What if Colleges Experimented at the Edges?

In her book Hope in the Dark, writer and activist Rebecca Solnit observes that transformation starts in the margins. The book explores social movements throughout history, but the notion that mainstream beliefs grow from fringe ideas once thought to be outrageous is familiar to anyone who has watched change happen. Hope, she says, lives in the dark around the edges.

Some combination of high costs, low public trust, shifting market demands, political pressure and the impact of artificial intelligence has every stripe and color of college under extreme stress right now. These are the moments when Solnit’s version of hope—the belief in possibilities that demand action—might just be found in the margins of higher ed.

That idea of change coming from the fringes came to mind during a conversation I had with Bob Zemsky, the pioneering higher education market analyst and researcher, for a recent episode of Inside Higher Ed’s podcast, The Key. He cited his research that found 25 percent or more of colleges and universities lost at least a quarter of their first-year students in the transition to their sophomore year. “In any other business that would be known as product rejection,” Zemsky says. His solution to higher ed’s “product problem” is the three-year degree. “American higher ed isn’t going to change unless we change the product, and this is the most [promising] way out there at the moment,” he said.

Zemsky, along with Lori Carrell, chancellor at the University of Minnesota Rochester, established the College-in-3 Exchange and initially worked with 10 schools to experiment with the model. The organization now has nearly 60 institutional members. “We got successful because we said, ‘Let’s not be overreaching,’” Zemsky told me. “We said, ‘We want the degrees to be three years’ and how you got there was your own business.”

Supporters of shorter programs argue they will improve college costs, accessibility and progression. Most accreditors and many states have already passed regulations allowing colleges to pilot three-year degrees. Some have already launched—Ensign University now offers a three-year completion option for all its degrees. But before the shorter degree reaches the mainstream, it will have to overcome critics who argue it lowers the quality of education, won’t be accepted by employers and threatens faculty jobs. On that last point, Zemsky encourages colleges to start curriculum redesign at the fringes. “[Higher ed] is supposed to be about purposeful experimentation,” he said. “It’s a whole lot easier if all you’re doing is selling this to a small group of faculty. They do it because they want to. These are people who are in tune with where this is going.”

Another idea living at the margins of higher ed: apprenticeships. These programs reimagine the relationship between higher ed and the workforce by providing students with on-the-job learning that ends in an industry-recognized credential and an associate, bachelor’s or master’s degree. We reported this week that the number of active participants in U.S. registered apprenticeship programs more than doubled between 2014 and 2024, to nearly 680,000—impressive, but still just a fraction of the more than 15 million undergraduates in the country.

Minah Woo, vice president of workforce innovation and strategic partnerships at Howard Community College in Maryland, said higher ed’s current moment of uncertainty and volatility “is requiring us to think outside of the box and be agile.” When Woo launched her institution’s first apprenticeship, skeptics doubted a skilled trade program in HVAC would take hold in one of the nation’s most affluent counties. She planned for five apprentices in that first cohort in 2018 and got 24. The college is now training more than 200 apprentices in skilled trades. “We now have faculty members come and say, ‘Hey, do you think our program could be part of the apprentice model?’ And we’re here going, ‘Of course!’ We welcome them,” she told my colleague Colleen Flaherty.

Joe Ross, president and CEO of Reach University, the country’s only accredited nonprofit university dedicated to apprenticeship degrees, invoked higher education scholar John Thelin when he noted that higher education sees a major transformation every 20 years or so and a major revolution every century. “I think the story of this century will be that the workplace is going to become the college campus, and that higher education is going to become work-embedded at scale.”

If there was ever a moment when higher ed needed to embrace a Solnit-like hope—not the belief that everything will be fine, but the willingness to see openings amid complexity and uncertainty and act—it’s now. Higher education institutions are full of curious people who have dedicated their lives to pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. It’s time for colleges to turn that same spirit of experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking on themselves.