A UC Davis degree in three years or even two?

Would you like to earn a UC Davis degree in three years or even two?  If you craft your own education plan like the new three year degree offered by Wesleyan University, you might just have a shot.

The trick isn’t taking a double course load according to Kai Ryssdal’s interview with Wesleyan President Michael Roth on the NPR show Marketplace:

Roth: No, we don’t actually have to double up on courses at all. If a student enters with two AP credits and does some work in the summertime, students won’t have to take an overload at all during their three years at Wesleyan.

Ryssdal: But they’ll have to do a little bit extra, right?

Roth: Well the summer work is extra, and not everybody has APs upon coming in. But if they do the intensive summer sessions and have some AP credit, they could actually just take the, in our case, four courses a semester. Many of our students already take five courses a semester from time to time, and they’d be free to do that too.

Go over to the Marketplace site to hear the whole story.

If you think earning a UC Davis degree in three years in impressive, how about earning your degree in two? Check out There’s No  Speed Limit. (The lessons that changed my life.) Derek Sivers writes how a random encounter with a great teacher named Kimo allowed him to earn his degree in two and a half years:

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging requirements.

When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those six semesters of required classes.

Then, as he suggested, I bought the course materials for other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework on my own time, then went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for the course.

Doing this in addition to my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years – (got my bachelor’s degree when I was 20) – squeezing every bit of education out of that place that I could.

But the permanent effect was this:

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to ALL of life – not just school.

Your UC Davis education is what you make of it.  We dare you to do better.