College Degrees Take Too Long, But True Innovation Is Hard

For 30 years two facts have remained true about the path to a college degree.

Successful bachelor’s degree completion rates have hovered around 60% and a consistent chorus of people unhappy with this percentage have called for changes to allow students to complete degrees more quickly. Yet even with a demonstrated need and a clear desire for change, there has been frustratingly little innovation.

When judging the quality of any time-extended processes, the probability of successful completion is a good barometer. Whether it’s a meal, a cross-country trip, or a book, the assumption is there will be progress from start to finish. Someone exiting part-way through suggests that the design may have flaws. Natural corrective actions might be to change the content of the experience or to reconsider its length. In the case of college degrees, both types of changes would benefit students as the most common reasons for failure to complete are running out of money to pay for education or poor counseling, particularly in regard to preparation and navigating the morass of required courses.

There largely have been two kinds of attempts to innovate. The first is new approaches that try to move students through the process more quickly. These include taking courses during the summer, taking more classes during the term, restructuring terms, or seeking credit through high school exams such as AP or equivalency exams such as CLEP rather than college courses.

A second type of innovation looks at how the time factor might be changed, particularly the requirement of 120 credit hours to earn a bachelor’s degree.

While 120 credit hours might seem arbitrary, it is a number deeply entrenched in the fabric of higher education. Four of the six main regional accreditation agencies have the 120 credit-hour figure hard-wired into bachelor’s degree requirements, and while the other two organizations do not explicitly require 120 credit hours, this has been their de facto standard.

Consequently, every college course catalog is likely to feature a declaration that degrees require a minimum of 120 semester credit hours. As such a Google
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search for “require a minimum of 120 credits” yields roughly 30,000 results. This numbr is so powerful that students from countries where the bachelor’s degree can be completed in three years may find themselves ineligible to enter master’s degree programs at American universities.

A dozen colleges and universities who have been trying to buck this trend met in early April 2023 to discuss various pilot programs to accomplish a 3-year degree with 90-100 credit hours. These degrees would not only accelerate progress from start to finish by a year. They also would reduce the total number of required courses, typically electives or general education classes, while keeping academic majors intact. While only a few of these colleges have brought proposals formally to their accrediting body, no school has had a proposal approved to date.

To surmounting this obstacle the accrediting bodies are only the first hurdle. Some states, such as Virginia and California have the 120 credit-hour requirement enshrined in their legal codes. And while other states have requirements that any degree requiring more than 120 credit hours be clearly justified, there has been little to no pushback at the state level against the 120-credit hour threshold itself.

What Can Be Done?

Answering this question first requires identifying the value of a college education. Is it the knowledge acquired in the process of completing the degree or is it the signal conveyed by having the piece of paper that says you have completed the degree?Colleges tend to favor the latter, with examples including MIT OpenCourseWare, and the willingness with which they have embraced massive open online courses. Both initiatives freely giving access to the underlying educational content, but not the college degree itself. How long will this remain the case?

Historically successful completion of a degree showed a student was fundamentally trainable in a job, giving prospective employers confidence that applicants could learn whatever skills they would need to succeed. But as serious academic degree requirements have given way to less rigorous courses, the value of a college degree as a marker of capability grows weaker. And as the reasons why students fail to complete degrees become better understood, it is difficult to distinguish between a signal of capability and one of socio-economic status.

At the same time, career-focussed boot camps such as the AP Academy, and career-gating examinations, such as Chartered Financial Analyst, provide better knowledge, clearer signals, or both. As employers tune into the true value of college degrees versus actual knowledge and skills, this landscape will continue to shift. Rather than counting on degrees and majors over which they lack influence and which are laden with general education requirements having no clear utility, companies may begin to seek job candidates who can provide the right combination of coursework and certificates showing they have the needed skills. That kind of pressure might be sufficient for leaders from within the ranks of the universities and regional accreditors to rework the definition of the bachelor’s degree and preserve its utility to employers. Until then, the rule of 120 is likely to remain firmly entrenched.