Three-Year Degrees Spread; Professors Call It Corner-Cutting
Three-Year Degrees Spread; Professors Call It Corner-Cutting
The News
American colleges are cutting a full year off the bachelor's degree, and the fight over whether that degree is worth the same is now out in the open.
As of this spring, 26 U.S. states have at least one college offering a reduced-credit, three-year bachelor's, according to the nonprofit research group RAND. The programs let students finish with as few as 90 credit hours instead of the typical 120.
Supporters call it an answer to the college affordability crisis. The American Association of University Professors says the degrees devalue the credential.
Timeline
Robert Zemsky, founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, argues in a Newsweek cover story that three-year degrees could shake up a broken system. Accreditors balk. "Accreditors said, 'College is 120 credits, not 90 credits,'" Zemsky recalled.
Amid mounting concern over college costs, Zemsky helps revive the idea. The College-in-3 Exchange is founded, and dozens of institutions join the network.
The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities becomes the first accreditor to approve reduced-credit programs, clearing Ensign College in Salt Lake City and Brigham Young University-Idaho. Other accreditors quickly follow.
RAND counts 119 publicly announced reduced-credit programs. The analysis was done to help education officials in Ohio weigh whether reduced-credit degrees are feasible.
Reactions
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.
What's Next
The open questions are licensure and graduate school. Jenna Kramer, a policy researcher at RAND, said programs with state licensing requirements are among the biggest worries. RAND also found the programs are so new that there are no standard practices for admitting three-year degree recipients into graduate school.
Indiana Wesleyan said its education programs are designed to meet Indiana licensing requirements, and that students from elsewhere will need to check whether the programs satisfy their own state's rules, according to Pam Downing, the school's director of communications.
Wesley Hardy, 22, three semesters into a bachelor of applied science in accounting at Ensign, has weighed becoming a certified public accountant. Many states require 120 semester hours to sit for the exam and 150 to be licensed. "Would I have to take extra classes?" he said. "It's definitely something I've thought of."
Ohio officials are reviewing RAND's findings as they consider reduced-credit degrees.
More
Private nonprofit schools offer three-quarters of the reduced-credit programs, frequently online, and typically compress majors by cutting electives. Business degrees such as marketing and management are the most common, followed by computer and information sciences. Engineering, with its heavy math requirements, has been harder to shrink, and RAND found just six reduced-credit degrees in teacher education.
The push comes as tuition and fees averaged $11,950 for in-state students at public schools and $45,000 at private nonprofits last school year, according to a College Board report, though many students get discounts that lower the price.
Three-year bachelor's degrees are standard in the United Kingdom, India, France and Italy, and some of the earliest colleges in colonial America — modeled on Oxford and Cambridge — started out with them, said John Thelin, author of "A History of American Higher Education." The four-year format took hold in the 19th century, he said, partly because there was no established system of public high schools to prepare students. "The colleges would have to kind of start from scratch," Thelin said.
Reporting from The Associated Press, The Independent and The Boston Globe.
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