The Curious Sanctity of 120 Credits

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In general, I am of the opinion that responding to ill-informed opinion pieces in the trade press or random newsletters is not worth doing. Today I am going to make an exception. The occasion is an Inside Higher Ed opinion piece by Christina Clark, president of La Roche University, arguing against the growing movement toward three-year bachelor's degrees in US higher education. Clark calls them a “perplexingly bad idea.”

I have some personal interest in this question. I have one of these apparently alarming three-year bachelor's degrees, as do rather a lot of people outside the United States, including graduates of such educational backwaters as Oxford, Cambridge and the University of Melbourne. Which makes Clark's repeated use of snigger brackets to describe “so-called three-year degrees” particularly odd. Three-year bachelor's degrees are not hypothetical credentials invented last Tuesday. They are the standard undergraduate degree in many countries and have been offered for a very long time by some rather successful universities.

The existence of successful three-year degrees elsewhere obviously doesn't prove that every proposed American three-year degree is a good idea. US higher education is different, and there are real questions about what gets removed, what students learn, how much students actually save, and how employers and graduate schools will respond. Those are questions worth debating. Unfortunately, Clark's piece mostly doesn't debate them.

Instead, she offers a giant splodge of loosely connected and poorly supported arguments: student debt isn't really as bad as people say; traditional-age students are undergoing important brain development that colleges should take maximum advantage of; AI means students need more advanced learning rather than shorter degrees; and students who want to finish faster already have other ways to do so. In some cases she offers little evidence; in others, the evidence she cites doesn't support the conclusion she draws from it.

My problem isn't that Clark reaches a different conclusion from mine. I don't yet know whether the emerging American three-year degree models are a good idea. My problem is that she repeatedly assumes the central proposition she needs to demonstrate: that fewer credits and less time in college necessarily mean less education.

Time is not learning

Clark repeatedly equates time with learning. She focuses heavily on the shortened nature of three-year degrees, describing them as “truncating undergraduate education,” “a shorter experience” and “a faster path through a thinner degree.” She also describes the move to three-year degrees as “lowering requirements for successfully completing college.” In each case, fewer credits and less time in college become proxies for less learning.

But she offers no evidence that greater time spent in college necessarily produces greater learning. A 90-credit degree contains fewer credits than a 120-credit degree. That's basic arithmetic, but whether three-year degrees involve less learning is an empirical question. Fewer credits alone tell us nothing about whether a degree involves less learning, poorer outcomes, less coherent curricula, weaker intellectual development or worse preparation.

The conflation of time and learning continues in a drive-by argument about neuroscience. Clark points to research showing that major phases of brain development occur between the ages of 9 and 32 and concludes:

There are several leaps in reasoning here. Even putting aside the fact that increasing numbers of students pursuing bachelor's degrees are not traditional age, evidence that the brain continues developing during the traditional college years is not evidence that four years of college produces better development than three. Nor does it establish that the fourth year of college makes some distinctive contribution to that development.

And if the fact that brain development continues is itself an argument for keeping students in college longer, why stop at 21 or 22? These students still have another decade or so of critical brain development ahead of them. Why not make the bachelor's degree run until age 32—a 14-year bachelor's degree? Imagine all the revenue that could bring in!

The absurdity of that suggestion points to the problem with the underlying argument. Simply extending the amount of time students spend at a university does not establish that students learn more or that institutions are “making the most” of a developmental window. To make the case for four years rather than three, we need evidence about what students gain from that additional time, not merely evidence that the additional time exists.

The curiously bad AI argument

Clark offers a different version of the same problem in her discussion of AI. She points to recent pressure on entry-level hiring associated with AI adoption and argues that this means we need “more mature, flexible and reflective thinkers,” rather than quicker degrees.

The first part of that argument is worth taking seriously and I have written about it at length. If AI is changing entry-level work, graduates may indeed need stronger capabilities in areas such as problem framing, ethical reasoning, judgment, communication and collaboration. But that tells us something about what students need to learn. It tells us nothing by itself about how many credits they need to accumulate in order to learn it.

If anything, AI provides an argument for taking a hard look at existing curricula. If the capabilities graduates need are changing, shouldn’t we be asking what needs to be added, what needs to be redesigned and, just as importantly, what may no longer deserve the curricular space it currently occupies. A 120-credit degree designed around yesterday’s needs does not become better preparation for an AI-shaped labor market simply because it contains 120 credits.

You could therefore draw almost the opposite conclusion from Clark's. If AI is changing what graduates need to know and be able to do, perhaps this is precisely the moment to rethink a degree structure whose basic credit architecture predates AI by many decades. Clark has a potentially strong argument for curricular redesign. She has not shown why that redesign requires preserving the 120-credit bachelor's degree.

