How To Graduate College In 3 years And Make It Look Easy
Do you know anyone who has graduated college in 3 years? Most likely you don’t, but you probably know folks who have graduated in 6. The difference is not merely intelligence or industriousness, but also approach. Most people don’t even contemplate graduating college in 3 years because they believe it will be difficult. If properly approached, it can be quite easy–and can give you a dramatic advantage in your career.
To employers, the time it took you to acquire your degree is a clear differentiator between an achiever and an overachiever, yet the benefits go beyond this:
You can save a full year of work and tuition
It frees up a full year to do whatever you want. If you want to stay in college for 4 years, you have the opportunity to do far more: begin grad school, earn a 2nd major, spend a year abroad, start a startup, start your career.
What Does It Take?
Graduating in 3 years requires a couple key things:
A good plan
The ability to stick to that plan
Planning is the easy part, and you should really just see it as a game. We got 70 students to plan out completing their undergraduate degree at MIT in 3 years, they all managed to build plans that did not require them to overload on classes. So now they all know how they could graduate even MIT in 3 years without burning out while doing it.
Here are the steps to develop your own plan:
Establish your dream college, and which course (or major) you want to take there
Identify all of the requirements to graduate
Find how you can acquire those requirements without taking classes during the semester–this includes:
Testing out of classes
Getting Advanced Placement (AP) or IB credit
Taking some local college classes in high school to transfer those credits
Acquiring credits with internships
Taking classes which count for two requirements (“double-dipping”)
If necessary, petitioning your course admin to test out of key prerequisites ( Erik did this at MIT by speaking competent Chinese to the East Asian Studies course admin and Chinese language teacher, allowing him to pick up a minor with only two classes beyond what he was already taking in Political Science)
It seems like an obviously good idea even if you are not inspired to graduate in 3 years, but the amount of students that never plan out their college degree surprises me each year. There’s a ton of resources online (Michael Gongwer, How I graduated in 3 years & College Raport, what you need to do to graduate in 3 years are some good videos) and with a good plan, your chance of both succeeding in college and also enjoying it are significantly higher. You will depend less on grit and late nights to graduate.
Now you have a plan in place, the difficult part for many is sticking to that plan. That’s because this requires skills that school never directly taught you. While 90% of students enter college saying they’ll graduate within 4 years, colleges promise that only 45% of them will. Further data shows that less than 66% of students manage to finish within 6 years (Education Department Report). These students certainly fail to plan, but they also lack the critical thinking, adaptability, grit, industriousness, etc, necessary to win (rather than fail or quit) when the going gets tough. I’ve seen many students make a habit of dropping classes when they are struggling, and this becomes a runaway train.
Walden University outlines the students who are the high-achievers often have a few things in common:
Higher levels of Grit
They value practice and learning more than demonstrating that they already know everything
Their self-management and industriousness are better (they’re better at sticking with a plan)
Those who develop these skills have a far better chance of graduating in 4–or even 3–years.
How To Develop These Skills
You’ll need to do your work to acquire these skills. High school will not teach them to you by default.
Start by reading and learning the fundamentals, resources on grit and planning in particular are going to help you here:
How to manage your emotions - if you master controlling this, sticking to a plan when impulses to slack arise will be easier
Then get practice developing these skills, with strong peers and feedback. At our own Skills for Success Course, you begin to understand your current strengths in these skills and attributes such as grit and self-management. Students then get coaching and feedback developing them, and a plan to keep improving.
For many prospective students, graduating in 3 years has never been heard of. After reading this, my hope is that you see it’s achievable and potentially quite easy. With the right plan and skill development in place, you earn time, money and proof that you have the skills employers want.
