Education Frontlines
John Richard Schrock
3-year, 90-credit hour ‘bachelor’s degrees’ on the rise
Kansas and other states are considering official recognition of reduced-credit college degrees in the midst of assessments showing decreasing student K-12 academic competency and reduced student numbers attending U.S. higher education.
One of the most serious erosions of college degrees has been the questionable all-online programs of the last two decades. While most have maintained supposedly four-year, 120-credit hour degrees, it is not surprising that online programs at BYU-Idaho, Ensign College, Johnson & Wales University and Plymouth State University were among the earliest to offer three-year lower-credit bachelor degrees.
Public universities now in the “College-in-3 Exchange” include the College of New Jersey, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, the Universities of Minnesota at Rochester and Morris, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Utah Tech University.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported how Indiana enacted a law requiring each public university to review all four-year degrees “…with an eye toward making some of them three years.” It required “…that by July 1, 2025, each state university offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years.” Indiana’s Butler University now offers three-year bachelor’s degree tracks for more than 40 academic majors.”
In Missouri, William Jewell College now has three-year degree options in a number of majors. Hawaii Pacific just established a three-year bachelor’s degree in “global business.” Some universities limit three-year bachelor’s degrees to narrow fields that supposedly do not need as much coursework, but they fail to explain why that would not fit an associate’s degree instead.
Additional factors are ignored. Nearly 60% of U.S. university students change majors at least once, resulting in the average college graduate taking five and a half years to complete a bona fide degree. The university-is-a-business college executives totally disregard that higher education needs to include general education so that students have a deeper understanding of civics, history, art, music, etc. and thus have a life after they come home from making a living.
Student reasons for three-year bachelor’s degrees include graduating earlier to enter the workforce sooner and avoiding a fourth year of expensive tuition and board. College administrative reasons include reversing the decline in student enrollment as the high school graduation population shrinks as well as competing with other institutions. The rate of higher education closures is increasing.
England and many Commonwealth countries use the General Certificate of Secondary Education to certify academic achievement. China has the most massive National College Entrance Examination or gāo kao, while South Korea uses the College Scholastic Ability Test, Taipei the General Scholastic Ability Test or Joint College Entrance Examination and Japan, the National Center Test for University Admissions. India uses an assortment of regional tests including the Joint Entrance Examination (engineering) and Common Law Admission Test. All ensure students graduating high school are academically prepared for college.
In contrast, the U.S. lacks true end-of-high-school test filters to determine who is academically prepared to attend college. Many U.S. universities dropped test score requirements of either the SAT or ACT tests for university admissions during the pandemic, and less than 10% now have such filters. Meanwhile, most states have increased their high school graduation rates from 70% to over 90% by ordering teachers to stop assigning F’s. Failure to hand in an assignment no longer results in a zero; the grade scale must start at 50%, etc.
In addition, the award of college credit to high school students (called dual enrollment) — initially intended for the few exceptional high performers — has become common practice for average students. Many now enter college with one or two years of college coursework credit for high school courses.
When high school students actually leave in the afternoons to attend courses at actual local colleges, this is likely a valid course credit. And if they took the course at high school, taught by a secondary teacher with 18 master’s level credits in the field, that is probably a bona fide college course. But the accreditation agencies that established those criteria have since allowed courses taught by secondary teachers without master’s credentials to be counted as college credits. Many U.S. students are now entering higher education with up to two years of often questionable college credit.
Sonny Ramaswamy, who led the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (2018-25) advocates for three-year programs that focus on competency for a specific profession and asserts that three years is adequate to develop professional skills as well as be accepted for further graduate school. He pointed out that that some European college degrees are completed in three years. What he and other advocates miss is that the British system of education is not K-12 as in the U.S., but is a system where more secondary courses are taught in “upper forms” and result in the equivalent of K-13 — an extra year of schooling compared to the U.S. Thus, a British three-year college degree is equal to a current four-year U.S. bachelor’s degree in educational study time.
This continued movement to water down U.S. college credit requirement reflects a U.S. anti-intellectual culture and “education is just for job-training” mentality.
Go back to the 1700s and a medical doctor trained merely as an apprentice under an experienced doctor. In the mid-1800s, Dr. Samuel Mudd (who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg) took two years of college. But after the germ theory breakthrough of Pasteur and Koch, the ability to conduct extensive surgery expanded, and the education of a medical doctor soon required more than four years of college, with further specialization of knowledge today requiring study up to near age 30! But none of that advancement of medical care would have been possible unless the general population likewise moved from a small portion graduating elementary school in the 1800s to now providing high school (and more) for the general population of patients. Advanced doctors cannot successfully treat stupid patients who believe in miasmas and other superstitions.
Progression forward with more education for the public is critical for society to advance. The dilution of learning that is occurring in the U.S. in both K-12 and higher education through this redefinition of the bachelor’s degree is a serious step backward.