On Average, How Many Years Is A Bachelor’s Degree?

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  • Find a bachelor's degree




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Key Infor­ma­tion:

  • A bach­e­lor’s degree typ­i­cal­ly requires 120 cred­it hours, tra­di­tion­al­ly com­plet­ed over four years of full-time study.
  • The Nation­al Cen­ter for Edu­ca­tion Sta­tis­tics found that 64% of stu­dents who began a bach­e­lor’s pro­gram in 2014 com­plet­ed their degree with­in six years.
  • Accel­er­at­ed pro­grams may be com­plet­ed in less than 4 years.
  • Fac­tors influ­enc­ing this dura­tion include course load per term, enroll­ment sta­tus (full-time or part-time), and any cred­its earned through advanced place­ment or dual enroll­ment pro­grams.

The typ­i­cal bach­e­lor’s degree pro­gram takes a stu­dent four years to com­plete. This has been the stan­dard bach­e­lor’s pro­grams are held for a long time. It is also a mis­con­cep­tion to think that all bach­e­lor’s pro­grams take four years to com­plete. There are a num­ber of fac­tors when you’re con­sid­er­ing how long your degree will take you to earn. 

If you’re work­ing at a part-time pace, it could take you as long as six years to com­plete it; if you’re work­ing through an accel­er­at­ed or self-paced online degree pro­gram, it’s up to you! Some can be fin­ished in less than a year.

Relat­ed:

Four years is the tra­di­tion­al esti­mate for any­one look­ing to earn a bach­e­lor’s degree. For some­one who is a non-tra­di­tion­al stu­dent, that num­ber could be dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent one way or the oth­er. After real­iz­ing that things aren’t as black and white as you’ve always been told, you might be think­ing: How many years is a bach­e­lor’s degree? The truth is that you can com­plete it in less than one year. The short­est pro­grams can take only nine months, and some of the longer pro­grams are still offer­ing you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to grad­u­ate in two years or less. 

Non-tra­di­tion­al stu­dents like those who want to study online, those who have com­plet­ed some col­lege and just need a degree com­ple­tion pro­gram, and any oth­er adult learn­er are going to have a much dif­fer­ent process when it comes to earn­ing their bach­e­lor’s degree. Accel­er­at­ed pro­grams are designed for those stu­dents so that they can get their life start­ed that much soon­er if they’re will­ing to work for it. Some accel­er­at­ed programs:

  • don’t have any breaks between terms
  • con­dense the cours­es down into just sev­en or eight weeks in length
  • give cred­it for past experience

Accel­er­at­ed pro­grams are offered in so many dif­fer­ent fields, from busi­ness to psy­chol­o­gy and every­thing in between. One of the fastest bach­e­lor’s pro­grams you can com­plete is a BS in Web Design & Devel­op­ment Online from Cham­plain Col­lege and it lasts for nine months. This pro­gram is asyn­chro­nous, you can do it on your own time. Oth­er perks of the pro­gram include the gen­er­ous pol­i­cy that allows up to 90 cred­its to be trans­ferred in and the six start dates through­out the year. Sev­en-week cours­es are the secret to how this degree track is so efficient. 

Earn­ing your bach­e­lor’s degree can also take longer if you’re some­one that does­n’t have the open sched­ule you would pre­fer to have in order to com­mit more of your time to your stud­ies. Part-time pro­grams allow stu­dents to take few­er cours­es at once so that the pro­gram can fit into your life. These typ­i­cal­ly take longer than four years, some­times up to six.

Relat­ed: