I confess to a bit of impatience at the flurry of interest in the three-year degree, which was most recently promoted by Stephen Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, and Gerald Kauvar, a colleague.
You’ve heard people who look back on the polio epidemics of the 1930s and 1940s say that business-as-usual would have been to improve the iron lung (equipment to aid victims’ breathing); the innovative approach was the discovery of a polio vaccine. The three-year degree strikes me as updating the iron lung.
This is not innovation; it’s not even cost-cutting. One of the biggest problems in higher ed is rising costs, as Stephen Trachtenberg well knows (tuition and fees at his university total $55,000 a year). By cutting out one year (and cramming some education into the summers), the total price to families would go down. But very little would change on campus; in fact, Trachtenberg and Rauvar say that lopping off a year “would be simple; it would mostly be a matter of altering calendars and adding a few more faculty members and staff.”
There’s a place for a three-year degree. But it is the easy way out, with nothing innovative about it.