With college costs rising and some students and families questioning the return on investment of a four-year degree, a few pioneering state universities are exploring programs that would grant certain bachelor’s degrees in three years.

The programs, which also are being tried at some private schools, would require 90 credits instead of the traditional 120 for a bachelor’s degree, and wouldn’t require summer classes or studying over breaks. In some cases, the degrees would be designed to fit industry needs.

Indiana recently enacted legislation calling for all state universities there to offer by next year at least one bachelor’s degree program that could be completed in three years, and to look into whether more could be implemented. The Utah System of Higher Education has tasked state universities with developing three-year programs under a new Bachelor of Applied Studies degree, which would still need approval by accreditation boards.

More than a dozen public and private universities are participating in a pilot collaboration called the College-in-3 Exchange, to begin considering how they could offer three-year programs. The public universities include the College of New Jersey, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, the Universities of Minnesota at Rochester and at Morris, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Utah Tech University.

Proponents of the three-year degree programs say they save students money and set them on a faster track to their working life. But detractors, including some faculty, say they shortchange students, particularly if they later change their minds on what career path they want to follow.

The Utah Board of Higher Education in March approved the new three-year degree category. Various areas of study would be tied to specific industry needs, with fewer electives required. These degrees are broader than two-year associate degrees, but narrower than a full four-year bachelor’s.

“We told the institutions to start working on them now and developing the curriculum,” Geoff Landward, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, said in an interview. “Also, we want them to find industry partners that would be willing to hire people with bachelor’s degrees of this type.”

He added: “We created a sandbox for our institutions to play in.”

Once created, individual programs would need both national accreditation and state Board of Higher Education approval.

Landward said he has taken note of criticism that the three-year programs might “cheapen” the bachelor’s degree by shortchanging students who wouldn’t receive a broad college education. But he said students could save on tuition, get a head start in the workforce and meet the needs of industries that are looking for certain skilled workers to address shortages in the state.

That includes nursing, he said, where requiring a four-year degree means taking lots of electives that have nothing to do with the career.

Utah State University’s current , for example, suggests several electives along with the required anatomy, math and biology courses as prerequisites during freshman and sophomore years.

“We think if we are partnering with industry and they help us develop it, I don’t think it cheapens the degree,” Landward said. “I think it creates a very specific degree.”

Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor and founding director of the university’s Institute for Research on Higher Education, began proselytizing for the three-year college movement about a dozen years ago.

He said the idea has gotten traction recently because “we are wading in the deep waters of righteous anger” at colleges and universities because of the perception that four-year degrees are not worth their high costs.

A Pew Research Center released last week found only 1 in 4 American adults said it is extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree as a means to getting a good-paying job. Only 22% of the respondents said the cost is worth getting a four-year degree even if the student or their family has to take out loans.

Zemsky suggested that a shorter time span also would lead to higher college completion rates. More than a third of students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree in fall 2014 at a four-year school failed to complete their education at the same institution in six years, the National Center for Education Statistics.

Zemsky said 27 colleges and universities have embarked on creating three-year pilot programs and predicted 100 would be doing so in another year.

Over the past 10 years, Zemsky said, schools have been ignoring the desires of students and instead creating their curricula around the preferences of faculty — which is where most of the opposition is coming from.

Last year, at a conference of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, a bargaining unit for professors, President Kenneth Mash said the overwhelming number of college faculty nationwide “have a visceral disdain for the idea.”

In an interview with Stateline, he said three-year programs would hurt students too, creating a “two-tiered” system under which wealthy students would get a full four-year education and lower-income students a cheapened three-year degree.

“If it’s not going to be a four-year degree, they should name it something that indicates it’s not a B.A.,” said Mash, who also is a political science at East Stroudsburg University. “We don’t know that employers will treat them the same.

“I’m on board, as most faculty are, with the notion that people want to increase their job opportunities. But that’s not all there is to a college degree,” he said. “Degrees prepare you to be a better citizen, a better parent, and on and on.”

And he said a broad education is what makes it possible for students to change jobs and careers many times during their working lives. “It’s really that baking in liberal arts … that makes it possible for people to do different things in their lifetimes.”

Indiana’s new law

Indiana enacted a in March that requires each public institution that offers bachelor’s degrees to review all the four-year degrees with an eye toward making some of them three years. And the law requires that by July 1, 2025, each state university offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years.

