<p>Well, it’s called a ‘graduate’ degree because it is worked on by (college) graduates. Moreover, graduate degrees build on certain prerequisite knowledge that you have to acquire at the undergraduate level - both specific to your field (e.g., introductory physics before you can study graduate-level theoretical physics) and the more general knowledge (e.g., freshman composition to write coherent papers; critical thinking and analysis skills garnered in other classes). I would be willing to bet money that no PhD programs will admit someone without an undergraduate degree - most pages list that as a requirement, and my own doctoral program required proof that I had completed an undergrad degree in the form of a copy of my diploma.</p>
<p>So…if you want to pursue a PhD, you will need to get a bachelor’s degree (and a GED, if you never obtained that, since most colleges will not admit you to study without a GED). You could potentially attend a local four-year college part-time while you continue to work - it will extend your time to the BA, but at least you won’t be attending college full-time with limited funds. CLEP testing and online courses can be used at many colleges and universities - but not very many offer credit for life experience. The ones that do tend to be for-profits that aren’t going to be very helpful in your quest for a PhD. (I’m not talking about military training - many reputable institutions accept that for credit, but that’s because it’s military training and experiences related to training in a very highly structured environment that, in many cases, isn’t so different from the process of learning on a college campus.)</p>
<p>If you work in an urban or suburban area there may be many choices for four-year colleges; I’d start investigating which ones of them accept CLEP credit, and how many credits they accept. Since it appears that you test very well and have acquired the knowledge in other ways, you might be quite successful at achieving the necessary scores for CLEP credit and testing out of quite a lot of general education requirements. If you also select a college with online courses, you could get a good idea of the work out of the way while still working full-time even if you decide to eventually leave your job and becoming a full-time BA student. However, few colleges will allow you to use CLEP or outside credit to substitute for their major courses, so if you wanted to major in math or physics you’ll probably have to take all of the classes there (with the exception that you can start a little later in math - instead of starting at calc I, placement tests may indicate that you can start with calc II or III or even skip calc altogether if you have the requisite knowledge).</p>
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<p>As for the PhD, though, there’s no real external way to speed that up. The only way to speed it up is to move quickly through the program itself by achieving benchmarks faster. There’s a lot of factors that go into a speedy finish for the PhD program; few are controlled by you, but one way is to have a good solid research project already in mind that can be developed into a dissertation and to start work on it very early in your PhD. I think the minimum amount of time you can expect to take would be about 4 years, but I think realistically most people can expect to spend 5-6 years earning a PhD in a physical science field or math (although that’s derived primarily from the NSF average time-to-degree and observing other people, not my own experience. I’m in the social sciences, where people tend to take a little bit longer.)</p>
<p>There is a middle ground. Many people do academic research in non-PhD-level roles, as research associates or project directors. These are generally MA-level positions. You could, for example, develop expertise in data science and work as a data science manager for a team of researchers who don’t have that expertise. Or, for another example, my current research center has a computer scientist on staff who helps us develop the statistical programs that we design - lots of statisticians and quantitative social scientists on staff to dream up the theory and write the equations, but he’s the one who makes it work on computers. If you just want to do academic research but aren’t necessarily interested in being the one who dreams up/directs the projects, MA-level work may suit you just fine.</p>