The traditional bachelor’s degree takes at least four years to complete. But some accelerated college programs let you complete an entire bachelor’s degree in far less time—sometimes under a year—depending on what you study and how aggressively you complete courses.

An online degree is usually more convenient than an on-campus degree, but an accelerated program can drastically reduce the cost of your degree—both in tuition and time. There are several main ways schools can cut down on the time it takes to finish your degree. They can:

Offer credits for life experiences, such as your employment history or volunteer work

Allow you to “test out” of certain classes

Let you complete courses at your own pace

If you’re looking into fast degree programs, you’re also bound to hear about “degree completion programs” or schools that accept the most transfer credits. We can tell you about those, too, but we’re not going to lie to you: degree completion programs aren’t faster. It just means you did all your work somewhere else. It’s like some colleges are saying, “You get to start this marathon at the halfway point, so you’ll finish faster.” But they’re only letting you do that because you already ran the first half somewhere else.

We’re going to assume you have zero transfer credits so that we’re only looking at programs that are actually faster. But we’ll still let you know if a school accepts credits from other schools, and how much of your degree can be transferred.

10 schools with accelerated online programs

The schools on this list provide genuinely faster degree programs—because of the factors we listed above. Obviously, there are a lot of variables that can affect how fast you finish, but the schools you’ll see her