Having taught engineering as an assistant professor for over 15 years I have always believed that the combination of well developed MOOCs and online information and video's for the Bachelor fundamentals in most domains in combination with attendance of specific hands-on skills workshops and traineeships (so far more hybrid than you propose), should and could replace most (antiquated) university curricula. Your use of GPT to help you design your course is an encouraging step. but beware of dogmatism.
1. The first answer GPT should have given you is that the Master's degrees can only be appointed to you by an acknowledged educational institution. If the certificate is important to you, how are you going to bypass this monopoly? State exam? Certification is a new market opportunity for innovative institutions like the https://www.khanacademy.org/, perhaps you can find one to certify you.
2. The second answer is that certificates can also be obtained from much cheaper schools and even in much cheaper countries whose credentials are acknowledged by the US. These schools are generally a waste of time if you are genuinely interested in content but you get your piece of paper.
3. People pay for Ivy League not because they have the best teachers but to become part of the entitled (pun intended) establishment. The high tuition fee threshold is there by design. It would be foolish to ignore this fact.
4. And my last point, what criteria does GPT use to compile its reading lists? And how does that list compare to lists made by active leading professionals in that domain? GPT is infamously biased unless you narrow down your questions to merely factual information. Especially true for a social science that is in constant development like economy. Ask prof. Steve Keen what he thinks of the regular economy education.... And I very much doubt that economists like Ha-Joon Chang and Kate Raworth will pop up on your screen. Let alone the many brilliant Chinese and Russian scholars, largely unknown to us in the West but who will be leading the development of the BRICS nations into the newly emerging multipolar world. Our world.
Cramming only yesterday's (and often very biased) knowledge will not bring about a better future. The core purpose of any higher education, or at least it ought to be. Like all dumb but dangerous tools: use them with caution. A chainsaw can cut off your fingers but GPT can rob you of your prime learning years.
