PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Quinn McDonald planned to spend the typical four years working toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Then he heard about a place where he could get the same degree in three.
“It was the idea of being able to save a year” that grabbed his attention, said McDonald — a savings of not only time but tuition. And he could start earning a salary faster than if he spent four years in college.
So, last fall, McDonald joined the inaugural class of one of the nation’s first in-person programs approved to award bachelor’s degrees with fewer than the usual 120 credits, at Johnson & Wales University. He’ll need only 90 credits, putting him on track to graduate in 2028, after three years instead of the usual four or more.
That’s an option being made available by colleges and universities with astonishing speed: a new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. Three-year degrees have existed, but they simply jammed those 120 credits into fewer semesters.
At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, will convert all of its bachelor’s degrees into the new, reduced-credit, three-year kind, it announced in February. Loma Linda University in San Bernardino County has added a three-year degree in global health. Nearly 60 other universities and collegesare planning, considering or have already launched them in some disciplines.
Fast-paced moves to trim
Much of this activity has occurred in just the last few months.
“There are small groups of institutions saying that the old game doesn’t work and has to change,” said Bob Zemsky, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education who has long campaigned for three-year degrees and co-founded a group of universities experimenting with them called College-in-3.
Now the accrediting agencies that oversee universities and colleges are approving bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits. It’s an idea almost all of them previously rejected, but accreditors today are under political scrutiny themselves, and are being prodded to encourage innovation.
Several states whose permission is also needed for these shorter-term degrees, including North Dakota and Massachusetts, are quickly providing it too, often under pressure from businesses that need workers.
Even more than employers, consumers have lost patience with the time and expense it takes to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocates and politicians pushing schools to offer faster degrees. More than half of students who start down the conventional four-year path today take longer than four years, according to the Department of Education.
Many colleges, meanwhile, are struggling to fill seats and hope three-year degrees will appeal to students who wouldn’t otherwise come.
Interest among college-bound high school students in three-year degrees has been climbing since 2019, though it remains relatively small, according to a survey by the higher education consulting firm Eduventures.
What a three-year degree looks like
The work of trimming down four-year bachelor’s degrees to fit within three years has prompted nothing less than a rethinking of the purpose of a college education. Universities and colleges are asking themselves, “What are we doing, why are we doing it and what do students really need?” said Johnson & Wales provost Richard Wiscott.
Most of those debuting three-year bachelor’s degrees have stripped out elective courses from what students have traditionally been required to take.
The three-year bachelor’s degrees at colleges and universities that have so far offered or announced them are almost all in disciplines that lead straight to jobs. In addition to criminal justice, Johnson & Wales introduced three-year degrees last semester in computer science, hospitality management and design.
“There are certain career paths where, at least for the foreseeable future, a four-year degree is still going to be a requirement,” said Nate Bowditch, provost at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, which added 96-credit, three-year degrees in the fall in robotics, outdoor adventure leadership and other fields. “If you want to go to medical school or be a rocket scientist at NASA, you’re going to need a four-year degree.”
At the insistence of accreditors, the new degrees are differentiated from their four-year counterparts by being called “applied” or “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees.
Questions remain
That leads to a critical unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will consider three-year degrees to be as good as the four-year kind.
Because no students have completed these new reduced-credit programs, that’s hard to know. But most employers in a survey by Johnson & Wales said they liked the idea and would consider three-year degrees just as good as conventional four-year ones.
On the other hand, graduate school admissions officers in a small, separate survey released in January by College-in-3 said almost unanimously that they wouldn’t takedomestic applicants with bachelor’s degrees of fewer than 120 credits, though most said they were reconsidering this as more reduced-credit undergraduate degrees are being introduced.
Letting students graduate with bachelor’s degrees in three instead of four years, of course, means less revenue for colleges and universities. But in addition to pulling in more customers, boosters said, those programs will appeal to results-oriented students who are less likely to drop out.
Already, the reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degree candidates at Johnson & Wales have had lower dropout rates between their first and second semesters than their classmates on the conventional track, the university said. And three-year-degree recipients might be persuaded to stick around for graduate school on the same campuses, which are more likely to accept the shorter-term degrees conferred by their undergraduate faculty counterparts.
Still, some faculty and even students have raised objections.
Accelerated bachelor’s degrees will create a two-tiered system in which the most affluent students will have the luxury of spending four years in college, the president of the Assn. of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has contended.
Shorter-term programs with fewer electives won’t do as good a job of teaching such important skills as critical thinking, ethical reasoning or “how to form and answer questions using a variety of intellectual approaches that different disciplines require,” the North Dakota Student Assn. argued in a resolution against shorter-term degrees.
North Dakota’s State Board of Higher Education voted anyway, in February, to let public universities in that state test “bachelor of applied science” degreesof less than 120 credits.
“We’re trying to be responsive to the needs of employers and, frankly, the desire of students who do want to work their way through school as quickly as possible,” said Kevin Black, who chairs the board, which voted to reassess the move in four years.
Marcus writes for the Hechinger Report, which produced this story and is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. This story also appeared in Slate.
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