Some colleges — including in Arizona — are offering bachelor’s degrees in only 3 years

A growing number of colleges and universities around the country are offering three-year bachelor’s degrees.

That includes Northern Arizona University. The state Board of Regents earlier this year approved bachelor of professional studies programs in hospitality business administration and engineering technology.

These degrees require 90 credits instead of the usual 120. And not only are schools offering them, but accrediting agencies are approving them.

Johanna Alonso, admissions and enrollment reporter at Inside Higher Ed, has written about this. The Show spoke with her and started with what’s behind this trend of colleges and universities offering three-year bachelor’s degrees.

Full conversation

JOHANNA ALONSO: Yeah, well, it’s something that’s been talked about for well over a decade now, and the main point is just to help students get their degrees quicker and get them into the job market quicker and for less money.

And it’s been tried in a few different ways, including just letting students take more courses or take summer courses to finish up more quickly. But my article focused a little bit more on actually cutting down on the number of credits and therefore the number of classes that students need to graduate.

MARK BRODIE: Obviously, as you say, it takes less time, it’s less expensive.

I wonder though if there’s a concern that if you are taking fewer classes and getting fewer credit hours, are you learning as much as maybe you would want to or need to in three years versus four?

ALONSO: Yeah, that is definitely sort of the key question on a lot of people’s minds with regards to three-year degrees. So, yeah, a lot of people think that the liberal arts element of college — because electives are the things that are going away in most cases. At most universities that have reduced credit degrees, the way they’re getting that number down is by getting of electives

So, no one’s necessarily worried about the major being watered down because in most cases the major classes are exactly the same. But the electives, you don’t have to take as many electives. And so it basically comes down to are those an integral part of the higher ed experience and of the education and if you don’t take that, you’re having a worse experience or you won’t be ready for the job market; versus some people feel they’re a little superfluous, especially not in every case but maybe for someone who’s had a lot of life experience, they’re not fresh out of high school. But it’s contentious.

BRODIE: Yeah. Are there particular degrees or particular types of majors that are seeing these offerings in three years as opposed to four?

ALONSO: Well, when me and Bob Zemsky, who is sort of the founder of this idea, talked about it, he wanted to make it clear that he felt this could be done in a wide variety of majors and programs.

However, to start out, a lot of colleges are primarily looking at this for pretty professional programs, like pre-physical therapy, cybersecurity, things of that nature. So at the moment, it’s really, really skewing in that direction.

And what Dr. Zemsky said was that he basically feels like at least part of this has to do with the fact that professors within like the humanities — he talked about history, which is his field specifically — are really reluctant to this idea, and feel that, yeah, as we mentioned it, it could devalue higher education.

So I think right now it’s definitely mostly in that professional space, but as we move forward, that could change. That definitely wasn’t the original vision for it to only be for a very small set of majors.

BRODIE: Well, other than him, does it seem as though there is an effort to maybe expand it to more of sort of the classical liberal arts type majors?

ALONSO: To be honest, of the people I spoke with, it wasn’t something that at least seemed top of mind. When I spoke with people at universities — well, I spoke with, the president of the university, and when I spoke with some accreditors — they didn’t bring it up and they seem to, when I asked about what kind of majors were being focused here, they seem to feel that it’s the easiest to map it on to some sort of professional program where again, it doesn’t feel like the liberal arts element is as intrinsic.

Again, that is open to interpretation. But there’s sort of a sense that if you’re studying pre-physical therapy, you’re gonna be a physical therapist. There could be more of a straight shot. Whereas if you’re a history major, it’s easier for a lot of people to see a relationship between history and whatever other sort of electives you’re taking, say, in music or the arts or something like that.

BRODIE: So you mentioned accreditors and I’m curious what you found about why those groups decided to get on board with this because that’s obviously a pretty big deal if universities want to be able to do this in any meaningful way.

ALONSO: Yeah, it’s been a huge deal that accreditors are now on board. Last spring, spring of 2024, very few accreditors were getting on board, but a few were just starting to move the needle. And now, a lot, maybe all of the major regional accreditors have some framework for allowing a college to introduce a reduced credit program.

So speaking with them, they were mostly stressing just the fact that they’re not interested in being stuck in the past. They want to be able to innovate along with the universities that they accredit. But they, like so many other people in this discussion, are concerned about the quality. And they’re also looking out for students in terms of things like, will graduate programs take a three-year, 90-credit bachelor’s?

So for example, if you got a 90-credit cybersecurity degree and you want to go on to some sort of master’s or Ph.D. program, would you be able to get in with that degree? That being said, no one knows exactly what the reactions are going to be and if they’re going to be universal. Some graduate schools might say yes, some graduate schools might say no, or it might be a case-by-case basis.

So it seems that across the board what most of these larger creditors said was, we’re definitely willing to give people a shot at this or give universities a shot to try this. But all of them sort of said, caveat, we definitely want to be measuring sort of the learning outcomes as well as looking into things like how employers and graduate schools view these things. And most of them sort of said that if we approve such a program, we’re doing it as something like a pilot where — they do check in with all programs on a regular basis — but they will be checking in on these programs in the future to make sure that they’re sort of working out as they should.

BRODIE: How significant will those sort of check-ins be to determine how prevalent this becomes and maybe how much it expands to other universities and other programs?

ALONSO: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think that some universities — well I should give the caveat that I didn’t really talk to universities that aren’t already considering this for this program; that would definitely be an interesting thing to look at. But what I would expect would be that other universities will definitely be looking at this, at the successes of these first programs to see if it’s something worth pursuing, definitely in whether in five years they come out with strong outcomes, also just looking at if these programs are popular, like is there any interest?

One thing that also didn’t make it into my article that I’m hoping to write about this fall is that I did hear a couple people say sort of, “We don’t necessarily think students are gonna flock to this.” And then also, yes, looking at the learning outcomes and all that and I should say even if these programs aren’t like excessively successful, that doesn’t mean that colleges won’t be interested in them. But there’s sort of a level of interest and enrollment and interest from students that they’ll have to get to sort of demonstrate to other colleges that their students might find value in this.