Joan Hawthorne, Assistant Provost for Assessment and Achievement, University of North Dakota
Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and former U.S. secretary of education, has become an outspoken and articulate advocate for a change from business-as-usual for higher education. His latest proposal, highlighted as a cover article in the October 26 issue of Newsweek, is that colleges and universities should provide a “three-year option” for well-qualified, intrinsically-motivated students who want to save money by graduating more quickly.
At some level, it’s hard to disagree with his proposal. And, in fact, many students do manage to graduate in three years. Realistically, those students need to arrive on campus with a clear academic focus which remains constant during their course of study. They must enter college with a strong level of preparation, usually including either college or AP credits. And they must be willing and able to take consistently heavy course loads, which likely will make paid work unmanageable.
This last caveat, of course, makes the whole notion out of the question for many UND students, regardless of motivation or preparation. Students in heavily sequenced majors may also find that a three-year path to graduation is impractical. So perhaps an engineering student or a nursing student would struggle to complete the necessary courses (in the required sequence) in three years, but a student majoring in English or psychology perhaps could.
Should UND – and other universities – be developing and “selling” this option to prospective students in all majors?
The prospect of saving as much as 25% of the cost of a college degree has undeniable appeal for students and their parents. But Alexander offers other arguments in favor of his proposal as well. For example, the physical plant of a college is a tremendously expensive resource which is seriously under-utilized for months of every year. The per-student cost of education could conceivably drop considerably if campus buildings were more fully used. And more students than ever will continue on to professional or graduate degree programs, meaning that the bachelor’s degree will be only a first step in their college education. The arguments in favor of shorter degree programs can be compelling.
But there are counter-considerations as well. For example, most students don’t arrive on campus with a clear focus, and some may try out several possible majors before settling on one. Despite the widespread availability of AP courses and college-in-the-schools programs, many students arrive on campus under-prepared for a successful transition to college. Other students couldn’t attend college at all if they didn’t work many hours each week to supplement their financial aid package. Perhaps most important, the traditional “college experience” provides students with a relatively safe environment in which to explore and grow (via friendships, service and volunteer opportunities, extra or co-curricular activities, part-time employment, study abroad and other travel, internships, or any of the other myriad experiences and opportunities available) in ways that could not have been planned. College classes, credits, and majors are reflected on a student’s final transcript, but what gets learned through this hidden curriculum or co-curriculum may be even more valuable than what was learned through a particular program of study.
Even the resource utilization question is more complicated than it first appears. Although classroom facilities are under-utilized from May through August and again during the traditional holiday break, faculty time is fully utilized for much more of the year. Without “down time” from teaching, many faculty would be unable to complete the scholarship which is often a job requirement – and which itself yields benefits to taxpayers and other stakeholders.
And, realistically, reconfiguration of faculty and staff time and institutional spaces would be cost-effective only if a ready supply of students were available to keep classrooms fully occupied. But many institutions (and not only those in demographically-challenged North Dakota) already scramble to maintain a steady flow of in-coming students. Generating enough new students to fill classrooms additional hours of the day and months of the year would be a major challenge.
If, as a result of all these challenges, moving to a three-year college system is untenable except for a very small percentage of students, then it becomes difficult to argue that a major campaign to create and market three-year degree options is economically justified.
For me, the appeal of reexamining conventional degree programs is more intriguingly articulated by Robert Zemsky, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in a five-person “debate” over higher education which appeared in the Newsweek pages immediately following Alexander’s cover article. Zemsky points out that adding three-year programs as simply “another option” would likely be cost-prohibitive. He goes on to argue, however, that making three-year degree programs the standard would not only bring down costs but also “make us rethink everything instead of just rethinking along the perimeter.”
“Rethinking everything” is a genuinely intriguing notion. What if prospective students and their high school teachers knew that students would truly need better preparation in order to be successful in college? What if they knew that college-bound students would need to complete the equivalent (by today’s standards) of at least a semester of college-level credits – maybe including a higher level math course, a higher level writing course, some amount of foreign language, and advanced credits either in a social science (perhaps history or economics) or a science (biology or chemistry) prior to high school graduation? How would that change affect what could happen on a college campus?
What if students understood (as is in fact becoming the case in many fields) that the three-year degree program would be essentially a program of “liberal arts” study albeit with a strong emphasis in math and science, arts and humanities, or social sciences – all prior to a two-year intensively focused professional master’s degree crammed full of career-specific courses? What if a dramatic change in institutional norms forced faculty and administrators to rethink assumptions, reconsider intended learning outcomes, and restructure the curriculum? If we really started from scratch, would our new degree programs and institutions look like the old ones?
There are many indications that it may be time to think differently about higher education: the technological revolution which has changed our communications, the post-World War II revolution which meant that colleges became about educating the masses (for jobs) rather than the elites, the economic revolution in which entire job categories appear and disappear almost overnight, the shrinking-world revolution which means that fewer people than ever live and die within the confines of a single geographic area, the multi-tasking revolution which has us texting and googling while listening. Our system of higher education was born before any of these changes, and it has survived them with only tinkering around the edges. Had the university been invented today, to deal with contemporary students and challenges, it likely would have looked far different than the campus we know.
Higher education is a huge and ultimately conservative endeavor; systemic change comes slowly. And I side with those who love the university and value what it represents. I don’t really want to throw it out and start over. But I fear that, as proved to be the case with General Motors, too much entrenchment is unhealthy for a system.
So if looking seriously at a three-year program of study would force us to re-examine our assumptions, then I’m all for it. If a new paradigm for higher education would allow universities to more effectively educate in a changing world, then I favor it. Bring on the conversation, and let’s see where it takes us.
