The 3-Year Bachelor’s Degree

Friday’s Inside Higher Ed article on a dozen colleges and universities around the country trying to put together three-year bachelor’s degree programs surprised me. The breakthrough method that these colleges are proposing is to lop off 20 or 30 credits from the degree.

That is not a breakthrough. That’s just a cut.

Worse, it’s a cut that presumes the kind of student who already thrives most in the current system: no remediation, no exploration, no changes of major. Deleting all the electives is another way of saying students can’t change their minds. While there are students like those, they aren’t the majority, and they’re likeliest to flourish in the current system. At best, it’s a reduction of opportunity cost for the students who are disproportionately likely to come from advantaged backgrounds.

The reduction of opportunity cost is real. If what would have been the fourth year of college becomes the first year of working full-time in a professional job, the lifetime wealth accumulation effects are likely to be significant. That piece of the argument is correct, as far as it goes.

The catch is that they’re proposing to do it by simply watering down the product.

There are better ways. I’ve worked with one, and I’m fascinated by the other.

The first, and easiest to implement, is to use summers fully. This is what DeVry did when I worked there. It ran three four-month semesters per year, so a student who took an average of 15 credits per semester could graduate in two years and eight months. A student who needed some remediation, and/or who failed a course or two along the way, could still finish in three years.

Part of the appeal for students was the reduction in opportunity cost. During year four, when their counterparts elsewhere would still be in college, they’d be out in industry making adult salaries. It was also a selling point to students for whom academia was, at best, a grudging obligation; a shorter obligation seemed less daunting. It also helped build routines for students who already had jobs that followed a 12-month calendar.

It’s a fairly straightforward solution. The major issues were financial aid and faculty fatigue. State and federal financial aid programs aren’t built on the expectation of students taking 45 credits per calendar year. And the way that DeVry managed it, the annual teaching load for full-time faculty was the full 45 credits per year, 12 months per year. That made professional renewal effectively impossible. It also continues to rely on the credit hour, which, at the most basic level, does not measure learning.

The second would be to decouple measures of learning from time. Competency-based education holds the promise of allowing students to move through as quickly as they can learn the material. Competency-based programs should be able to handle prior learning assessment easily enough, thereby allowing working adult students to reduce the time to degree. Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University have been doing versions of this for years. It can be done. Admittedly, severing the connection between time and learning makes it harder to market a “three-year degree” with a straight face, but one could certainly offer students the chance to move faster than they normally could.

In many states, dual-enrollment programs are offering a way to back into a three-year degree. If a student comes out of high school with a year or two of college credits, then they should be able to finish the rest in less than four years. I recall discussions with one nearby private college about students doing a year of credits in high school, a year at Brookdale, then two years at the private college to get the bachelor’s and a third to get the master’s. And that was without any unusual summer loads. The model is likely to become more common over time.

I’d take any of those models over the one the article proposes. Students don’t need less education. They need different models that recognize the reality of opportunity cost. We should be able to manage that; in some ways, we already do.