A worried but self-aware reader writes,
“This IHE article about three-year degrees is very interesting, especially the fear of being left behind as other states move forward with three-year degrees. I have long thought that once this door opens there will be a land rush.
“Three-year degrees will hurt many institutions because they will lose 25% of their revenue unless they can increase the size of their freshman class. A school that has 12k students now (3k per class) would need to have 4k freshmen to keep the revenue the same. That might be a bit of an exaggeration since most colleges would probably have a mix of three- and four-year degrees. But the point is we cannot manufacture more students, so if all schools go to three years, then the sector will shrink (unless three-year degrees attract people who would have otherwise skipped college, which seems overly optimistic).
“To mix metaphors, this feels like colleges are at the edge of the demographic cliff and the race to the bottom has begun. With millions of students taking AP and dual-enrollment courses, throw in some asynchronous online courses, and they will be able to get a bachelor’s degree in two years or less. We are on the road to Fr. Guido Sarducci’s Five-Minute University.
“I feel like it feeds the cynics (like Fr. Guido) who say that people don’t actually learn anything in college … it’s just an expensive signal like a Coach bag.
“Maybe I have turned into a curmudgeon who resists change as I have aged, but this worries me a bit. Tell it to me straight, Matt, am I a curmudgeon?”
To take the last part first, no, I don’t think that’s curmudgeonly.
To a civilian, I could imagine this scenario actually sounding pretty good. College is expensive, and it charges by the semester; lop off a couple of semesters and the cost comes down. And that’s before addressing the very real opportunity cost of college. Getting out of school a year earlier makes it easier to start earning full-time money earlier (assuming employers embrace the shorter degree).
The latter isn’t a new observation. When I was at DeVry in the ’90s, it ran three 16-week “trimesters” per year, so a student could finish eight semesters in less than three years. The admissions folks sold the reduced opportunity cost as part of the appeal.
The difference, though, was that students were still required to take the equivalent of eight semesters. The new degrees only require the equivalent of six. Combine that with dual enrollment or AP/IB, and the need for traditional college classes—and the people who teach them—is threatened.
That’s true, but much of the country would consider that a feature, not a bug.
Ideally, the interest of colleges would be in producing a well-educated population. And it’s easy enough to imagine a world in which that would be true. But on the ground, most colleges rely on tuition for the majority of their revenue. That wasn’t supposed to be true of public institutions, but after decades of public austerity, it is. In this context, it can be tempting to push back against what feel like incursions on the traditional model, since those incursions stand to starve colleges of revenue. On campus, the argument for pushing back can be persuasive; off campus, it sounds perverse. What some call funding cuts others call cost cuts, and both are correct.
For-profit higher education fell upon hard times mostly because there’s a difference between saying a customer is always right and saying that a student is always right. Those of us who spent years—years!—arguing that standards were inherent to the service consistently lost to those who could promise a few more butts in seats, until the public realized that the standards had been so watered down that the degrees had become meaningless. (The constant battles between quantity and quality drove me out of the sector entirely.) Enrollment was easier to measure than quality, at least in the short term. Eventually, though, quality hit a level at which point students had no reason to enroll. The institution forgot what it was selling.
I hate to see public institutions follow the same path. The issue is less the number of years than the frantic race to put butts in seats, and the cumulative effect of that race over time. I’ve seen that movie before, and I know how it ends. Once quality isn’t credible, the argument for cutting colleges back—or cutting them altogether—makes itself.
Straightforward claims about funding loss aren’t likely to win the day; if they were, they would have worked by now. Instead, we should focus on making higher education worth paying for, which necessarily involves rejiggering the incentives of colleges themselves. At this point, the business model of enrollment-driven public institutions isn’t far from what the for-profits were doing 20 years ago; we shouldn’t be surprised to see similar behavior. Instead of rewarding butts in seats, we need to find ways to reward quality. Among other things, that would require decoupling institutional budgets from tuition.
That’s a tough sell for a host of reasons, both political and epistemological. But the alternative is much worse. In higher ed, customers aren’t always right. If they were, they wouldn’t need higher education in the first place.
Have a question, a thought, or an ideological objection? I can be reached at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
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