A friend of one of my kids had a semester worth of credits from the start, but took off one semester and couch-surfed at the school for that amount of time, while working on various independent projects. So he was paying bills at the school for only three and a half years, but actually there, and graduated, in four years. Don’t know that that is something one could plan for ahead of time (have to have willing friends with couches), but just putting it out there.