The Three-Year Degree Makes Sense

On 27 April, the University of North Carolina (UNC) System’s Board of Governors approved a pilot program to begin offering three-year, 90-credit degrees as early as fall 2027. The decision came after a Request for Proposals (RFP) yielded eighteen proposals from seven of the system’s sixteen institutions, including NC State University, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC-Asheville.

The idea of reduced-credit degrees in general and three-year degrees in particular has been gaining ground over the past several years as American colleges and universities have faced declining enrollment, increasing costs and tuition, and closer scrutiny from skeptical students, parents, taxpayers, government officials, and employers.

One of the greatest sources of frustration with American higher education is that graduates and employers alike are increasingly finding that the former are simply not prepared to meet the needs of the latter. This is the goal of the pilot program as articulated by UNC System president Peter Hans, who cites the need to “prepare students for direct entry into the workforce” and to ensure that UNC keeps pace with businesses’ needs.

This aligns with the vision of reduced-credit degree programs articulated by the College-in-3 Exchange, a “nonprofit organization, reimagining undergraduate education to increase student success while decreasing student costs”—a vision with implicit as well as explicit benefits to students, employers, and awarding institutions alike.

The most common (and most serious) objection to three-year degrees is that the presumed practical benefits will be outweighed by the assumed educational costs. A particularly compelling argument along these lines is made by High Point University professor Matthew Brophy. “To be clear,” he acknowledges, “the UNC request for proposals stipulates that new 90-credit programs must ‘preserve the intellectual depth’ of a traditional undergraduate education. However,” he continues, “the 90-credit model achieves its savings primarily by minimizing general education and restricting elective choice. A curriculum built around workforce alignment and return on investment will treat general education as a technicality to be satisfied— say, by ‘integration’—rather than a foundation to be built upon.” And general education, he rightly observes, “is where students encounter different ways of knowing, learn to reason across domains and develop the intellectual flexibility that makes them adaptable over the long arc of a career.” In other words, general education requirements are not expendable. It is unfortunate that, as Brophy notes, many proponents of reduced-credit programs explicitly advocate reducing the number of general education requirements. But not all do.

There is no single 90-credit model, as the submitted proposals from UNC institutions illustrate. Reporter Korie Dean notes that “a proposal for a 90-credit bachelor’s of science in nursing at N.C. Central would remove gen-ed requirements including English, math, and fitness classes” (emphasis mine). But other proposals retain current gen ed regimens. As Dean also observes,

A proposal from Fayetteville State for a 90-credit business management degree focused on artificial intelligence would preserve the entire 39-credit general education curriculum and ‘streamline’ some business courses to cut 15 credit hours… App State, meanwhile, wants to create programs specifically for students who earn their two-year associate’s degree at a North Carolina community college. The proposal notes that reduced-credit degrees would not be open to traditional first-year students.

How exactly this latter model impacts the number of general education credits that students would take is unclear—but presumably, students would enter the program having already satisfied a number of these requirements.

It also seems unlikely that three-year programs that preserve a robust general education core would “treat general education as a technicality to be satisfied.”  But if there is a danger of this wisdom’s being lost, it is already upon us in our four-year programs. The need to impress it upon students, faculty, and administrators alike is no less pressing there than it might be in three-year programs—as may be the need to revisit and reinvigorate general education requirements and courses.

This is all to say that it is far from certain that three-year degree programs will be less intellectually rigorous or academically demanding than four-year programs. The argument in their favor becomes even more palatable when we see them as the UNC System is framing them: not as replacements for four-year degrees but as alternatives. “We want these programs to attract students (who) might otherwise not choose to come to a UNC System institution at all for any kind of degree,” declared Dan Harrison, UNC System vice president for academic affairs. “We don’t want it, necessarily, to be a sort of situation where we’re taking away from our existing student pool who are in the traditional 120-credit-hour undergraduate degrees to launch these.” 

Implicit in this statement is the recognition that while three-year degrees provide benefits that four-year degrees don’t, the inverse is also true. If this doesn’t mean that the three-year degree must be decidedly inferior to the four-year degree, neither does it mean that it will become the threat to the four-year degree that some fear it may. Education writer Scott Carlson, for example, wonders, “Why would a student opt to pay more for a 120-credit accounting or business degree with a cheaper and faster 90-credit option available? Doesn’t this start a move toward making the 90-credit option a standard?” The answer may be that a student won’t “opt to pay more for a 120-credit accounting or business degree with a cheaper and faster 90-credit option available”; and perhaps this will “start a move toward making the 90-credit option a standard”—at least in certain programs for certain degrees. But why shouldn’t this be the case? Why should all tertiary degrees be four-year degrees—particularly if students can get what they need in three?

Even if the lure of a three-year degree draws some students away from four-year programs, this may ultimately be to the benefit of these programs as well as to the students. Disinterested students will no longer flounder in courses that they don’t see the value in taking to fulfill requirements that don’t necessarily serve them, and departments will be able to better serve the students who are taking those courses because they choose to. 

This could perhaps set our higher ed system on not only one new path, but multiple new paths—multiple tracks for students with different goals seeking different educational experiences. The attempt to be everything to everyone has increasingly forced the university into a one-size mold that is proving to fit almost no one. To date, the measurements seem to have worked well enough for a sizable enough population. But the past few years have seen a sharp increase in people who are opting out—not, it seems, because fewer students desire higher education, but because the available options are less and less appealing to greater numbers of students. The three-year degree would provide them with another option.

It could very well turn out that the time has not yet come for the three-year degree in the U.S. Whatever the case, it does seem that the time has come not only to consider it but to try it. There will, of course, be failed experiments. But there may also be successful ones. The risks seem worth the reward. And not only because of what might be achieved through it, but because of what we are losing without it.

David C. Phillips is an English teacher who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.