I enrolled in a Coursera's online CS degree program. I have am an EE interested in a CS degree in AI/ML.

I have decades of software engineering under my belt and transferable academic credit (C programming, elementary to advanced). I have worked on embedded systems, FPGA's, web and mobile software and hardware dev. I have developed software in assembley, C, Forth, Lisp, C++, JS, Python, Objective-C and more. Also HDL's: Verilog and VHDL.

What's the problem?

They requires all students to take the following courses:

Intro to Programming 1 and 2 How Computers Work Web Development

This will consume somewhere between 1 and 1.5 years.

Yes, someone who knows little to nothing should take these modules.

What about someone who has years of experience and some relevant academic work?

These programs do not have a sensible assessment test one could take in order to demonstrate capability.

I think this is a serious problem.

At the very least this does not respect student's time and prior accomplishments. Forcing someone to devote two semesters to "Intro to Programming" when they know the material inside-out is silly at best.

A further problem is that it seems none of the organizations have any interest in addressing this issue. Repeated pleads at the highest levels have resulted in nothing.

And so someone like me is facing the reality of having to spend a year+ "learning" how computers work, how to write a "for" loop and use arrays when hardware I designed that has flown in space and I have designed and programmed embedded computers from scratch --like 8080, 6502, MC86K, 8085, R65F11, C8051F100, PIC and other processors and published mobile apps.

This isn't necessarily about money but that is likely a factor as well.

You ought to be able to prove what you know through a well designed test and enter these kinds of programs at the appropriate academic level.