Two Plus One Equals Four Minus One

Math is full of life lessons. For example, mathematically speaking, subtracting a negative number has the same effect as adding a positive number. Anyone who has managed groups knows that there are times when addition by subtraction is the right move.*

I was reminded of that in reading proposals about, and reactions to, the idea of three-year bachelor’s degrees.

Three-year degrees aren’t a new idea. When I was at DeVry, it taught three 15-week semesters per year. As a faculty member, I hated it, but even I understood the appeal of saying to students that they could finish eight semesters in less than three years. It reduced the opportunity cost of a degree by a year’s salary. But the current proposals aren’t for year-round instruction; they’re for reducing a 120-credit degree to 90 credits or the equivalent. Rather than compression, the current proposals work by reduction.

Nearly every proposal, and reaction, assumes that “four-year” colleges would be the ones to award three-year degrees. Posed that way, it’s presented as an exercise in subtraction. But there’s an alternative.

Two plus one equals four minus one. Put differently, community colleges would make natural homes for applied three-year bachelor’s degrees.

The single most common argument for three-year degrees is reducing the cost of college. Community colleges are already the low-cost providers on the scene. Adding junior-level classes in business management, logistics or certain technical fields wouldn’t change that.

In many states, dual-enrollment classes have eaten away at campus enrollments in first-year gen ed courses. Adding junior-level classes to community colleges could offset those losses even while making the pathway to the bachelor’s degree more affordable.

Although more community colleges have dorms now than 20 years ago, they’re still the exception, and most community college students live at home. Taking dorm life out of the equation reduces the cost to the student. Most people in the U.S. live within commuting distance of a community college, and most community colleges at this point have reasonably robust online offerings for those who don’t. (Some of us have seen online offerings eat away at branch campus enrollments, somewhat tipping the balance toward online.) By and large, community colleges have been relatively immune to the budgetary and cultural distortions of big-time athletics programs. They are the low-cost, local, unpretentious providers that policymakers claim to want to see.

I can imagine this proposal landing with a thud at some struggling four-year campuses, for obvious reasons. For them, it represents subtraction. I get that. And there’s a perfectly compelling argument—one with which I’m in broad agreement—that measuring learning in units of time is fundamentally mistaken in the first place. It’s a category error that leads, through the relentless logic of Baumol’s cost disease, to higher costs over time. But moving away from time-based measures seems to be a longer-term fix, even if ultimately a better one.

Legislatures haven’t shown a lot of appetite for—or, frankly, understanding of—long-term outlooks. They tend not to look past the next election. (In my state, Pennsylvania, the House is controlled by Democrats and the Senate by Republicans. Unsurprisingly, the state missed its annual budget deadline again, with cascading effects throughout the state. To steal Sarah Kendzior’s line, Pennsylvania is purple like a bruise.) If the three-year bachelor’s degree is what has captured their attention, then let’s at least do that right. It will save students money and keep the most affordable branch of higher education healthy.

If we go in that direction, we might actually improve access and cut costs for a while. Ideally, that would buy time to remake the entire system around learning-based measures, rather than time-based measures. At the very least, it would acknowledge the basic truth that two plus one equals four minus one. We can figure out the rest later.

* Of course, math can also lie. For example, according to math, I’m as close to 77 as I am to 37. That’s clearly preposterous and calls the entire enterprise into question.