"A college degree is a social certificate, not a proof of competence" - Elbert Hubbard, 1911More kvetching here
A "DIY Degree" is as much of a non-thing as it is a thing. The spirit and intent of a DIY Degree is that you'll learn at least as much as the average student in the field simply by doing the work.
At first, this seems like a daunting task: after all, don't college kids study for years to become experts? How can one obtain for free what costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars? Why isn't everyone doing this instead?
This page hopes to help explain these questions, problems, ideas, and solutions.
For some inspiration, check out "The MIT Challenge", where Scotty speedruns an MIT Computer Science degree in under a year.
There's also what I might refer to as "The Harvard Challenge".
In the early part of the 20th century Harvard University President Dr. Charles W. Eliot is quoted for often saying ‘anyone can get all the elements of a liberal education by reading for 15 minutes a day for one year from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot bookshelf.’ The professor was challenged to create that five-foot bookshelf that could be put into the homes of everyday people so that anyone could turn themselves into a well-read cultivated scholar with minimal time and resources. He accepted that challenge and The Harvard Classics were born.
Note that both of them indicate a timeline of one year, not four. These people are not out to milk you for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's important to note that what I'm NOT saying is that you can become an expert in a year. First of all, expert is in sarcastic quotes above, as college grads are by no means considered experts in much of anything. Now that everyone has a degree, nobody is impressed by it. So now you'll need two degrees to convince everyone you're smart and worthy of a place in society. (Edit: perhaps their value has declined so much that you'll need three) Instead, this highlights the incompleteness of a college education; or, conversely, that you can get a basic grasp of the world (plus your favorite subject), all on your own in as little as a year.
Once upon a time, higher education was essentially only available to upper classes. Today in The United States, however, it's available to anyone who can afford it. This commodification of higher education has resulted in degree inflation which only serves to reinforce inequalities by essentially selling "tickets" to A Good Job (and thus, a Good Life).
Put another way, even basic jobs require a degree, which means that even basic employment is only available to those families privileged enough to afford college and other things in the first place. This, we DIY-ers assert, is bullshit. (we're not alone)
unless you need Daddy's friend to get you a job
At Harvard, students caught plagarizing are kicked out of the kingdom for a year and forced to work with the peasants at a real job for a year before begging on their knees to return to their privileged lifestyle. I suggest you do the same - working a Real Job - though looking at it as an opportunity to learn about the world and help your fellow humans, rather than treating it as a punishment.
A classic joke begins with a graduate student applying for a summer job as a barista. The manager looks at the Education section of their CV and frowns.
"I'm afraid you're underqualified for this position." says the manager.
"Underqualified?! I have two degrees in English Literature and Early Childhood Gender Studies!" replies the student indignantly.
To which the manager replies: "Yes, but all of our other baristas have PhDs!"
Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they never get it wrong.
Instead of asking our alumni for donations, we ask you to keep learning. If you can grasp the fundamentals of the Liberal Arts in a concentrated year of study, imagine what you could do in two years. Or, perhaps you take a more relaxed route and finish in two years. Imagine where you'll be after four years of earnest inquiry.
It's important to account for what you're missing by not attending a brick-and-mortar campus in-person, so don't forget to have a few beers with some friends from time to time. Smoke weed (but not too much), give a guy $50 for a wet napkin in a plastic baggie that he promised was the purest of cocaine. Every six months or so, invest $20k (or throw it in a hole, idc).
While many University students love to repeat the claim that they're learning how to learn, in the classroom their mantra is closer to just tell us what we need to know for the test. I emphatically and uncritically believe Harvard President Dr. Charles W. Eliot that reading for 15 minutes a day provides more education than
The assignment above was posted to a freelance site, presumably by a student who couldn't be bothered to follow the outline in front of them or google how to set up roundcube and follow any of the tutorials on the web. Furthermore, the professor's outline isn't even production-ready, as it violates a number of best practices for the sake of being a simple educational exercise.
You don't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars working your way to a 300-level course to learn how to set up a half-assed email server. There are literally thousands of tutorials out there, and spending an evening (or maybe a weekend) scratching your head while following them will teach you quite a bit. Will you be an expert on the ins and outs of running an email server after this exercise? Of course not. But you'll be miles ahead of this chump.
The credit system used translates to only 40-60 "actual" hours per 3-credit course, which is like 1-1.5 weeks of full-time work spaced out out over several weeks. One of the tricks of a DIY Degree is that you must keep at it (though binge-watching documentaries is occasionally allowed). There's no shortcut, no weekend bootcamp, no way to pay to get it over with. You must simply do the work.
First, you need to know what job(s) you'd like to do, and a good way to do that is to think about which problem(s) you want to (help) solve in the world (and cross-checking salary charts).
Unfortunately, if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or financial advisor, you'll need a degree because those occupations don't want to count poors among their ranks.
Then, figure out what degrees are usually required (if any), and use that to create your Program of Study (next step). If no degree is required, but you're here anyway, browse some interesting degrees to come up with your own mix of 120-150 credits of courses.
From here, the basic process looks like this:
The goal is to compile a list of individual topics and tasks that programs require: books to read, videos to watch, topics to cover, names and dates to know, etc, etc. This will serve as your guide and outline during the process.
It should be more like a concept map, learning pathway, or skill tree than a checklist that's set in stone. The purpose of this guide is to illuminate the areas that you don't know that you don't know and remove the "fog" so you can clearly see the "terrain" and "paths" around you. You'll find out later that you'll need to cover other things, too, and others not at all, but for now, when in doubt, add it to the list.
In fact, consider that your first homework assignment: gather a list of textbooks and a 10,000' outline of the topics that your three favorite colleges would require you to read for three degree programs you might like to complete.
The next step is to find the books and read them, cover to cover. Google things you don't understand. Add interesting topics to your personal syllabus. Remove topics that you discover aren't so relevant, or replace them with whatever the current theory/process/method is. (Some classes won't even read the whole book - they'll skip chapters for various reasons, but you'll read it all, and you'll be better off for it.)
Most basic courses follow the same rough outline, so it's pretty easy to find a few "Intro to Psychology" (or whatever subject) practice quizzes online, or a used copy of the textbook. They're free to fail, and you can fail at them as many times as you need to before you decide you're comfortable with the subject or realize maybe it's not your thing. Fail fast and fail often. Rinse and repeat, and feel yourself moving forward on that road each time you finish one.
Concurrent with reading is taking notes. I rarely took notes in class because I'd already done the reading and mostly understood it. But I take notes at home, because that's when I find it hard to keep track of similar or confusing ideas. Don't waste your time re-writing these textbooks - take notes of things you don't understand, of the questions and ideas you have while reading. You can put them into separate notebooks like the college kids do, or you can buy a really nice, thick notebook and use it like a commonplace book. Or simply pick up a few packs of index cards and roll your own zettelkasten.
The lines between subjects can be quite blurry in Real Life, with most things requiring a holistic or interdisciplinary approach, so it's really only useful to keep separate notes if you have separate exams, or if you're studying multiple fields. (Zettelkasten really excels here).
The only exam in the DIY Degree process is not embarrassing yourself in real life. The key here is to achieve a well-rounded, holistic understanding of how the world works, especially where it concerns the things you want to do in this world.
A critical step in this process is to, at some point, sit down with your notes and google your questions and keep doing it until you understand. Read the forum posts, read the Q&A sites, read the shitty explainer sites like this one, read the academic journal articles (if they exist), watch the Khan Academy video(s) and try to find a YouTube video or two that doesn't suck. No TikTok. Make more notes. Add your answers to your questions. Add your new questions that you just thought of. Rinse, repeat, continue.
