The Higher Learning Commission, the largest institutional accreditor in the United States, recently introduced a new process for reviewing bachelor’s-degree programs that require fewer than the traditional 120 academic credits. There’s a lot to like about the powers that be paving the way to clearing out some of the fluff in higher education. Who needs four years and 120 credits? After all, you can get a BA in mathematics and philosophy from Oxford in three years.
Streamlined programs targeted at in-demand career skills could lead to a more affordable, relevant product.This movement is not just speculative. Some schools have already begun the process of offering condensed bachelor’s degrees. On the graduate level, my own employer, the University of Southern Indiana, started an accelerated online MBA program that can be completed in a little over a year a few years back. Advocates of reform, like the College-in-3 Exchange, are well-intentioned in their efforts to address known problems facing college students, such as the high cost of obtaining a degree, high first-year dropout rates especially for first-generation students, the questionable worth of some degrees, and students’ preference for anything but traditional lecture-style delivery of content. Certainly more streamlined programs targeted at in-demand career skills and delivered in an online or hybrid fashion using modern technology could lead to a more affordable, relevant product that would retain more students. Students can already take summer classes that speed things up. Why not take the next step and condense the 120-hour degree to its essentials?
Even though I personally believe that such reforms are a step in the right direction, I also want to pump the brakes a little, because these attempts to shorten traditional BA/BS degrees bring me back to the “seven-minute abs” joke in the 1998 comedy There’s Something About Mary:
Hitchhiker:
You heard of this thing, the Eight-Minute Abs?Ted:
Yeah, sure, Eight-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.Hitchhiker:
Yeah, [my idea] is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: Seven … Minute … Abs.
While that reminiscence makes me yearn for the time of less politically correct comedies, the premise of the joke actually has some merit. Are a few college credits really the main concern that needs to be addressed in order to improve the undergraduate degree? Why not just encourage more students to go to community college instead? What do shortened bachelor’s degrees offer that students can’t get from associate’s degrees or the plethora of vocational certifications that are already available for those who want a post-secondary credential requiring fewer than 120 credits? Moreover, will, say, 110-credit bachelor’s degrees be immediately trumped by some enterprising college offering 109-credit BAs in a race to the intellectual bottom?
Shouldn’t we instead try to spur deeper courses of study at the college level, however many credits that requires?When this question arises, I tend to revisit a point made by historian David Labaree in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. While that title is provocative, Labaree discusses calmly whether college aims to provide general higher education, holistic training for a career path, or specific vocational education for a student’s immediate next job. A knee-jerk reaction to that quandary is to say that the aim is all three, because higher education is in the “you can be anything you want to be” business. In practice, however, there is a lot of dissonance amongst higher-ed stakeholders. Both a philosophy and a business-strategy professor can face imposter syndrome as they promote the “next job” that students will get, even as they hide the fact that their own true expertise is in academic material, which does not always directly correlate with job training.
When people with minimal job experience of their own have to train other people for their next job, everyone loses.
Hence, the biggest question regarding a shortened bachelor’s degree is whether the aim of reform ought really to be a more accelerated way to obtain an expensive employability credential. Shouldn’t we instead try to spur deeper courses of study at the college level, however many credits that requires? In exploring the programs that are on board with the College-in-3 movement, one finds the former aim being enacted at the moment. Yet trimming a dozen credits from a 120-hour degree should spur additional brainstorming about what a 21st-century college degree should actually look like. Proposing a three-year bachelor’s degree feels a bit like designing a better six-disc CD changer for a market that is embracing streaming.
Along these lines, one of the most common quips I hear when advising students is some form of, “How does this class relate to my major?” or “When will I be able to take major classes?” It’s easy to forget that within a 120- (or 100-) credit liberal-arts degree, only 30-40 of those credits are typically focused on “major” classes. While one can argue that some of those classes require prerequisite skills (e.g. higher-level math for technical careers), for every one of those instances, there is an accounting major desiring to work at the Big Four who feels “forced to waste time” with eight hours of biology or chemistry. Real innovation should focus on creating targeted, deep courses of study. This does not have to come at the expense of employability. Perhaps there will come a time when a 19-year old can take 30 focused credits in accounting, call it a degree, and get hired at Ernst and Young.
If they want a more radical change, reformers should consider preserving the classical bachelor’s degree for those who want that path while simultaneously crafting higher-education products that take into account whether students actually need general-education requirements. Most students can already graduate without reading Shakespeare or taking a foreign language. Why trouble them with Feminist Basket-Weaving in satisfaction of their “college core” requirements?
Proposing a three-year bachelor’s degree feels a bit like designing a better six-disc CD changer for a market that is embracing streaming.Traditionalists will hate this idea, and I consider myself something of a traditionalist. People like us typically try to force the classics on a population of students who see college as vocational training. In the big picture, however, real innovators should not be nibbling around the edges but asking whether there are vocationally minded students who should be going to college at all, as well as how employers (who tend to have college degrees already) can be convinced that new hires do not need to have a BA/BS degree as a prerequisite for employment.
Bruce Lee is credited with saying, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Is the 120-credit general college education offered in the United States closer to the former or the latter? From the ground level, I have seen little evidence that college students practice the same kick even twice. This thought experiment is an important one, because if college is just a collection of assorted credits that lead to a piece of paper, it does not matter if its completion takes two, three, or six years. If brief exposure is deemed satisfactory, then by all means reduce the credits and offer the entire curriculum as compatible with the latest smartwatch.
Jason Fertig is an associate professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville.