3 Years of College?

(Given that I placed the term “critical thinking” in the blog’s title, I thought that I would begin to discuss a key element of critical thinking in my first real blog entry.)

There has been considerable discussion that college should be reduced to three years. As someone who teaches at a university, I am deeply interested in this debate.

So, let’s begin with the first step of critical thinking: identifying the claim. What is being claimed and what are the stated reasons for that position?

In this debate, the claim (i.e. we should decrease the length of time it takes to get a bachelor’s degree) is pretty easy to spot, but the reasoning is implied at best. From the articles that I have read and the ongoing debates I have witnessed at various conferences, it seems like two reasons for this proposal (feel free to elaborate those other reasons in the comment area) recur:
· The increasing cost of tuition
· The academic calendar inefficient, unnecessarily stretching out the college experience (i.e. campus operate at capacity and faculty appear to work only 9 months a year)

Typically, the next step in critical thinking would be to identify the evidence that supports of each of these claims and then evaluate the quality of that evidence.

For today, I want to assume that there is solid evidence underlying each of these potential reasons so that we can examine the assumptions within this claim. I think these assumptions help reveal the underlying concerns folks have about college and higher education.

The Increasing Cost of Tuition

Many proponents of shortening the length to a bachelor’s degree identify the cost as the most pressing problem facing higher education. In other words, their main beef with colleges and universities is that tuition simply costs too much (or perhaps more cynically, they use the issue of cost as proxy for other concerns about higher education). It is important to note that it is not the content but the length or cost that is the problem. While cutting off a year of college appears to remedy this problem, I am not sure it does. These proponents rarely identify what courses, skills, or knowledge they would omit from the curriculum. If universities simply try to repackage their current four-year degrees into three-year packages, I am not sure where the cost savings would be (other than room and board). Moreover, this argument seems to rely on the premise that most college students are 18 to 24 year olds who are primarily focused on getting their degree. It is not clear to me that working moms and dads in college could take any more classes than they are currently taking.

The Inefficiency of the Academic Calendar

A variation on the concern about costs (discussed above) is that the academic calendar simply wastes a lot of time that could be spent in the classroom. Given I am writing this during my university’s winter break, I am quite sympathetic to this argument. However, it is the very inefficiency of the current system that enables many students to pay for their education. Most traditional-aged students work during summer and winter breaks. Without freeing up students the time to work, they would need to take out bigger loans or have the government subsidize their education further. In addition, many study abroad during these times. Equally as important, it is during these breaks that most faculty keep up with their fields and engage in their research and other professional activities. It is quite possible that making higher education more efficient may reduce its quality.

Some Critical Reflection

fully admitting that there are other reasons at play in the debate, these two objections (cost and efficiency) to the current structure of higher education tend to neglect the content of most degrees and the differences among students. They also omit some basic truths about higher education:
1. Some majors require more content than others, meaning that they might justifiably take longer. In fact, many professional schools (e.g. education, accounting, architecture, etc) have more extensive requirements than more traditional majors.
2. Some majors require skills that take longer to develop and perfect than others.
3. Some students are well-enough prepared that they possess sufficient knowledge and the right kind of study habits to proceed at an accelerated pace. I have met a number of students who possessed this knowledge and the requisite study skills to graduate in three years. Many students, however, do not possess either. In fact, that is why they are in college!
4. Most students do not proceed through college following just one path. Many students change major multiple times and others try to complete multiple majors.
5. The number of majors and career paths seem to be expanding exponentially, which turn puts pressure on universities to offer even more courses and incur more costs.
6. Many students (especially non-traditional students) move as fast or as slow as they are able, no matter what the official pace of the university suggests.
7. Many students need the four years to mature and acculturate into a new profession and a new way of life. This is probably obvious, but education is about growth and development. Unlike a sandwich that can be consumed pretty quickly, education requires reflection. Many arguments focusing on efficiency and cost appear to forget that.
8. Higher education is social. A key element of college is learning how to interact with peers and fellow professionals. While class-time is important, it may not be as important as learning this social lesions, whether they are learned in a fraternity, an internship, or in a senior seminar. I am not sure if reducing college from four years to three years will help in this professionalizing function of higher education.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

Critical thinking tends not to provide a clear answer. It does however offer us a clearer sense of strengths and weaknesses of a particular issue.

Higher education is expensive and there is not a clear sense of how to contain costs. Shortening the official time to degree might or might not accomplish that goal, especially as the number and depth of majors expand and the range of student gets bigger each year. Universities are being asked to do more but charge less, especially as folks want to spend less government funding on education. The end of education, unlike many other goods, is not efficiency or an economical price, but the development of skills, the attainment of knowledge, and creating the next generation of leaders.

I suspect that the debate about the length of college is really a debate about how much should the public fund higher education. It seems (after writing this post) that higher education is facing a number of crises and simply changing the length of a degree probably cannot remedy all of them. In fact, it may make some of the problems discussed above even worse. But, it does offer a compelling and persuasive rhetoric.