A concerned but self-aware student writes,
“This IHE article about three-year degrees is very interesting especially for the fear of falling behind as other states move forward with three-year degrees.
“Three-year degrees will hurt many institutions because they will lose 25% of their revenue unless they can increase their freshman class size. A school with 12k students now (3k per class) will have to have 4k freshmen to keep the money the same. That may be a slight exaggeration since most colleges probably have a mix of three and four years, so schools can’t do more degrees. The field will shrink (unless three-year degrees attract people who had not graduated from college, which seems overly optimistic).
“To combine metaphors, this sounds like colleges are on the edge of a demographic cliff and the race to the bottom has begun. With millions of students taking AP and dual enrollment courses, throw in some online courses that aren’t compatible, and they’ll be able to get a bachelor’s degree in two years or less. We’re on our way to Fr. Guirdu Sardo Sales. Five Minute University.
“I feel like it feeds the critics (like Fr. Guido) who say that people don’t actually teach anything in college … it’s a sign that’s as expensive as a Coach’s bag.
“Maybe I’ve become a curmudgeon against change as I get older, but this worries me. Tell me straight, Matt, am I a curmudgeon?”
Taking the last part first, no, I don’t think that’s curmudgeonly.
To the average person, I would think that this scenario sounds pretty good. College is expensive, and it charges per semester; complete a few semesters and the cost goes down. And that’s before dealing with the true cost of college opportunities. Leaving school a year early makes it easier to start earning full-time income early (assuming employers accept short degrees).
The latter is not new. When I was at DeVry in the ’90s, it ran three 16-week “trimesters” a year, so a student could complete eight semesters in less than three years. Admitted people sold reduced opportunity costs as part of the appeal.
The difference, however, was that students were still required to take eight semesters. 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 most of the world would consider that a feature, not a bug.
Ideally, the interest of colleges would be to produce an educated population. And it’s easy enough to imagine a world where that would be true. But on the bottom line, most colleges rely on tuition for the most money they receive. That shouldn’t be true of government institutions, but after decades of public hardship, it is. In this context, it can be tempting to push back against what sounds like entry into the traditional model, since that entry represents starving colleges of revenue. On campus, the reverse argument may have an impact; off campus, it feels distorted. What some call subsidy cuts others call spending cuts, and both are correct.
For-profit higher education has had a particularly difficult time because there is a difference between the customer always being right and the student always being right. Those of us who spent years—years!—arguing that standards were consistent with service were continually lost to those who might promise a few more butts in the seats, until the public realized that standards had been watered down to the point that qualifications no longer mattered. (The ongoing battles between quantity and quality put me off the field entirely.) Subscriptions were easier to measure than quality, at least in the short term. However, over time the quality reached a level where students had no reason to enroll. The center forgot what it was selling.
I hate to see government agencies follow the same path. The problem is less about the number of years than the frenetic race to put buttocks in seats, and the cumulative effect of that race over time. I’ve seen that movie before, and I know how it ends. If quality is unreliable, the argument for rolling back colleges—or cutting them entirely—makes itself.
Direct claims for financial loss will not succeed on the day; if that was the case, they would have worked by now. Instead, we should focus on making higher education affordable, which of course includes revitalizing the incentives for colleges themselves. At this point, the business model of enrollment-driven public institutions is not far removed from what was for-profit 20 years ago; we should not be surprised to see similar behavior. Instead of rewarding bums in seats, we need to find ways to reward quality. Among other things, that would require defunding the learning center.
That’s a tough sell for a number of reasons, both political and epistemological. But the exception is worse. In high situations, customers are not always right. If that were the case, they wouldn’t need higher education in the first place.
Do you have a question, thought, or opposing opinion? I can be reached at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com.
