Don’t Water Down the Bachelor’s Degree

Should it take four years to earn a bachelor’s degree? No. If you can earn a bachelor’s degree at Oxford or Cambridge Universities in three years, why not at Harvard, Florida State, or the University of Oklahoma? Is the three-year degree being promoted by some in Virginia and Ohio, therefore, a good thing? No, because it appears to aim to achieve this goal by reducing the academic work required by about 25 percent, to about halfway between what an associate degree and a traditional bachelor’s degree require.

In the 17th, 18th, and some of the 19th centuries, the four-year bachelor’s degree made some sense, since many students came from farming families, where their labor was in high demand during the peak summer growing season. Today, only about two percent of the labor force is involved in farming because of the Agricultural Revolution that has spread worldwide. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, a large proportion of students take five, six, or even more years to earn their degrees.

My main concern with the Virginia-Ohio proposal is that it appears to dilute the academic content of the traditional bachelor’s degree by 25 percent when it is totally unnecessary to do so, even with a three-year period of study. Do the math. A typical college semester lasts 15 or, at most, 16 weeks. Eight semesters, completed in slightly less than four years, typically today, can be completed in 120 to 128 weeks, or between 2.3 and 2.5 years, allowing for a degree to be completed in three years, still allowing for some vacation and holiday breaks, and even perhaps a vocationally oriented internship of 2-3 months.

The potential economic gains are immense. College classrooms, dorms, and cafeterias, currently unused for about four months each year, would see fuller use. Faculty could work 48 weeks a year instead of 32, as physicians and lawyers do, and earn more income. In the fourth year after high school, graduating college students would be at a full-time job at a far higher pay rate than they earned as a part-time student barista or running a grocery store checkout line.

Largely because of grade inflation, I have understated the problem. Governmental time-use surveys typically show that college students spend less than 30 hours a week on academic chores, for about 32 weeks a year. That is less time annually than they spent on schooling at the beginning of their teenage years in the seventh grade. Can’t we expect more, not less, effort from 20-year-old college students than from 12-13-year-old school kids? Aren’t they supposed to be transitioning between childhood and adulthood?

The time is ripe for real higher education reform. Enrollments are lower than they were 15 years ago, and public support for colleges is at a low ebb, huge problems for a sector that cannot meet its current financial obligations from the tuition fees of students alone. While university-level research is needed, the vast majority of faculty write little-cited research papers, much of it on subjects of at-most-marginal interest, even in a society that highly values the discovery and dissemination of new ideas.

An important villain in creating this sad state of affairs is the accrediting agencies, which are largely controlled by the colleges and universities themselves. My guess is that a school that announced it is going to an innovative year-round schedule and offer what is now a four-year degree in only three years might face accreditation woes from its regional accreditation agency. State colleges and universities would face questions from legislators, state regulatory bodies, and/or hostile competitors. In some cases, faculty and/or staff labor unions would cry foul and attempt to block change.

The most fundamental problem with the proposed change is that it is coming at a time when the United States is retreating from its long-deserved reputation as a nation with a ferocious work ethic. Europeans often take five-week summer vacations and provide generous paid parental leave to new parents, while Americans have historically taken closer to three weeks of vacation, and paid parental leave for fathers has been virtually unknown. The move to become more efficient and more rational is coming as more Americans are rejecting the work ethic and values that made America the greatest large nation, a rejection in part a result of a left-wing anti-market ideology fomented in both our primary and secondary schools as well as our colleges and universities.

Sure, we should have three year bachelor’s degrees, but also we should have more rigorous expectations of our students, less ideology and more learning, more about truth and beauty and less complaining about our amazingly successful American Exceptionalism that has made us the most successful human society that has ever graced this planet.

This article is part of a Minding the Campus discussion on the growing movement toward three-year bachelor’s degrees. Read the introduction to the discussion, “Three Years or Four?“, along with companion essays by David Randall and Suzannah Alexander.