At 34, Giles Sims was tired of being overlooked for job opportunities simply because he lacked a college diploma.
Faced with the challenge of financially supporting his wife and widowed mother, Sims decided he needed a swift remedy. Consequently, the former web developer, who had been laid off, opted into an increasingly popular three-year degree program.
“A four-year absence from the workforce isn’t economically viable for me—it feels like an eternity. The three-year path feels far more manageable,” expressed Sims, who is currently enrolled at Ensign College in Salt Lake City. The private institution recently revised its bachelor’s degree offerings to require fewer courses than the conventional four-year degrees.
These streamlined programs are rapidly gaining traction, with 26 states in the nation now featuring at least one institution that provides a three-year bachelor’s degree, according to a study by the nonprofit organization RAND.
Proponents of these degree programs assert they’re a valuable solution to the affordability issues faced by college students, especially benefiting nontraditional learners like Sims.
Critics, however, worry that they’ll narrow too much what students learn, confuse employers, limit graduate school options and create headaches in fields that require state licenses.
The American Association of University Professors, for one, says the programs devalue the meaning of a college credential.
“This is not innovation. This is just cutting corners,” said Todd Wolfson, AAUP’s president.
A new option to graduate more quickly, but with reduced credit
For decades, colleges have offered accelerated programs that let students finish faster, often by forgoing long summer breaks, maximizing transfer credits and condensing semester-long courses into shorter, five- to 10-week terms.
But those programs maintained the same course load, measured as credits. The new programs let students finish faster by completing as few as 90 credit hours. That shaves a year off the typical 120-hour bachelor’s degree.
Three-year bachelor’s degrees are common in other countries including the United Kingdom, India, France and Italy. But they can create complications for graduates seeking admission to U.S. graduate schools, which sometimes require extra coursework.
Some of the earliest colleges in colonial America, modeled after English institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, initially had three-year degrees, said John Thelin, the author of “A History of American Higher Education.” By the 19th century, the four-year format had taken hold, partly because there wasn’t an established system of public high schools to prepare students, Thelin said.
“The colleges would have to kind of start from scratch,” he said.
A change in accreditation opened the door to shorter degrees
The idea of bringing three-year degrees to the U.S. got attention in 2009 when Robert Zemsky, the founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, argued in a Newsweek cover story that three-year degrees could shake up a broken system.
But there was a roadblock, he recalled recently. “Accreditors said, ‘College is 120 credits, not 90 credits,’” he said.
Years passed. And in 2022, amid mounting concerns about college affordability, Zemsky helped revive the idea. The College-in-3 Exchange was born, and dozens of higher education institutions joined the network to look for ways to help students get degrees faster.
The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities was the first accreditor to say yes in 2023, when it approved reduced-credit programs at Ensign and Brigham Young University-Idaho. Other accreditors quickly followed.
As of May, 119 reduced-credit programs had been publicly announced, according to the RAND analysis, which was conducted to help education officials in Ohio as they weigh the feasibility of reduced-credit degrees.
It comes at a time when tuition and fees averaged $11,950 for in-state students at public schools and $45,000 at private nonprofits last school year, although many students get discounts that reduce the price, according to a report from the College Board, the nonprofit that oversees the SAT.
Some degrees are easier to compress
Private nonprofit schools offer three-quarters of the reduced-credit programs, frequently online. Typically, they compress the majors by reducing electives. Business degrees in fields such as marketing and management are the most common, followed by computer and information sciences.
Other majors, such as engineering, with its extensive math requirements, have been harder to shrink. And RAND found just six reduced-credit degrees in teacher education, which involves real-world experience requirements and state licensure.
Jill Cohen, 42, lives on a ranch in rural Yoder, Colorado, and is completing her teaching degree through one such program at Indiana Wesleyan.
She quit her old job selling life insurance and turned to teaching after a farming accident nearly claimed her life. Already, she is in the classroom, teaching middle school English, as she works on the degree through a special “Grow Your Own” program designed to address staff shortages.
Because her home is busy — she has twin 12-year-olds, along with a menagerie that includes horses, goats and chickens — she appreciates the streamlined degree.
“Why do I need to take, you know, underwater basket weaving when I could just take the evolutionary structure of the English language — what I’m going to be teaching,” she said.
However, programs with state licensing requirements are one of the biggest worries for Jenna Kramer, a policy researcher at RAND.
Indiana Wesleyan, which has a growing slate of reduced-credit offerings, said its education programs are specifically designed to meet Indiana licensing requirements. Students from elsewhere will need to check if the programs meet their state requirements, said Pam Downing, the school’s director of communications, in an email.
The RAND report also found the programs are so new that there are no standard practices for admitting three-year degree recipients into graduate school.
Students acknowledge it’s a gamble
Gabriella Staten, a 20-year-old student in the reduced-credit digital marketing program at Mount Mary University, a Catholic women’s institution in Milwaukee, estimates it will save her at least $20,000. While she sometimes wonders whether employers will take her degree as seriously as a four-year degree, she decided she could prove herself.
“Even if they were to look a little bit down on the three-year pathway, I can show them otherwise with the work,” she said.
Wesley Hardy, who is three semesters into a bachelor of applied science in accounting at Ensign, also sees the pros and cons. He likes that the three-year format will get him into the workforce faster.
But he noted that the requirements to become a certified public accountant — something he has considered — vary by state. Many require 120 semester hours to sit for the exam and 150 to become licensed. Graduate school often is needed.
Bruce Kusch, president of Ensign, said he has talked to multiple college presidents and doesn’t anticipate that graduate school will be a problem. But Hardy, 22, has questions about how it would work.
“Would I have to take extra classes?” he asked. “It’s definitely something I’ve thought of.”
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