An increasingly popular way to earn college credits doesn’t involve college.
Online learning platforms are offering a wide range of courses that are typically cheaper and faster than traditional college classes — giving students a head start toward an undergraduate degree, a Washington Post analysis found. Some of the courses can be completed in a matter of hours, while others typically take weeks.
The platforms aren’t schools, but more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities have agreed to give students credit for taking the companies’ classes, following recommendations from an influential advocacy group, the American Council on Education.
That has helped some students complete a degree that normally takes at least four years in as little as a few months. Other students say they have shaved months or years off the journey to their degrees, potentially saving them thousands of dollars in tuition.
Two of the most popular platforms, Sophia Learning and Study.com, let students take as many courses as they want at their own pace for less than $100 a month, a fraction of the average cost charged by most colleges. (Study.com charges a higher rate for access to advanced courses.)
Some advocates say the online platforms provide a key path for nontraditional students to earn a degree, especially people who are juggling work or family responsibilities and can’t afford to spend four years or more in a traditional college program.
“People are looking for convenient and shorter-term options,” said Beth Doyle of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, a nonprofit group that supports adults seeking education and job skills. “Lowering the cost of a degree is obviously very pressing to a lot of folks.”
But critics worry the platforms make it too easy for students to fly through coursework without actually learning the material. There are no class meetings. No required lectures. No discussion groups.
“It’s hollowing out what makes a degree valuable,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which represents about 800 accredited schools.
In some cases, students can complete a course in less than a day by answering multiple-choice, open-book tests.
In one extreme example, a content creator filmed himself completing a Sophia Learning one-credit management class in around 30 minutes. Another student raved on Sophia’s website last month: “Easy class, you can finish this in an hour.”
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Many other courses take days or weeks, especially those that require papers or other written assignments that need to be graded. But even those courses are typically much shorter than a traditional semester-long college class.
Study.com advertises that students who study several hours a day typically complete classes in two to seven days. Sophia says students take 24 days, on average, to complete a class, although some go much faster.
The Post spoke with several students who said they finished many of the classes they needed for a bachelor’s degree within a few months through the platforms. One person finished 16 classes in 22 days.
Instead of focusing on how fast some adults earn degrees with help from online platforms, Elaine Kincel, a Sophia spokeswoman, said she wishes there was a focus on a different question: Why are so many adults seeking faster and cheaper alternatives to finish their college degrees?
“The traditional system, for all its strengths, does not work for many people who deserve a chance,” Kincel said.
Study.com did not respond to interview requests.
Some of the platforms have grown significantly in recent years, attracting tens of thousands of new students by offering speed, low cost and convenience.
Sophia Learning’s parent company reported the average number of users in the first quarter of 2026 grew 40 percent from the same period in 2025. And over the past four years, Sophia has signed up 215,000 paying users, including 65,000 new subscribers last year. That’s according to filings by its corporate parent, Strategic Education of Herndon, Virginia, which runs two U.S. for-profit colleges, Strayer and Capella. Both Strayer and Capella offer transfer credits for Sophia classes, according to their websites.
The CEO of another provider, StraighterLine, which enrolls over 45,000 students a year, said it is experiencing “double-digit growth.”
Sophia and StraighterLine said the typical student only signs up for a few classes. “The students taking a lot of courses with us are outliers,” said Nick White, Sophia’s chief learning officer.
But the outliers are easy to find.
Scott Sweeney, 47, of Ohio, took 14 Sophia classes over two months through early 2023 for about $14 per class.
“If you’re my age, you are trying to obtain your degree as fast as possible,” said Sweeney, a digital marketing manager who works full-time and is raising a daughter.
Sweeney said he knew the answers to many of the test questions because of his work and life experience. And if he didn’t, he could just look up the answers in the online textbook because all the Sophia class exams were open-book.
“I didn’t find most of the questions challenging,” Sweeney said. “Sophia essentially just validated what I already knew and turned it into college credit.”
He said he spent an average of two to 10 hours of work on each class, although he often chipped away at a class over the course of a week or more. He also took three more courses on another online platform.
Ultimately, Sweeney transferred about 50 credits to Western Governors University and completed his bachelor’s degree in business administration in nine additional weeks in 2023. He says that made it possible for him to later earn a master’s degree in marketing that helped him land a new job.
“The courses really helped me,” Sweeney said.
People who post on Reddit and other social media sites about using the platforms openly discuss using the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + F” to search for information during open-book exams. Some describe using Google or artificial intelligence, even though that violates the platforms’ honor codes.
“That’s how you complete a course in a few hours,” one user boasted on Reddit. “You won’t learn anything but you will have it done.”
Ryan Swayt, who coaches students how to speed through online college programs, said he loves classes that allow people to move at their own pace. But he worries that Study.com and Sophia make it too easy to cheat or look up answers online because they use unsupervised tests.
