> I pulled 23 credit hours at a regular collage in a normal semester.

Good for you. But that's not "viable" for most students in the first place – 18 is probably pushing it.

No need to design a school for most students. Many people regularly pull 18 credit hours with a job. If they don’t need to work a meaningless job then bumping that to 20 seems extremely reasonable.

Really, an elite admittance process coupled with a school that focuses on getting people out quickly vs ramping up course difficult seems like a viable tradeoff. The biggest issue with early graduation is often a few rare required classes. Design the schedule to avid that issue and you have a huge advantage.

I agree it's definitely possible for some students. There are students who finish standard 4-year CS degrees ahead of schedule by taking overloads every semester (which sounds like your case), even at programs considered rigorous. But designing a normal/median path is different thing than saying a handful of top students can breeze through this faster than normal. If you just took the current UT-Austin CS curriculum but made 21-credit-hour semesters standard so you could advertise it as a 3-year time-to-completion, I'm pretty sure it'd be a mess, with some students finishing faster, but also a big spike in dropout/failure rates.

So engineering colleges no longer tell incoming freshmen "look to your right, look to your left - only one of you three will be here four years from now"?

I think he answered with his take on the reddit thread. He thinks that current universities don't push the students far enough and this workload is similar to what they will experience in their first job. Seemed convincing to me.

You probably missed out on a lot of drinking and sporting events.