Indiana state Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican who sponsored the measure, pointed out that every extra year of college costs the students, their parents and the state.

But she noted that not all degrees lend themselves to compressed curricula. “If you’ve got a kid in pharmacy [studies], they are not going to be able to get through it in three years. Engineers aren’t going to be able to do it in three years. But some of the other kids will.”

Chris Lowery, Indiana’s commissioner for higher education, said the law will encourage schools to think about how to create 90-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees: “How feasible is this, would you still have the quality, would you still have the agency?”

Three-year degrees allow for choice, he added. His daughter, for example, had enough AP credits after high school to make a college degree feasible in three years, but opted to go to school for four, because she wanted to have enough time to study so that she could get “straight As” as well as to have time for extracurricular activities.

“But for a lot of students, the finances are tighter,” he acknowledged.

Credentialing requirements

At both public and private universities, the new three-year degree programs that require fewer credits would need national accreditation.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a regional credentialing agency, several three-year bachelor’s degrees at two private schools, Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, last year. The degrees are in applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health and professional studies.

Sonny Ramaswamy, the commission’s president, said in an interview that the three-year programs underwent two years of evaluation before being awarded accreditation.

He said the evaluation showed that competency in many professions could be attained in three years instead of four, and that graduate schools were willing to accept three-year bachelor’s as a credential for the pursuit of higher degrees. He noted that European college degrees often are completed in three years.

“We said, ‘We will approve you, but this is a pilot,’” Ramaswamy said. The schools will provide data to show their students have earned a good education, he added.

“My intuition is that it will head in the right direction,” he said. “The public is calling for innovation.”

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization that says its mission is promoting academic freedom, excellence and accountability at colleges and universities, said “fluff” courses strengthen the case against a 120-credit hour bachelor’s degree.

“Let people get a good foundation with a strong general education core, strong skills and some electives,” Poliakoff said in an interview. “That’s what a responsible university should be doing.”

The council does an annual of higher education institutions and grades them A through F on what the group calls “core curricula” — the proportion of courses dedicated to mathematics, literature, composition, economics, laboratory science, American history and government, and foreign languages.

Poliakoff said the amount of debt students are accumulating over four years is “sinful” and unnecessary. Colleges and universities must meet the concerns of students and their families, he said.

“A 90-credit baccalaureate degree is a pretty good way to tighten up the bolts,” he said.

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Officials from Indiana’s public colleges and universities agreed Thursday that their schools need to do a better job at convincing Hoosier students of the value of four-year degrees.

The discussion took place during the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute’s annual luncheon in downtown Indianapolis.

Representatives from Indiana, Purdue, Ball State and Vincennes universities, as well as Indiana State and Ivy Tech Community College, conceded that rising tuition costs are deterring thousands of students from post-high school educations.

“How do we demonstrate the value of the education?” asked Christopher Ruhl, chief financial officer and treasurer at Purdue University. “Why would I spend all this money and incur all this debt? That’s what students are asking. And we’ve also got to sell this better and make sure the degree is worth the value. What’s your return on investment? Is this a good value? We hope at Purdue the answer is a resounding yes, but we have to continue focusing on that.”

More student aid — and transparency about costs

Despite pushback from some state lawmakers and budget officials, Indiana’s public colleges and universities are slated to increase tuition and fees over the biennium — up to 4.9% per year — according to .

The revelation has since put the state’s higher education officials in the hot seat and prompted calls for Indiana schools to renew efforts to make degrees more affordable and valuable for students.

Concerns also surround Indiana’s declining college-going rate. The state’s higher education commissioner indicated in June that Indiana’s already dismal college-going rate has declined by roughly another half-percent.

Data released last year showed that only half of Indiana’s 2020 high school graduates pursued some form of college education beyond high school. The drop marked the, but the decline has been ongoing for the last five years.

That’s compared to five years ago, when 65% of Indiana’s high school graduates pursued some form of higher education.

Dominick Chase, a senior vice president for Ivy Tech Community College, said Indiana institutions “want to keep prices low as possible,” not just for tuition, but for other expenses, too.