The dual-enrollment contradiction

But she then goes on to argue that students who want to finish their degrees more quickly already have plenty of ways to do so. They can earn college credits while still in high school or accelerate their progress once they arrive on campus:

But this creates a rather large contradiction in her argument. If learning takes time, the traditional college years represent a critical period of brain development, and students benefit from prolonged intellectual formation, why is it desirable for students to reduce their time in college by accumulating credits at 16 or 17?

Apparently:

90 credits at the university + 30 AP/dual-enrollment credits = perfectly acceptable

while

a deliberately redesigned 90-credit bachelor's curriculum = a dangerous shortcut

If the problem with a three-year degree is genuinely that students need four years of intellectual development, allowing them to replace a year of college with credits earned in high school doesn't solve the problem.

The alternative explanation is that AP and dual-enrollment credits represent genuine learning and can therefore substitute for credits that would otherwise have been earned at the university. But that concedes the more important principle: what matters is what students learn, not how long they spend enrolled at the university.

Who gets to afford exploration?

There is another assumption lurking in Clark's argument. She writes.

I agree that breadth, flexibility and opportunities to change direction have value. But so do students' time and money. A student whose parents can finance four years of college may indeed value another year of exploration. For a lower-income student, a working adult, a parent or anyone struggling to pay tuition and living expenses, completing a bachelor's degree a year sooner may have considerable value. The potential savings aren't limited to tuition. They include books and living expenses, as well as the opportunity cost of spending another year in college rather than in the workforce.

There is a class assumption buried in the idea that the richer educational experience is necessarily the longer one: students should bear the cost of additional time because educators believe that additional time is good for them.

And Clark's proposed alternatives for students who want to accelerate raise their own equity questions. Access to AP and dual-enrollment opportunities is not evenly distributed. Students from higher socioeconomic groups and better-resourced school systems are more likely to have access to them. If the answer to students who want a shorter degree is that they should accumulate credits before arriving at college, are we not further privileging students who already have greater access to those opportunities?

None of this establishes that three years is better than four. But the benefits of the additional year need to be demonstrated rather than assumed. If we want to argue that lower-income and other disadvantaged students are better served by spending four years completing a bachelor's degree rather than three, we need evidence that the additional time produces benefits sufficient to justify its additional cost. Valuing breadth for breadth's sake is not enough.

Clark also points out that many of the institutions experimenting with three-year degrees have experienced enrollment declines, presumably suggesting that desperation rather than educational judgment is driving the movement. Perhaps financial pressure does encourage bad ideas. It can also force institutions to reconsider practices they previously had little incentive to question. Either way, an institution's motivation for experimenting with a three-year degree tells us very little about whether the resulting degree is any good. For that, we have to examine the degree itself.

She never asks what is being removed

This is where something Clark says about her own institution becomes particularly interesting. She describes how La Roche replaced a “disconnected buffet of choices” with a “curated, scaffolded pathway.”

That is exactly the kind of curricular thinking this debate needs. It also raises a rather obvious question: if the existing curriculum can be a disconnected collection of requirements rather than a carefully designed educational experience, why should 120 credits itself be treated as sacrosanct? Why should everything inside the degree be open to fundamental redesign except the number of credits required to complete it?

A serious three-year degree should not simply take an existing 120-credit curriculum and lop 30 credits off the end. It creates an opportunity—and an obligation—to ask much more fundamental questions about the architecture of the degree. What belongs there? What contributes to the outcomes we want? What is redundant? What can be combined or taught differently? What experiences are essential and must be protected?

The burden of proof runs both ways

We need an actual reasoned and informed debate about three-year degrees. There are plenty of legitimate questions to ask. What can be removed without diminishing learning, which programs lend themselves to compression and which don't, what happens to general education, advanced disciplinary work and opportunities for exploration? How much money and time do students actually save, and, most importantly, are graduates at least as well prepared as those completing traditional 120-credit degrees?

Advocates of three-year degrees should have to answer those questions. They shouldn't get to assume that a shorter and cheaper degree is necessarily a better one. But the burden of proof runs both ways. Defenders of the traditional bachelor's degree shouldn't get to assume that four years and 120 credits are educationally superior simply because that's what we currently require. If those additional 30 credits produce important learning, intellectual development or better preparation for life and work, show us.

That requires questioning some deeply embedded assumptions about the relationship between time, credits and learning. Clark's piece largely reinforces those assumptions rather than examining them. Ironically, that makes the case for the four-year degree weaker rather than stronger.

Forward this post to a friend and earn 60 OSS credits toward your bachelor's degree in student success. Learning outcomes remain unverified, but apparently we're counting credits, not learning.

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