You can definitely bang out all the major requirements in 2 years if you don't need any gen ed classes (e.g. community college or other transfer credits). ~18 class-quarters of requirements, 3 classes/quarter => 6 quarters. Possibly as short as 4-5 quarters if you can manage a higher courseload.

Note: this isn't true for some universities that limit transfer/AP credits. I remember some of my classmates not taking their AP tests senior year of high school because of it.

We're specifically talking about UW CSE here.

Wow, really? So you just pay for a year instead of 4 years? Why do people not do that more?

Because you have to go to a high school that offers special courses, you have to be willing to work much harder than the average student, and you have to know about this trick when you're like 15yo and comprehend how much $$$ and time it's going to save you in the long run.

I fortunately did take advantage of this, and so did my wife. Thought we took advantage of it so we could do cheap study abroad and not have to take any courses toward our degree plan (indeed, I actually earned a second degree in a completely unrelated field while doing my study abroad)

But to be clear, this was because I took every advanced class offered at my high school and took other courses at the local community college instead of hanging out with my friends during lunch, etc. It was a constant gaming of the system to eventually get the results I wanted.

In Washington, high school students can enrol in community college courses through their school, and count them for both high school and college credit.

https://www.seattlecolleges.edu/running-start

You can double up on a lot in high school (AP, IB, dual enrollment) or CLEP out of a good number of GenEd classes, but not everybody has the access and support they need to pull that off. There's potential value in going to college (as in _being in college_) that isn't strictly measured in credit hours as well.

Oh absolutely, most of the value is being there not in the credit hours. At Cambridge Uni you can't just condense the time for a BA, no matter how brilliant you are. You spend time 3y on learning. If you're fast, you just learn more.

The critical part is getting all the non-exciting stuff done at community college. There’s a useless cultural construct we have that says that CC is for a lower tier of student. Obviously this is absolute poppycock, since paying $2000 a year for college vs $20,000 only proves that you don’t like pissing away money. It’s not like English 112 is taught by world-class professors at Stanford or UW. It’s taught by some random TA. But many types of people (even myself) felt pressure to “attend a 4-year school” right from the start.

The best argument for it actually is purely social — community colleges (for no real reason though) don’t have dorms, so the ‘commuter school’ experience can be socially isolating, whereas for outgoing types mixing with all your fellow freshman in a dorm can be very socially rewarding and help establish major friendships. I think they should add on-campus living to community college.

You still need the gen ed credits from somewhere. And you have to actually get in to the major, which is hard for UW CSE (desirable major with limited spots).

UW charges the same fixed credit rate for 10-18 credits/quarter then adds significant per-credit fees above 18 to explicitly discourage super high courseloads.

Yep, pretty common, at least they allow it though - mine wouldn't let you take such a courseload unless you had a stellar academic record, and they would require grades significantly above average to recognize equivalent classes from lower education.