What Are You Paying for When You Go to College?

If you take all the required courses in a typical bachelor’s degree program, you aren’t just paying for the material you learn. You aren’t even paying for the books (those cost extra). Here’s what you are paying for:

Sports stadiums, recreation centers, climbing walls, plasma televisions, resort-style pools, bubble baths… Wait, bubble baths?

Yep, that’s right. It was all documented in an original film, Ivory Tower, produced by CNN. CNN has investigated the problems within America’s college system—especially the soaring costs—and their documentary shows you exactly why the typical college experience is so expensive. (If you fast-forward to 13 minutes, 28 seconds, you’ll see this particular point illustrated.)

What about College Tuition at State Schools?

Even at the so-called “public” colleges, where an education is supposed to be accessible to everyone, college leaders are running their schools like businesses. They’re investing in crazy amenities, hiring more administrators, and taking home outrageous paychecks for themselves.

In fact, many public university presidents earn more than the President of the United States. Here are just a few examples:

• E. Gordon Gee, Ohio State University: $6,057,615
• R. Bowen Loftin, Texas A&M: $1,636,274
• Michael Adams, University of Georgia: $1,295,954
• Sally Mason, University of Iowa: $1,139,705

None of these things affect how much you will learn in college, or how prepared you will be to land a job after graduation. So why should you pay for them?

With Achieve’s credit-by-examination bridge program you don’t pay for all the college waste. Because instead of completing the traditional college course (two hours per week, two or three times per week, for four months straight), you simply take an exam (via CLEP, DSST, etc).

One exam.

It’s one exam that encompasses a summary of the material you would learn (or maybe already know) after countless trips to and from an expensive lecture hall. And if you pass, you get to skip that four-month-long class. You earn credit for it, just as if you’d been there all along. And you get to avoid it’s enormous tuition price tag, which could top $2,000 at certain schools.

How do you learn the material to pass the credit-earning exam?

That’s where Achieve test prep courses come into play. Achieve is an expert at getting students to pass these exams. In our opinion, is not hard, just a matter of knowing what will be on the exam. A test-prep course is not anything like a college course. They’re shorter, more efficient, and typically much less expensive than the equivalent full-length college course. While most students are successful at passing the exam on the first try, just in case they don’t, Achieve allows the student to access a variety of support services at no extra cost -- anything from free course retakes, to free refresher courses, to free one-on-one tutoring. Achieve really does work with, and support, the student until they are successful.

(Good luck getting this kind of offer after a failed college course.)

So what do you do with all these passed exams and potential earned credits?

Each exam you pass, and each series of credits earned, gets you one step closer to the accelerated degree.

Achieve helps you find an accredited college or university that will accept your exam credits. You still can choose which college you want to apply them toward if you like, or let Achieve save you the hassle of researching different schools’ transfer policies, and trying to guess which ones will accept the majority of your exam credits.

At the end of the day, of course you can’t test-out of all of your college courses. The courses in your major as well as some other critical general education courses will still need to be taken with a college, after all those courses are what form an important foundation to launch your new career from.

Got questions about accelerated degree programs and exam credit?

Of course you do! This is rapidly changing landscape for colleges and for college students. Every year more standardized exams are created, and every year more colleges are relaxing their transfer policies so that smart, ambitious students can take a shortcut through their programs.

If you want to know what kinds of majors (degrees) are attainable through credit-by-exam, accelerated degrees contact one of our educational counselors today!

Contact Achieve Test Prep today for more information or visit http://www.achievetestprep.com/bloggd.