I don't have any degrees, and pursuing a four year so I can take a pay cut is a non starter for me. I'd consider doing a two year technical degree, maybe.
Have you heard of WGU? You can knock out bachelors degrees much faster if you already know the material. After about a decade of software engineering, I was able to knock out a CS degree in about six months. Feel free to email me for more info.
That's a big if! My issue with college degrees is all the BS classes unrelated to the degree that you have to take. Looking at WGU's catalog for a secondary math education degree, I have to take classes on US history, biology, natural science, and composition. I think these are the classes that you allude to skipping, but it seems like WGU and other colleges are incentivized to make the skipping process quite difficult as skipped classes == lost revenue, no?
When I did the degree in CS, I was able to almost immediately test out of nearly every "fluff" class. There's no "minimum time" required or anything like that; if you know the material you can schedule the exam and test out of it.
For example, I enrolled in the history class on Tuesday morning. I went through the per-assessment and got a 90%, so Tuesday afternoon, I took the exam, and got an 85%, which was high enough to pass. I knocked out a class in about a day.
This of course won't apply to all classes, but I didn't think it was so bad; the "BS classes" were also my initial hesitation to going back to school, but I was able to whip through them pretty quick.
https://www.teachaway.com/blog/can-you-become-teacher-withou...