There is good news for parents of children attending college: A three-year college degree is coming. It’s no secret that higher education in the US has a cost problem. Tuition and other costs exceed $100,000 per year at more and more institutions. No wonder there is a student debt crisis. Defenders of the status quo point out that most students can get discounts of one kind or another from the college sticker price. And it’s also true that for a handful of elite universities, some parents of qualified students would happily pay double the asking price for their offspring to attend such prestigious places. But for most parents and students the financial burden of a higher education is enormous.
The good news is that there is a growing movement to replace the traditional four-year curriculum with a three-year version. We’re not talking about cramming four years of coursework into three years, which about 10% of students do now. Rather, a number of states and institutions are betting that a well-designed three-year degree can lower costs without reducing quality.
The momentum is real. The College-in-3 Exchange, a nonprofit organization that promotes accelerated undergraduate degree programs, launched in 2021 with just 13 participating colleges. It has now grown to 60 member institutions. In the past year alone, Massachusetts has approved three-year programs at Suffolk University and Merrimack College, joining more than 60 institutions nationwide that have followed this path. North Dakota, Louisiana, Maine and North Carolina have all greenlit or piloted similar programs. This is clearly not a fringe idea being tried out in an experimental college.
The College-in-3 approach asks institutions to redesign their curriculum to about 90 credit hours by eliminating low-value electives, e.g. unwanted courses.
The financial case is imperative for families. A 90-credit degree instead of a 120-credit degree saves a quarter of total tuition, along with a year’s room, board, and severance pay. For a generation drowning in student debt, this is an essential structural solution.
It’s also a reasonable solution to what actually drives the cost of college. Decades of cost data show that tuition costs—the part of the university that actually teaches students—have risen much more slowly than the administrative bureaucracy that surrounds them. Shortening the credit path not only saves students a year of tuition, but also forces institutions to question which of those 30 extra credit hours were ever essential to the degree in the first place, rather than being accepted as a fixed cost.
Will employers and graduate schools treat a 90-credit degree as equivalent? Will it create a two-tier system in which only the least advantaged students take the “faster, cheaper” route?
Most employers will recognize the value of a degree awarded after three years of substantive coursework, given the questionable quality of too many of today’s graduates from the traditional approach. A large number of graduate schools will eventually do the same once it becomes apparent that the academic substance of the three-year scholar is equal to or better than the four-year.
Three-year degrees, done right, are one of the few reforms that simultaneously address a family’s affordability crisis and a university’s cost structure.
