Can Saylor Academy save college students $1 million in tuition in 2016?

In April, we reported on completion of exams for credit recommended courses, in which we estimated confirmed student tuition savings to date of more than $250,000 — that’s about $2,000 per student!

With this post, we wanted to share a couple graphs to help tell the story Here is the first, tracking the completions of most* proctored exams for college credit recommended courses**.

While it is a bit early to tell much from the spikes in exam completions (unless you MA121 grads out there care to crunch the numbers for us), we notice jumps that coincide with the ends of academic units in April, August, and December.

Using six month averages (i.e., for each month showing the average of the previous six months, inclusive of the current month) helps to smooth out the numbers and describe a more clear trend of accelerated growth:

We may remain one of the better-kept secrets in both informal learning and formal higher education, but that is changing. The trends we have seen this year in completion of courses recommended for college credit testify to Saylor Academy’s growing visibility and value for students from two dozen countries (and counting) looking to start or finish their college degrees.

Will we hit a million dollars? We do not know, but things are looking good. What we do know is that we will make a real difference for a lot of students this year — we look forward to sharing that story!

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* Some proctored exams, not administered by ProctorU, are not included in these figures.

** Our “Direct Credit” are not the only methods by which students have earned college credit using Saylor Academy materials. Partner programs, third-party exams, and portfolio evaluations (among other methods) have also helped our students earn college credit. True savings for students are already more extensive than the story we are telling here!