The Bad Idea Gaining Traction in Higher Ed (opinion)

As employers integrate artificial intelligence, they are rethinking—and increasingly eliminating—entry-level roles. For generations, those jobs gave recent college graduates and other new hires a place to build professional judgment while performing more straightforward tasks.

At the same time, a perplexingly bad idea is gaining popularity across higher education and in policy circles—the so-called three-year bachelor’s degree.

One argument in favor of this idea is reducing student debt, a topic of great concern to students, families, higher ed institutions and lawmakers. Yet national data offers a more nuanced picture of undergraduate debt than the headlines often suggest. Among students who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2023–24, fewer than half (47 percent at public universities and 49 percent at private nonprofit colleges and universities) graduated with student loans. Those who borrowed owed an average of $27,420 and $34,420, respectively—about the average cost of a new compact or midsize car.

These are meaningful obligations, and every institution has a responsibility to keep college accessible and ensure that the education students receive prepares them well for what comes next. And for current and future students, that means being prepared for work environments now demanding much more highly developed human skills of their entry-level employees.

Given that, truncating undergraduate education is the wrong way to address college affordability. It disadvantages students for the workforce and contradicts what we know about human brain development.

Neuroscience research shows that the part of the brain responsible for executive function, impulse control and long-term planning continues to develop “into the third decade of life.”

In a study of brain imaging from more than 4,200 individuals from zero to 90 years old, researchers identified five major age-related eras of development across the lifespan. Between the ages of 9 and 32, complex neural networks become increasingly specialized and efficient. This means that the traditional college years occur during a critical development window—and educators have an obligation to make the most of it. 

It concerns me that this important evidence is missing from public debates in state legislatures across the country. Colleges and universities are frequently marketing these reduced-credit programs as workforce-oriented options that will save students time and money. It’s important to note that many of the reduced-credit program trailblazers are institutions that were suffering enrollment declines. 

Further, there’s not enough evidence to know whether three-year bachelor’s degrees produce consistent workforce outcomes, and we cannot presume compression is “neutral,” as public health researchers in Tennessee recently pointed out. Prioritizing efficiency during their college years may require students to sacrifice things like breadth of knowledge, flexibility and opportunities to pivot if the career choice they make at 19 doesn’t fit their lives or interests at 29.

A new Jobs for the Future report describes the push to offer three-year degrees as “a national movement,” even as it raises five unresolved questions about these programs:

I’d add another, related question to the list: Where and when does quality enter the conversation as three-year degrees become more mainstream? We have an ethical obligation to be transparent. We must tell students about the risks or unknowns, which may include questions about employability, earnings and graduate or professional school admissions.

As we lower requirements for successfully completing college, employer expectations are trending in the opposite direction. Employers are demanding more sophisticated human skills like ethical reasoning, problem framing and sound judgment, even for entry-level positions. Those capabilities have traditionally been expected from middle managers, not new hires. 

Fewer entry-level opportunities offer newly minted college graduates the chance to develop more complex skills as artificial intelligence absorbs tasks like basic research, drafting and data entry, causing companies to cut junior positions.

Higher education has been told to face the realities of AI and move faster. Yes, higher education needs to adapt and evolve—and it is. But reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees are not the solution. Students who are committed to accelerating their degrees already have options like dual enrollment, Advanced Placement and summer courses. At La Roche University, where I serve as president, 27 percent of new undergraduate students came to us this fall with credits toward their degree from dual enrollment and AP scores.

We will serve students best by revising curricula so they can develop their uniquely human skills to more sophisticated levels across a variety of classes and contexts. The humanities help develop the analytical depth, cultural competency and moral clarity students need to navigate an increasingly complex world. Sadly, the conferral of humanities degrees has hit a 35-year low. 

My own institution is responding to this moment by fundamentally revising our core curriculum—not by cutting it, but by strengthening it. We are replacing a disconnected buffet of choices with a curated, scaffolded pathway that gives every student a coherent intellectual journey, under the mentorship of the full-time faculty scholars who are most deeply invested in their success.

As AI reshapes the workforce, we are doubling down on our liberal arts identity, because the uniquely human capacities—ethics, empathy, cultural understanding and critical inquiry—are becoming more valuable, not less. We are also embedding a classroom-to-career framework into every major program, to ensure that every student has robust work-based learning experiences. In an era that pressures higher education to offer less, we are choosing to offer more—more depth, more mentorship, more humanity.

It is a given that we must enable students to learn basic, ethical AI use and to apply it as appropriate in their majors and chosen career paths. But equipping students with technical capabilities is different from teaching them how to apply those skills in uncertain environments, as part of a team or in the face of an ethical dilemma. 

Learning takes trial and error, communication and collaboration. And indisputably, at least for humans, learning takes time.

Graduating more sophisticated thinkers will not only benefit employers—our communities and our democracy will also be strengthened by graduates who understand their civic responsibilities, participate knowledgeably and actively in democratic life, and use their skills and talents to advance the common good. 

The burden to optimize and articulate higher education’s return on investment truly belongs to our nation’s colleges and universities, and we are making progress on that front. But we won’t prove ROI by offering students a shorter experience; instead, we must provide a better one.

This is precisely the wrong moment to compress undergraduate education. If the workforce now demands more mature, flexible and reflective thinkers, students need more intentional formation—not a faster path through a thinner degree.

Affordability and accessibility are indeed challenges we must solve. But shortcuts in the form of the reduced-credit undergraduate degree are not the answer. Let’s resist the false economy of shorter degrees and redesign undergraduate education with greater purpose, coherence and commitment to the whole student.