Does a three-year bachelor’s degree make sense?
Earlier this year, after reading several brief articles citing the surge in three-year bachelor’s degrees, I decided to take a look at what was going on in this area. To say the least, it was a disappointing undertaking since most of what is being done is to cram four years of work into three without any attempt to rethink the bachelor’s degree or to engage in innovation. What I found were simply accelerated degrees where “exceptional” students (apparently chosen for their ability to endure pain and masochistic tendencies) are allowed to attend college year round, using summer sessions to make up time, and to take exceptionally large credit loads. There was a lot of blather about the Bologna Accord and the European model, but no model that would fit the United States or evidence of an American institution actually doing anything other than talking.
But, there was one exception. One university that had engaged in serious consideration of what they intended in a business administration bachelor’s degree, what learning outcomes should be produced, how they could create an experience for the student that was tolerable, and weave an instructional design that makes sense. That program has been a success at Southern New Hampshire University, and I was pleased to see it referenced in a Chronicle of Higher Education report.
This program is interesting because it uses
• cohorts
• individual and group learning
• active learning
• technology for virtual collaboration
• a master planning document (what I view as a curriculum map)
• integration of experiences to bring together competencies learned in modules offered that term
And it eliminated redundancies in courses. It is a real three-year bachelor’s degree that is well thought-out and designed to deliver on clearly articulated learning outcomes. It truly stands out from all the others I could find.
So, it was no surprise to see the comments of the Southern New Hampshire University president at a recent meeting sponsored by Jobs for the Future, Education Sector and the Lumina Foundation on “Thinking Big in a Crisis”. Paul J. LeBlanc is quoted as saying that “in coming years, colleges will move away from using credit hours as a measure of achievement and instead rely on demonstrations of competency” and “I think it’s appalling how little innovation has gone on in higher ed.”
I think Mr. LeBlanc is right. I think the comments posted to the article reveal, though, one of the reasons that there is so little innovation: there is real resistance to change and there is a persistent attitude that the United States has the best education system in the world so leave it alone. That position is increasingly difficult to defend or even to understand.
Your thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment.
Mike
Share This3 Responses to “Does a three-year bachelor’s degree make sense?”
David Hasbury-Snogles Says:
The UK model has for decades always been based on a 3 year Bachelors and the requirement that competency must be achieved before progress is permitted i.e. the student must ‘graduate’ through each year of college before he/she is allowed to move on to the next one. In fact the only instance of ‘cramming’ I personally have seen is where my son took his Bachelors (with Hons.) in just 2 years!
I can only assume that the US High School system does not take students far enough before they attend College, so that their first year at University is equivalent to finishing school in England. We take our ‘Advanced Level’ qualifications over the last 2 years of school (up to age 18) and then move on to College, often after a Gap year (year off inbetween) in which travel, work and general non-college ambitions are met. Other than that I cannot see any point in spending four years to obtain what can easily be achieved in three (other than to keep the unemployment figures down of course!).
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Paul Says:
This is an interesting finding, and I think it helps make the case that higher education’s adherence to a traditional model must end, or at least be reduced in order for substantive changes to occur. Universities after all exist within the frame of human society, and no single society can be shown conclusively to be utterly static. Even the most reticent change through the indirect and more mobile shifts of other societies.
The example SNHU appears to provide is one of a shift in thinking. I would argue that this sort of shift is possible for SNHU because it is a comparatively small U. Not that my ignorance is evidence, but I did not know SNHU existed until today, and the sort of change in perspective implied by the study and SNHU’s results appears to indicate that like many things, real change begins small. It would be a remarkable sort of exception were the subejct of the study Arizona State Univeristy, or the University of Minnesota, two of the largest public universities in the US.
Taking one or more models of how the system and organizations within it need to change to improve education, and placing them within very large universities, would prove Rummler’s statement on the good performance of an individual in an under-performing system. Large institutions are inherently resistant to such changes for a number of reasons (budgets spring to mind as one of the most obvious), and I would hope that SNHU’s example will prove to others that change can happen. Universities such as Capella are also an example of how higher education needs to and is changing. Capella is not necessarily in the 3-year undergraduate category, but is another sort of model that has results to back its existence. I do agree that the perspective that says our homegrown system is tops is bull-headed at the very least.
I think the system in the US will change. It will take a long time, but then, it was only a decade ago that people said online education wouldn’t work, and now, before we know it, there is nary a reputable B&M institution of higher education that doesn’t have at least one class online.
September 1st, 2009 at 1:51 pm