The Three-Year Option

In 2009, Robert Zemsky, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed a radical idea: a three-year college degree, which, he argued, would serve as a catalyst for fundamental change in higher education. “It’s time to look for something that will really make us rethink everything instead of just rethinking the things along the perimeter,” he told Newsweek. The idea barely registered. Higher education, long accustomed to the comfortable architecture of 120 credits spread across four years, was not ready to question itself. Accrediting agencies were opposed. Zemsky pressed on anyway, arguing that only a genuine “dislodging event” would force the academy to question its assumptions all at once.

As the cost of higher education continued to rise and draw the ire of policymakers and the public, and with the value of a college degree increasingly questioned, Zemsky and Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, revived the idea in 2022 and contacted selected colleagues to test the waters. The result was a group of like-minded innovative institutions willing to experiment. Thus, the College-in-3 Exchange was born.

A growing collective of US campuses of which I serve as executive director, the College-in-3 Exchange has created not a dislodging event but a gathering movement. Today, at least a hundred institutions of all types are planning, designing, or have launched three-year degrees. The principal institutional accreditors have developed guidelines to review programs of fewer than 120 credits. States, including Indiana and Iowa, are directing public institutions to explore or develop three-year pathways. Other states, such as Utah and Minnesota, have created processes for review of programs of less than 120 credits. What was once a thought experiment is becoming a new pathway to a college degree.

So, why a three-year degree? The most immediate argument is cost. A three-year degree eliminates one year of tuition, fees, and living expenses for students, while delivering graduates to the workforce a year earlier. For students from working-class and middle-income families, that double dividend can be transformative.

Workforce pressures provide a related rationale. Cybersecurity, health care, and AI-adjacent fields have pressing needs for workers. Three-year programs in high-demand fields respond directly to that need, demonstrating that higher education can innovate in service of societal priorities.

The deeper argument is pedagogical, and it begins with an uncomfortable question: Why 120 credits? The 120-credit bachelor’s degree originated not from evidence-based learning theory but from the Carnegie Foundation’s early twentieth-century effort to determine which institutions qualified for a faculty pension scheme—those that offered four full years of liberal arts and sciences. From that effort emerged the credit hour, which has been the coin of the higher education realm ever since. As Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has asserted, “it is increasingly clear that the skills, knowledge, and dispositions needed to succeed in the twenty-first century are not singularly demonstrated through time; yet we are currently stuck in a system that conflates time with learning.” Indeed, prompted by accreditors, institutions have acknowledged the difference between time spent and learning accomplished by designating learning outcomes for courses and programs and assessing students for achievement of these outcomes. The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ VALUE rubrics, the incorporation of competency-based learning in numerous programs, and the use of authentic assessments such as internships and clinical evaluations have helped countless institutions operationalize the recognition that time on task does not measure learning.

The pedagogical argument centers on a candid assessment of the current college degree. What knowledge and abilities should a college graduate have, regardless of the time it takes to acquire them? Does it meet students’ needs or those of the faculty? Does it meet employers’ needs? When designing a three-year degree, faculty must create a coherent, intentional curriculum in fewer credits, thus confronting fundamental questions: What are the essential learning outcomes for this degree? Where is the redundancy in our existing curriculum? These questions require a shift from “What do I want to teach?” to “What do students need to learn?” Three-year degrees are a golden opportunity for institutions to engage in much-needed introspection about their academic programs and to make needed changes.

It is important to clarify what a three-year degree is and is not. Dual enrollment, transfer credit, credit for prior learning, and course overloads have long allowed students to finish in three years or less. What is genuinely new are degree programs designed to require fewer than 120 credits, clear institutional pathways through existing 120-credit curricula, or—most ambitiously—programs designed from the ground up with three-year completion built into their DNA.

Institutions have started small, typically with one to five programs, often in career-oriented fields where employer demand is clearest. Programs at College-in-3 member institutions include cybersecurity degrees at Mount Mary University, Plymouth State University, and Northwood University; public health and education studies at the University of Lynchburg; business at Yavapai College, Brigham Young University-Idaho, and Plymouth State University; and hospitality management, design, computer science, and criminal justice at Johnson & Wales University. The University of Minnesota Morris defines three-year pathways for all its 120-credit programs, and Hartwick College does this for most majors. Goucher College has three-year options for five majors and offers accelerated combination bachelor’s to master’s degrees for other programs. To date, only Ensign College has made all its campus-based programs available in three-year formats of ninety to ninety-eight credits alongside four-year 120 credit versions. Institutions see three-year degree as an alternate pathway, not the only pathway.

Institutions have followed internal governance processes rigorously. Working groups, faculty-led design teams, and institutional approval sequences are the norm, followed by state approval, and accreditation reviews. The process can span two years—but multiple quality checks give the resulting degrees their credibility.

One structural pattern is worth noting. Nearly all three-year programs have preserved existing general education requirements, treating general education reform as a separate long-term project. The redesign energy has focused on the major and on electives—the roughly thirty credits in many four-year programs, constitute something of a curricular wild card.

The three-year-degree movement, like every higher education innovation, has its skeptics. Because so few programs of less than 120 credits have launched and the ones that have started up have yet to graduate their first cohort of students, important questions remain. How will employers evaluate three-year graduates? Will graduate admissions committees penalize candidates who lack the full 120-credit credential? Will institutions that lose a year of tuition revenue find themselves financially worse off, or will they attract students who would otherwise not have enrolled? Will a three-year degree be a second-class credential?

These questions can only be fully addressed over time. Preliminary evidence, gleaned from conversations, indicate that employers are receptive. A College-in-3 study of deans of graduate programs found that institutions already evaluate candidates with nonstandard degrees, such as foreign graduates. College-in-3 is also building a data infrastructure to track learning outcomes and graduate trajectories, although accumulating a critical mass will take time.

A three-year degree, like other innovations, has unknowns and risks. But the status quo carries its own risks—students burdened by debt, employers struggling to fill positions, and an institution whose legitimacy is fraying because it has resisted asking hard questions about its own product.

Three-year degrees are not for every student or for every major or program. Those who want the full exploratory range of a four-year education—or who need four years to find their academic footing—should have that option. But for returning students, career-focused students, or those who want a shorter pathway through a well-designed education, a three-year degree is not a lesser path. It is, for many, the only viable one.

The experiment has become a movement. It is time for the movement to become a norm.