“More than 1 in 4 [students at University of Maine at Presque Isle’s online MyPace program] finished their entire degree course load in a single eight-week session, half the length of a traditional academic semester.” — The Washington Post
- – -Thanks to the hassle of reading, writing, doing equations, performing lab experiments, speaking to professors and peers, comprehending topics, growing as a person, and, in general, learning, going to college is extremely time-consuming. That’s why our university offers an online degree program, during which you will not need to read, write, do equations, perform experiments, speak to anyone, comprehend topics, grow, or learn.
You could have completed your first semester instead of reading that paragraph.
You see, it takes a while to read sentences. It probably took you a second or two just to read that last nine-word sentence. But by the time we get to the end of this paragraph, you could have completed Intro to Microeconomics, Writing for College and the Real World, Bio 101, and Visual Design in Digital Spaces. Bet you feel a little silly that you just spent six seconds reading the titles of those courses and thinking about them when you could have instead finished sophomore year.
It appears that over centuries of building the modern university system, they never stopped to consider how inefficient learning itself is. It takes a solid amount of time for the human brain to absorb new knowledge, which is covered in the Advanced Neurobiology course you could have aced instead of reading this sentence. But with the modern tools at your fingertips, you can bypass knowledge absorption altogether by having AI complete all the pesky essays and exams our online degree program must still require to keep our accreditation.
The US education system is completely unfair, as evidenced not only by influencers encouraging people to degree-maxx but also by our Inequality in Education class (which will take your AI agent eight seconds to complete). The US ties funding for elementary and secondary education to housing taxes, supplemented by wealthy boosters, ensuring that high-income families attend rich public schools and lower-income families attend underfunded schools. We’ve also chronically underfunded higher education, resulting in skyrocketing costs, while doing little to subsidize those costs for students, even the most underprivileged. In the time it took you to read those sentences, you could have gotten A’s in Econometrics and Advanced Data Analytics too. Those courses explain that, rather than working together to solve these social problems, it makes more (financial) sense for colleges to offer a cheaper option—still out of reach for those with the least money, of course, but at least accessible for the shrinking group with a medium amount.
If you do it fast enough, our online degree program will cost you 10 percent of the sticker price of the “real” degree being earned by the fat cats attending the physical university. And because you won’t have to bother learning, you’ll never question the fairness of letting some students have a genuine education of gradually grappling with ideas for four years, while funneling others onto the assembly line of a degree factory where they learn how to plug test questions into a chatbot as fast as possible so they can more quickly get into a real factory, which, in this economy, somehow requires a master’s degree for an entry-level position.
But don’t worry: If the factory job doesn’t work out, our superfast online degree ensures you’ll have a backup option in one of the fastest-growing industries: as a YouTube influencer explaining how to get a superfast online degree. With the fees you’ll collect as a personal mentor to fellow degree-hackers, you’ll save up enough to pay for your second PhD in no time.
That’s right, your second PhD. In the time you wasted reading that last paragraph, you could have picked up your first.