The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2008, Friday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 14, 2008, Friday

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Why Colleges Should Offer 3-Year Diplomas

By GEORGE KELLER

Educators need to be more imaginative in finding ways to slow or reduce the alarming rise in the cost of college. Since 1981 higher education has been the fastest-growing component of the Consumer Price Index, and tuition rates at nearly all institutions show few signs of leveling off.

For the 2006-7 academic year, tuition and fees at public institutions rose 6.3 percent, and those at private colleges increased 5.9 percent, both double the inflation rate. The College Board estimates that, to pay such tuition bills, students and their parents borrowed more than $157-billion from the federal government in 2005-6 and at least $17-billion from private lenders. That escalation has become a serious worry for parents, state legislators, and economists.

In Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much (Harvard University Press, 2000), Ronald G. Ehrenberg, an economist and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, details the ingenious attempts to reduce expenditures when he became Cornell University's vice president for academic programs, planning, and budgeting, in 1995. He paints a vivid picture of how so many faculty members pay little attention to the rising costs at their institutions and tend to behave like independent entrepreneurs or henchmen in their disciplines, ignoring their universities' need to be more frugal.

Higher education's costs cannot be reduced much more through additional incremental cuts. Only major structural redesign can result in significant decreases. And colleges need to introduce some major alterations, if only to show the public that academe is sensitive to the mounting indignation at ever-increasing tuition and fees.

The health-care field has, to some extent, restructured itself to stem escalating costs in its services. Higher education should follow with its own rationally chosen renovations.

At least two structural reforms could make a difference for anxious students, parents, and legislators. The first is to replace many four-year undergraduate programs with three-year programs. The reasons are numerous. Each year more and more students take Advanced Placement tests, and so a growing number of college students have achieved sophomore status, or close to it, when they enroll.

Further, a higher percentage of college graduates than ever go on to graduate or professional schools, so the necessity for undergraduates to major in some subject for depth in a discipline is undercut — students will "major" in law, engineering, medicine, business, or some other field during their graduate study. More than 90 percent of graduates of the most renowned colleges, and nearly three-quarters of graduates of solid four-year colleges, pursue graduate work. The century-old major requirement is now largely an anachronism, although academic departments continue to argue for its maintenance.

Moreover, college students are usually older now than were students of a century ago. (Charles Eliot, longtime president of Harvard University, entered college at age 15 and graduated before he was 20.) So students may now require less than four years of college life to prepare for the future. Information technology also allows students to learn from online courses and two-way video conferencing, which makes eight semesters on campus less important. Then, too, the explosion in continuing education allows graduates to add a course or two that they might regret not having taken while in college.

In fact, the number of students who finish their undergraduate degrees in seven semesters is growing. At the Johns Hopkins University, for example, more than 20 percent annually complete their degrees at least one semester early.

Undergraduate studies in Britain are three years in length; the same is true at many Canadian universities. Similarly, the European Union agreed in 1999, as part of the Bologna Process, on three years as a common length of undergraduate studies, to rationalize the disparate time arrangements of different European countries.

In the United States, the concept of a three-year baccalaureate is not new; it caught the nation's attention more than 100 years ago, at Harvard. President Eliot thought college took too long, especially with the development of summer schools and the opening of more graduate programs and professional schools. From 1896 to 1900, one-sixth of Harvard students completed their undergraduate work in three years; in 1906, 36 percent of the university's B.A. recipients did so. After World War II, many veterans, with the help of the GI Bill, attended summer school and took extra courses to finish college in three years.

Then, in the early 1990s, S. Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College, advocated that, at least at selective colleges like his, a three-year bachelor's degree should be introduced, to "reduce the cost to students by nearly one-quarter." For dedicated athletes, underprivileged minority students and immigrant youth, and students who needed some remedial work, some form of preparatory fourth year could be maintained. Two years later, Gerhard Casper, president of Stanford University, joined Starr and proposed that Stanford consider offering a three-year degree to reduce the rising costs of elite higher education and to slow the escalating costs of institutional financial-aid budgets. Casper also believed that the new technology would enable many students to complete courses off the campus. But neither the Oberlin nor the Stanford faculty was more than lukewarm about the proposals.

Today a handful of America's four-year colleges offer a three-year option. But the concept continues to be resisted, and institutions seem content to pass on the four-year financial burden to students, who often need to work part-time and take out loans to pay for rapidly rising tuition.

A second structural change — to help reduce costs for students, support three-year degrees, and use well-equipped campus facilities more efficiently — is for students to attend college year-round, with a four-semester schedule. Some private colleges already use their campuses all year, and several states are considering such a requirement at their public universities. The current two-semester academic year is, in fact, based on the agricultural cycle of the previous century, when many students were needed to help with spring planting and fall harvesting. But colleges no longer need to lie fallow for nearly three months a year.

Switching to year-round operations would require new arrangements to continue giving faculty members the time off to write, travel, and do research. Semesters could be reduced to 12 weeks, and other innovative steps would have to be taken. But a college with a four-semester scheme could not only cut costs for students by reducing their time to degree completion, but also increase its own revenues. Moreover, such a change would help diminish two of the public's criticisms of higher education: that institutions are prodigal and inefficient, and that many professors have too soft a life, with a work year of only eight to nine months.

One could point to other structural alterations to the American higher-education enterprise that should be considered — for example, truly reforming collegiate athletics by professionalizing Division I football and basketball, or reducing the number of administrators. While publications on planning nearly always offer better strategic ways to compete against other rival institutions, very few analyses offer ideas for fundamental change that can truly reduce the escalating price of college. But although small incremental improvements and better strategic methods and designs may continue to help academe, it is clear that further financial tinkering within the century-old structure of higher education is no longer sufficient.

George Keller, who died last year, was chairman of the department of higher-education studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and author of Academic Strategy (1983) and Transforming a College (2004), published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This essay is adapted from Higher Education and the New Society, published this month by Johns Hopkins.