CSUN University News Clippings

A Former Secretary of Education Backs Exploring 3-Year Degrees

(October 20, 2009)

By Jack Kadden
Published: 10/19/09

Comparing the American university to the American auto industry may seem incongruous. While Detroit’s auto manufacturers are struggling to survive, American universities are the envy of the world.

But in a cover article in Newsweek, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, a former federal secretary of education and the former president of the University of Tennessee, warns that American universities may be at risk, like the automakers 40 years ago — victims of their own success and their unwillingness to adopt new ideas.

Senator Alexander argues that it is time to consider the three-year college degree, as schools like Hartwick College in New York and Lipscomb University in Tennessee have already done.

By eliminating that extra year, three-year degree students save 25 percent in costs. Instead of taking 30 credits a year, these students take 40. During January, Hartwick runs a four-week course during which students may earn three to four credits on or off campus, including a number of international sites. Summer courses are not required, but a student may enroll in them—and pay extra. Three-year students get first crack at course registration. There are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay.

He notes that many colleges have made it easier to get credit for Advanced Placement courses, and he points out that for students who plan to get an advanced degree, graduating from college in three years could be very attractive. But he admits there is a downside.

For one, it deprives students of the luxury of time to roam intellectually. Compressing everything into three years also leaves less time for growing up, engaging in extracurricular activities, and studying abroad. On crowded campuses it could mean fewer opportunities to get into a prized professor’s class. Iowa’s Waldorf College has graduated several hundred students in its three-year-degree programs, but is now phasing out the option. Most Waldorf students wanted the full four-year experience—academically, socially, and athletically. And faculty members will be wary of any change that threatens the core curriculum in the name of moving students into the workforce.

As The Choice reported in August, Robert Zemsky, a professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, offers an argument for three-year degrees in his book, “Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education” (Rutgers).

Publication: The New York Times