A Three-Year Bachelor’s Degree? Let's Give It a Try.

A growing number of colleges are experimenting with a new model for undergraduate education: the three-year bachelor’s degree. Last month, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education voted to allow some public institutions to offer bachelor’s programs requiring just 90 credits rather than the traditional 120.

Massachusetts isn’t alone. The first accredited three-year bachelor’s programs launched in 2024 at Brigham Young University–Idaho and Ensign College in Utah. In total, as many as sixty programs either already have or are working towards offering a three-year bachelor’s degree.

Students have long been able to earn credits faster by taking heavier course loads, enrolling in summer classes, or bringing in Advanced Placement credits. Now, for the first time, institutions are offering degrees with a smaller number of credits required to graduate.

This raises an obvious question: why has the bachelor’s degree been set at 120 credits in the first place? After all, there is nothing magical about 120 credits. There is no reason to believe that this is the optimal amount of coursework needed to prepare someone for life after college, much less that the number is identical across every career.

The answer isn’t particularly satisfying. The number persists largely because it was a convenient administrative benchmark. Historically, credit hours functioned as a form of quality control. Regulators and accreditors needed a way to ensure institutions were delivering a sufficiently rigorous education, and instructional time served as a proxy.

The problem is that credit hours are an abysmal indicator of quality, especially now.

Over the past two decades, we’ve developed far better tools for evaluating higher education. We can now measure whether graduates succeed in the labor market—what they earn and whether their education paid off. Now that outcomes can be observed directly, crude proxies like instructional time should become passé.

If the goal is preparing students for productive lives, outcomes—not the number of credits—should matter most.

With that in mind, the benefits of shorter degree programs are straightforward. The most obvious is that students would pay for fewer credits. Colleges may try to offset that by raising prices for accelerated programs. But even if tuition savings are partially eroded, there is one advantage colleges cannot take back: time.

For most students, the opportunity cost of college—the wages they forgo while sitting in classrooms—is larger than the tuition they pay. Every year spent in school is a year not earning income or gaining work experience. Giving students back a year of their lives is effectively giving them back money. And it’s time, not money, where colleges stand to drive the biggest gains in affordability.

Critics worry that shorter degrees could trigger a race to the bottom, with institutions cutting corners to reduce costs. Some of that will likely happen. In some cases, a reduction in credits required may come with a reduction in quality. But in other cases—hopefully the majority—shortening programs will represent genuine innovation. By identifying coursework that adds little value, colleges can both streamline curricula and maintain quality.

A decade ago, the risk of declining quality would have been more concerning to me. Without adequate outcomes data, reductions in quality might have gone unnoticed by students, regulators, and lawmakers—with students and taxpayers ultimately paying the price. But today’s policy environment is more data rich, and lawmakers are more sensitive to student outcomes. Federal law now includes outcomes-based accountability standards that evaluate programs on their economic results. These data-driven accountability guardrails will allow lawmakers to evaluate whether the experiment in three-year bachelor’s degrees is working as expected.

For this vision to work, however, students, not just lawmakers, must pay attention to data. And that hasn’t always happened. Evidence suggests that students often shop for college based on reputation. Despite the growing availability of information about outcomes, the culture around how families evaluate colleges has been slow to change.

But that may be changing. As skepticism about higher education grows, discerning students may use the available data to make better-informed decisions. If students are discerning, colleges won’t be able to get away with offering three-year degrees of questionable value.

So, is the three-year bachelor’s degree the future of higher education? Maybe, maybe not.

The strength of the push for three-year degrees is that it represents experimentation—institutions trying new ways to deliver a higher-value education. Some of those experiments will fail. Others may succeed in ways we don’t anticipate. But a system that allows experimentation—and rewards models that deliver value to students—is far stronger than one that insists every student follow a set path.

That’s why policymakers in Massachusetts deserve credit for green lighting three-year programs. Not because the three-year bachelor’s degree should definitely replace the four-year one, but because higher education desperately needs innovation and experimentation.