was going about half the speed of the author of this post, yet my speed was still astonishingly fast for my mentor. While you will read about people flying through the program, the norm is to take about 2.5 years.

When I first started the program I always joked that I was simply buying a $3,500 paper (the rough cost for one 6-month term). I looked at it as a degree-mill. I had accepted it for what it was. But after going through everything and graduating, I was wrong about that initial assessment. I am actually far more proud of the work I did at WGU than what I did at my official 4-year university back in my mid-20s. I also walked away feeling like I learned more at WGU than at my previous university.

Yes, some of the courses are very easy. I was able to coast through them in a day, relying entirely on my previous experience. But this is the same as any other college, there are always 10-20% of the courses that are easy, and you basically just need to show up. The difference is that a normal university would require you to go through the motions for 16 weeks before you can complete the class that you could have passed on day #1. WGU simply lets you take the final exam whenever you want, allowing you to control the timeframe.

While I flew about 20% of the classes quickly in less than 48 hours after starting them, the rest took me an average of about a week of full-time work. I was usually juggling two classes at a time.

A standard 3 credit college course is supposed to take around 20 hours of in-class time with about equal amounts of studying time at home. So a normal 3 credit class generally takes about 40 hours of work to pass. But it is spread across 16 weeks and you also juggle 4-6 other courses. At WGU you take 1-2 at a time and go full bore until you are done with the course. I find that I was still averaging about 40 hours per course on average, but since I could do it all at once I went through it faster. I also found that i retained the knowledge a lot better.

Funny enough, my breakdown is very similar to the author. I would say I didn't even look at the material for about 1/5 of the courses. I skimmed through the material while watching cherry picked lectures for 3/5 of the courses. The final 1/5 of courses I read the text book cover to cover.

Basically what I am getting at is that WGU isn't just a "buy an online degree" program. You really need to work for it. I was working full-time on school. Generally 8-10 hours a day during the week and 3-5 hours a day on the weekend. The tests were generally very difficult. Even courses where I had a lot of experience, I really had to slow down for the final assessments. Passing a course requires you to pass two tests. They call them a "pre-assessement" and an "objective assessment". This is essentially a mid-term and a final-exam from any other school. That is generally the only requirement. So as soon as you pass the "mid-term" they will let you take the "final exam", and once you pass that then you are done with the course. You can choose how to spend your time to prepare for these tests. You can spend zero hours or 100 hours on the course. There are lectures (they call them "cohorts"), text books, study guides, practice tests, homework problems, and flash cards provided for each course. You can choose what you want to use and what you don't want to use. You can also look at a course syllabus and recognize which parts you already know and which parts you need to study and then only spend your time on those parts. You go at your pace and you are in charge. Nothing else is required. For this reason you really need to have good time management and self control.

Overall I am really proud of my WGU Degree. It wasn't easy. I struggled on several classes, but I also walked away learning far more than I expected.

Its also worth noting that at the speed I went, it was exhausting. I really don't recommend it. It is clearly possible, but by the end I was burnt out. I hit full burn out when I had 4 courses left. I really struggled through the final few classes because I had simply gone so fast and so hard for too long. Unless you really need it, I don't recommend cramming this into a single term even if its technically possible.

This math doesn't check out. $240k for three years is $80k/year. Assuming you are already factoring interest in. So you and your wife lived off less than $20k a year? Where?