“No one likes to be surprised by the end of the process when you have fees you weren’t expecting at the beginning,” he said, adding that’s why Ivy Tech strives to “be transparent at the front about how much it’s going to cost.”

The state’s largest public postsecondary institution is trying to ease the financial burden on students by , he noted. This fall, eligible students are assessed just $17 per credit hour for textbooks. Next year, that fee will drop to $16 per credit hour.

Dwayne Pinkney, Indiana University’s executive vice president for finance and administration, emphasized that IU’s tuition prices are among the lowest in the Big 10, and that the school is “committed to getting institutional aid” to as many students as possible.

“We certainly recognize that tuition increases create challenges for students and families,” he said. “We’re making sure we’re doing everything we can.”

Still, Pinkney doubled down that “investments” in the state’s schools still offer “great returns.” He said 80% or more of the university’s funds are needed to compensate “the excellent faculty, researchers and support staff who provide the best opportunities for our students.”

Anand Marri, Ball State’s interim provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said utility costs are also on the rise, affecting some schools’ budgets. Even though the Muncie school has the largest geothermal system in the country, utility costs have increased by more than 5%, he said.

Marri added that university research shows a four-year degree provides more than $1.7 million to a graduate over their lifetime, and that schools “have to get that message across to an increasingly skeptical audience.”

Even so, Chase recognized how easy it is “to get on YouTube now and learn things faster.”

“I don’t think, as a consumer in this day in age, that we’d want to take this length of time to learn something,” he said of traditional college degrees. “Students want to do more, faster.”

Vincennes University President Charles Johnson agreed, and said the state’s schools can collaborate even more, given “there are multiple ways to get the same bachelor’s degree.”

Indiana State University Vice President Diann McKee said focusing on higher education pathways is especially important for attractions and retaining first generation and Pell Grant-eligible students.

“Those are the students we primarily serve,” McKee said. “It’s really important for us, and for them, to make sure we’re maintaining affordability for four-year degrees.”

Prospects for new Indianapolis campus

Also discussed during the Thursday meeting was the dissolution of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Following a 53-year partnership, the school will be separated into two — Indiana University Indianapolis and Purdue University in Indianapolis — beginning in July 2024.

University officials reiterated Thursday that the split will help each school expand their academic and research portfolios, in addition to making a positive impact on the state’s economy.

Dan Hasler, chief operating officer for Purdue in Indianapolis, said the restructured urban campus won’t have its own chancellor. Instead, the goal is for Boilermakers and faculty at the Indianapolis location to be “in sync” with the flagship West Lafayette campus.

The Indianapolis extension will especially focus on various “flavors” of engineering degrees, as well as other science and business-related majors.

He further noted that 80% of students who apply to Purdue’s West Lafayette campus to do computer science get rejected – not because they aren’t qualified, but because the university “is out of space.” The Indianapolis location is a chance to give those students the education they want, Hassler continued.

Between 800 and 1,100 new first-year students are expected in Indianapolis in Fall 2024, with the goal that most students will be residential on the campus in the coming years.

As Purdue looks forward, Hasler said the university is hoping to introduce additional fields of study, including in agriculture and motorsports engineering — given the close proximity to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

On the Indiana University side, Michael Huber, vice president of university relations, said the Indianapolis campus will help meet “significant demand” for health and life sciences. While the 65-mile corridor running from West Lafayette to Indianapolis has become what some are calling the “Hard Tech Corridor,” Huber said IU is coining the stretch of Interstate 69 between Bloomington and Indianapolis the “Life Science Corridor.”

To help, new applied research partnerships with Eli Lilly, also located in Indianapolis, are in the works, he said.

Additional libraries and health services are also coming together on the campus that can be shared by students at both universities, he said.

The two university officials said the combined central Indiana campus should help increase retention of current students, as well as recent graduates.

IU Indianapolis announced its own initiative last month to offer direct admission to Indianapolis Public Schools students who have a grade point average of at least 3.0. Huber said the program has already garnered a “flood” of interest from other Marion County high schools who want the same opportunity for their students.

“We’re banking on relationships,” Hasler added, referring to collaborations in Indianapolis between the universities and industry.

But he emphasized that Indiana-based companies “have to compete,” too. That means more internships, apprenticeship programs and other incentives will need to come together to better “woo” students to stay in the Hoosier state.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .