Three-Year Degrees Spread; Professors Call It Corner-Cutting

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, was blunt: "This is not innovation. This is just cutting corners."

Students see a trade-off they are willing to make. Giles Sims, 34, a laid-off web developer supporting a wife and a widowed mother, enrolled at Ensign College after getting passed over for jobs without a degree. "I can't afford to be out of the workforce for four years," he said. "That just seems like forever, and the three-year made it seem less daunting."

Jill Cohen, 42, who lives on a ranch in rural Yoder, Colorado, is finishing a teaching degree through Indiana Wesleyan while already teaching middle school English. "Why do I need to take, you know, underwater basket weaving when I could just take the evolutionary structure of the English language — what I'm going to be teaching," she said.

Gabriella Staten, 20, in the reduced-credit digital marketing program at Mount Mary University, a Catholic women's institution in Milwaukee, estimates the path will save her at least $20,000. She said she sometimes wonders whether employers will take the degree as seriously, but decided she could prove herself: "Even if they were to look a little bit down on the three-year pathway, I can show them otherwise with the work."

Bruce Kusch, president of Ensign, said he has talked to multiple college presidents and does not anticipate graduate school being a problem.