Sophia executives said it’s not possible for every student to take a proctored exam. For instance, there are often security restrictions on computers used for work, at libraries and by members of the military that bar students from downloading the software they would need to use.
Instead, the company uses other techniques to detect cheating, including checking students’ typing patterns, monitoring whether students are using internet addresses from different locations and requiring students to show their ID and face. Sophia also scans written assignments for plagiarism.
“We layer these things and have algorithms to continually improve on what we’re doing,” said White, Sophia’s chief learning officer.
Study.com used to offer proctors, but it switched to open-book exams without observers early last year, matching Sophia’s approach.
StraighterLine, however, has stuck with remote proctors. “I don’t want to be known as the cheat path for hacking college,” CEO Matt Hulett said.
Because the platforms don’t offer degrees or federal student loans, they aren’t formally overseen by either the Education Department or college accreditors.
“They are unregulated,” said Jan Friis, a former vice president with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, which recognizes accreditation agencies that meet its standards.
Instead, many colleges rely on guidance from the American Council on Education, which represents nearly 1,600 colleges, universities and other organizations, to decide whether to accept the classes. ACE’s recommendations are considered so critical that credits for the approved courses are widely referred to as “ACE credits” by students, the learning platforms and universities.
But the trade group said it is ultimately up to colleges whether to give students credit, not ACE.
“We don’t demand that universities accept our credit recommendations,” said ACE President Ted Mitchell. “We simply say that our faculty reviewers have reviewed these courses in much the same way that they would review courses from their colleagues on campus.”
ACE charges online learning platforms fees for the recommendations, generating a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue. The group says the fees cover its costs and don’t influence its decisions.
ACE hasn’t conducted any studies to find out how much students learned from the online courses or how they compare to traditional classes. “That’s not our role,” Mitchell said.
In March, Sophia also got an endorsement from a college accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission. Sophia paid the commission an initial $10,000 application fee, and it must make smaller annual payments to maintain the endorsement.
Higher Learning spokeswoman Laura Janota said the commission did not review any of Sophia’s courses as part of the endorsement process.
Janota said the endorsement only “applies to the provider, not to individual offerings” and is separate from its accreditation process for colleges.
Accreditors like Higher Learning typically leave it up to colleges to decide which outside classes to accept for credit, including those from online platforms.
The colleges that have struck formal partnerships with providers like Sophia Learning and Study.com spell out which classes they accept. Some institutions allow students to complete up to three-quarters of their coursework on the platforms. That includes universities with popular online programs, such as Southern New Hampshire University, Thomas Edison State University of New Jersey, University of Massachusetts Global, University of Maryland Global Campus and University of Maine at Presque Isle.
Several of the colleges said it was important to give adult students credit for nontraditional types of learning — including classes on the online platforms and life and work experience — to help them complete their education. As of 2023, more than 43 million people have started college in the U.S. but never finished, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“Flexible transfer policies and recognition of prior learning create meaningful pathways for adult learners to finish degrees they started,” Victoria Monaghan, a Thomas Edison State University spokeswoman, said in a statement.
In an email, Southern New Hampshire spokeswoman Siobhan Lopez said that giving students credit from varied sources helps “students build on their existing knowledge, reduce unnecessary duplication of coursework, and progress toward their academic goals.”
But many schools have restrictions on what classes they will take from the platforms and how much credit they will accept.
Western Governors University, one of the online colleges popular with students trying to accelerate their degrees, said it stopped accepting upper-division classes from online learning platforms early this year. A spokeswoman said about 4 percent of the transfer credits they reviewed for students came from online platforms in the last fiscal year.
And some of the colleges that allow students to complete up to 75 percent of their coursework on the platforms, such as the University of Maryland Global, say it’s rare for students to transfer in that many credits.
Some other colleges aren’t partners with the online platforms. The University of Maryland at College Park says it won’t accept any credits for coursework completed through learning companies — including Sophia, StraighterLine and Study.com — even though its online sister school does. Similarly, the University of Arizona’s main campus says it won’t accept courses from Sophia, while they are accepted by the University of Arizona Global.
Other colleges that don’t have formal transfer agreements with the platforms regularly award credit for the classes on a case-by-case basis. That includes California State University, one of the largest college systems in the country.
“Campuses have a right to investigate anything that a student might bring them, do an analysis, and determine if they think it’s worth some type of credit,” said Brent Foster, an assistant vice chancellor for the system.
But the state system won’t allow students to use nontraditional sources like Sophia and Study.com for more than one-quarter of the total credits they need for a bachelor’s degree. Foster said the school still wants students to complete most of their degree through more traditional classes that take longer.
“I think anybody that has a degree that they spent four or five years getting knows that you cannot get the level of learning and experience that you need in five weeks — or even five months,” he said.
The post They aren’t colleges. But they promise fast, cheap college credits. appeared first on Washington Post.
