Universities Ponder Three-year Degrees

This spring, college graduates who have spent four years earning bachelor’s degrees will flood an entry-level job market that has already been washed out by AI. Some graduates, armed three-year bachelor’s degrees that an increasing number of states are rushing to create, will arrive faster. The promise is a less costly path to the workforce. The problem, as Matthew Brody recently argued in Inside Higher Ed, is that these degrees were designed for a job market that is disappearing in real time.

Brody, a former higher-education administrator in North Carolina, described the move as misguided, arguing that such programs focus on applied fields that claim to prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce without acknowledging that those same fields face the highest exposure to AI disruption. North Carolina is one of the newest states to explore the creation of three-year degrees, but the movement is neither new nor isolated to far-away states.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, which accredits schools in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, was the first to approve reduced-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees in 2023 for BYU-Idaho and Ensign College. Programs such as these were designed to be completed in about 90 semester-credit hours rather than the 120-hour programs that have long been the norm for accredited bachelor’s degrees.

Those early adopters are “spotlight members” of the College-in-3 Exchange, a non-profit formed in 2019 whose stated mission is “reimagining undergraduate education to increase student success while decreasing student costs.” Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts (part of Seattle University) and Portland State University are also among the 62 member institutions. But, at least for now, the University of Washington is watching from the sidelines.

Phillip J. Reid, Vice Provost of Academic Strategy and Affairs at UW said that administrators are still in the preliminary stage of exploring three-year degrees. “We are looking at where a three-year degree might fit into the whole portfolio of academic programs.” For students pursuing fields that require graduate training, such as Reid’s own discipline of chemistry, he believes that “three years may not do it.”

Reid suggested that shortened programs might be appropriate for “degrees that enable students to enter professions where the majority of professional development is occurring in the workplace on the job.” He cited cybersecurity and criminal justice as examples. But a 2025 Stanford Social Innovation Review analysis found that AI has cannibalized the entry-level tasks and on-the-job training in fields such as those.

In states such as Utah, Indiana, Massachusetts, Iowa, and North Carolina, regulators and legislatures are actively encouraging shortened degrees. But thus far there is no evidence of impending pressure in Washington.

“The focus of people in Olympia who are thinking about higher education has been on student success and time to degree,” Reid said. That focus has led to emphasizing Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and dual enrollment programs that allow high school students to get a head start. It has also been a fundamental driver of transfer articulation agreements and generous transfer policies.

UW allows up to 135 quarter credit hours to be transferred toward a 180-credit degree, with a residency requirement of 45 of the final 60 credits. Hypothetically, a well-prepared transfer student could complete a UW undergraduate degree after spending only one year on campus. Which raises the fundamental question: what relationship, if any, exists between time spent at an institution and learning outcomes?

In 1906, the credit hour was introduced by a foundation formed by Andrew Carnegie to standardize faculty output. But an industrial-era measure of time spent in a classroom no longer aligns with digital-era pedagogy which has moved rapidly toward asynchronous, self-paced, AI-assisted, online instruction.

Timothy Knowles, the current president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has said: “For decades, we’ve known that a time-based system of education is at odds with our educational aspiration.” Yet even as the Carnegie Foundation was rethinking its own creation, colleges and students were doubling down on the vocational turn that the 2008 recession had accelerated.

Proponents of shortened time to degree have focused on the applied-education priorities of the post-recession, pre-AI era. Between 2008 and 2016, humanities enrollments declined 14 percent, and social sciences fell 8 percent, while math and sciences grew 29 percent. Business majors grew 60 percent from 2000 to 2020, engineering majors more than doubled, and health science majors tripled over those two decades.

Brody argued that three-year degree programs are no longer relevant in the AI-era: “What students need to succeed in the future, whether 18-year-olds entering college or 38-year-olds returning to it, is not narrow specialization. It’s broad capabilities–things like systems thinking, ethical judgment, communication and the ability to work effectively with emerging technologies.”

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers the top three skills employers will be seeking from this year’s crop of graduates are ability to work on a team, problem-solving skills, and verbal communication skills. These are not the competencies of narrow specialization. They are the outcomes a broad liberal arts education is designed to produce.

Reid defines the general education curriculum at UW as the source from which these outcomes spring. He calculates that a three-year degree could include a full set of general education courses as well as the required courses in applied majors. But the opportunity to take elective courses is likely to be lost.

Electives represent more than just discretionary fields of study. Transfer credits are often recorded as electives when they don’t align directly with a new major. According to the National Student Clearinghouse, nearly 1.2 million students transferred institutions in fall 2024 alone — and nearly two-thirds of them changed their majors in the process. Add to that the roughly one-third of all students who change majors, and the elective column of a degree plan becomes the safety valve in many degree plans.

As this year’s graduates wade into the job market, they may find that the applied fields for which they trained have already been reshaped by the AI storm. The first students to complete the three-year programs that were approved in 2023 will test the waters to see well their more “efficient” degrees can help them navigate employment options.