A recent Washington Post investigation described something called “degree hacking” — students racing through accredited online bachelor’s and master’s programs in weeks rather than years. One woman earned both degrees in 2024 for a combined cost of just over $4,000. Another completed 16 college courses in 22 days. A cottage industry of YouTube coaches and $1,500 consulting packages has sprung up to help people game the system. Academic officials are alarmed. Accreditors are saying they may investigate. Reddit moderators at one university forum have had to create a separate subforum to contain the conflict between regular students and speed-runners. I am not alarmed. I’ve been warning about exactly this dynamic for years. If anything, I’m surprised it took this long. We’ve known this was coming since at least 2018 Back in 2018, I wrote a piece I called “ Breaking Up the Degree Stranglehold .” The core argument was straightforward: the four-year college degree had become a blunt instrument — a filter employers used to manage hiring volume, not a reliable signal of whether a candidate could actually do the job. Drawing on research by Harvard’s Joseph Fuller , I pointed out that 67% of production supervisor job postings at that time required a college degree , while only 16% of employed production supervisors actually held one. More than six million jobs were already experiencing what Fuller called “degree inflation.” We weren’t hiring for competence. We were hiring for a credential — and then confusing the two. The costs were enormous and fell hardest on people who could least afford them. Requiring a bachelor’s degree for entry-level work knocked out nearly 83% of Latino candidates and 80% of potential African American candidates. It drove students into debt to obtain credentials that were, in many cases, economically irrational proxies for skills employers weren’t even that sure they needed. The degree had become, as I wrote then, “a handy shortcut” — a one-click filter that reduced the hiring pile without requiring anyone to think harder about what the job actually demanded. The shortcut was always a stand-in Here is the uncomfortable truth at the center of the degree-hacking controversy: employers never really cared about the degree. They cared about what the degree was supposed to represent. What does a bachelor’s degree signal? Loosely, it suggests that a person can manage sustained effort over time, read and write with reasonable competence, show up reliably, and work within institutional structures.  It also, especially at selective schools, signals that the candidate has been sorted against a competitive peer group. These are real things. They matter in the workplace. But they aren’t what we’re measuring when we issue a diploma. We’re measuring seat time, credit hours, and completion of a curriculum designed, at its core, around the research interests of faculty rather than the capability needs of employers. The degree is a contract between a student and an institution. The employer is a third party who has agreed, by convention, to treat it as meaningful. When a student completes an accredited competency-based program in eight weeks, they have fulfilled the terms of that contract. The institution says they have demonstrated competency. The credential is technically legitimate. And yet something that employers were treating as a proxy for three or four years of formation and signaling has been compressed into a fraction of the time. No wonder they’re worried. The shortcut just got a shortcut. Both sides are now weaponizing technology What’s happening here follows a pattern that anyone who studies technological disruption would recognize. When a system creates a scarce and valuable signal — in this case, an accredited degree — the people locked out of it will use whatever tools they have to obtain it or replicate it. And the people benefiting from its value will use tools to defend it. We are now in a full-scale arms race. On one side, job seekers are using online learning platforms, competency-based pathways, credit transfers, and AI -assisted coursework to obtain credentials at a fraction of the traditional cost in time and money. One of the students profiled in the Washington Post finished her undergraduate and MBA at Western Governors for under $9,000 — covered largely by her employer and a Pell Grant — while raising a six-year-old and holding a full-time job. She subsequently earned a promotion to a higher-paying role. For her, hacking the system worked.  She was richly rewarded for it. On the other side, employers are increasingly turning to AI-powered resume screening, structured skills assessments, and work-sample tests — precisely because they’ve figured out that the degree doesn’t reliably deliver what they thought it did. LinkedIn’s skills-based hiring tools, HireVue’s competency assessments, and a wave of pyschometric screening products are all essentially employers trying to get to the signal underneath the credential. Both sides are making rational choices. The system in between — the degree as a trusted proxy — is being hollowed out from both ends simultaneously. Purdue Global saw the problem clearly enough to stop allowing unlimited concurrent enrollments in its ExcelTrack program in January, citing concerns about “academic integrity and the value of a Purdue Global degree.” That’s one institution trying to defend the signal. But unless most institutions align around a similar standard, individual holdouts simply divert traffic to schools that don’t impose limits. This is a collective action problem, not an individual institutional one. The real fix is hard and nobody wants to do it The degree-hacking phenomenon will not be resolved by accreditors issuing stern inquiries, or by universities capping enrollment speeds, or by hiring managers adding another screening filter. It will persist until we do something genuinely difficult: reconnect what educational institutions actually certify with what employers are genuinely confident represents mastery. Right now, those two things are almost entirely decoupled. An accredited degree certifies that a student completed a curriculum designed by people whose primary professional incentive is research output, not employer-relevant skill formation. The accreditor certifies the institution’s process, not the student’s capability. The employer uses the resulting credential as a signal for things nobody in the chain actually measured directly. What would a real fix look like? It would require employers to define, with much greater specificity, what capabilities they actually need — and to be willing to assess those capabilities directly, rather than outsourcing the work to universities. It would require universities to design curricula around demonstrable competencies, not credit hours. It would require accreditors to evaluate whether graduates can actually do things, not merely whether the faculty had the right publications record.  It may even mean changing the nature of incentives at universities to reward transfer of capability to students at least as much as being cited by academic peers. Some of this is happening. Competency-based education, when done rigorously, is a step in the right direction. So is the growing use of employer-designed certifications — think of how Google’s professional certificates have gained traction — and apprenticeship models that keep the learning tethered to real work. But “a step in the right direction” is not the same as a functioning system. Until we establish credible, widely accepted mechanisms for certifying that a student has reached a meaningful level of mastery in something specific — and until employers trust those mechanisms enough to hire against them — we will keep running this same race. The students degree-hacking their way through online programs aren’t the problem. They are a symptom. The problem is a credential infrastructure that was always a proxy, pretending to be a signal.