PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Quinn McDonald planned to spend the typical four years working toward a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. Then he heard about a place where he could get the same degree in three.
“It was the idea of being able to save a year” that grabbed his attention, said McDonald — a savings of not only time, but tuition. And he could start earning a salary faster than if he spent four years in college.
So, last fall, McDonald joined the inaugural class of one of the nation’s first in-person programs approved to award bachelor’s degrees with fewer than the usual 120 credits, at Johnson & Wales University. He’ll need only 90 credits, putting him on track to graduate in 2028, after three years instead of the usual four or more.
That’s an option being made available by colleges and universities with astonishing speed — especially in the notoriously slow-moving world of higher education: an entirely new kind of bachelor’s degree muscling into the space between the traditional four-year version and the two-year associate degree. Three-year degrees have existed, but they simply jammed those 120 credits into fewer semesters.
At least one school, Ensign College in Utah, will convert all of its bachelor’s degrees into the new, reduced-credit, three-year kind, it announced in February. Nearly 60 other universities and colleges are planning, considering or have already launched them in some disciplines. States including Indiana have required or are considering requiring their public universities to add reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees. Even graduate and professional schools are being pressed to shorten the duration of degrees.
Much of this activity has occurred in just the last few months. Yet precisely because it’s come so quickly, and at a time when political controversies have dominated the wider conversation about higher education, the dramatic implications of this reimagining of bachelor’s degrees have gotten surprisingly little attention.
Behind the scenes, however, “There are small groups of institutions saying that the old game doesn’t work and has to change,” said Bob Zemsky, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education who has long campaigned for three-year degrees and co-founded a group of universities experimenting with them called College-in-3.
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Now the accrediting agencies that oversee universities and colleges are approving bachelor’s degrees that require fewer credits. It’s an idea almost all of them previously rejected, but accreditors today are under political scrutiny themselves, and being prodded to encourage innovation.
Several states whose permission is also needed for these shorter-term degrees, from North Dakota to Massachusetts, are quickly providing it, too, often under pressure from businesses that need workers.
Even more than employers, consumers have lost patience with the time and expense it takes to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocates and politicians pushing schools to offer them. More than half of students who start down the conventional four-year path today take even longer than four years, according to the Department of Education.
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Many colleges, meanwhile, are struggling to fill seats and hope three-year degrees will appeal to students who wouldn’t otherwise come.
These include Johnson & Wales, which lost a third of its enrollment in the 10 years ending 2024, the most recent available federal data show, and has been forced to close several satellite campuses. Last year, it laid off 91 faculty and staff.
The idea of getting a degree more quickly appeals to a broader group of prospective students, said Mim Runey, chancellor at the university, where 94 students signed up for three-year degrees when they were offered in the fall, according to a spokesman. “There is a market that will think about a three-year degree that maybe wouldn’t think about a four-year degree.”
Samuel Antonio, who is in the accelerated criminal justice major at Johnson & Wales, thinks three years “is an adequate amount of time to be in college.” His friends in conventional four-year programs are almost a year in, and “they’re still taking gen ed and other courses they don’t even care about,” Antonio said, using the abbreviation for general education.
Interest among college-bound high school students in three-year degrees has been climbing since 2019, though it remains relatively small, according to a survey by the higher education consulting firm Eduventures. It might be higher if there were greater awareness that the newest form of these degrees require fewer credits, analysts there said.
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“It’s still a little early,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures. “We’re not sure what the demand is or what subjects are right. But it’s a change that’s coming.”
The work of trimming down four-year bachelor’s degrees to fit within three years has prompted nothing less than a rethinking of the purpose of a college education. Universities and colleges are asking themselves “What are we doing, why are we doing it and what do students really need?” said Johnson & Wales provost Richard Wiscott.
Most of those debuting three-year bachelor’s degrees have stripped out elective courses from what students have traditionally been required to take.
McDonald doesn’t feel like he’s missing out on anything. He still has to take humanities courses, math, psychology and political science. He plays on the lacrosse team, lives in a dorm and is so woven into campus life that he knows what day and time to nab the free leftovers from the pastry classes that are part of Johnson & Wales’s top-ranked culinary program.
But he didn’t want to spend more time in college than he had to.
In his speeded-up program, “You can focus on what you’re interested in and want to learn about instead of taking classes you don’t care about,” he said.
The three-year bachelor’s degrees at colleges and universities that have so far offered or announced them are almost all in disciplines that lead straight to jobs. In addition to criminal justice, Johnson & Wales introduced three-year degrees last semester in computer science, hospitality management and design.
“There are certain career paths where, at least for the foreseeable future, a four-year degree is still going to be a requirement,” said Nate Bowditch, provost at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, which added 96-credit, three-year degrees in the fall in robotics, outdoor adventure leadership and other fields. “If you want to go to medical school or be a rocket scientist at NASA, you’re going to need a four-year degree.”
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At the insistence of accreditors, the new degrees are differentiated from their four-year counterparts by being called “applied” or (as at Johnson & Wales) “career-focused” bachelor’s degrees.
That leads to a critical unanswered question: whether employers, graduate schools and licensing agencies will consider three-year degrees to be as good as the four-year kind.
Because no students have completed these new reduced-credit programs, that’s hard to know. But most employers in a survey by Johnson & Wales said they liked the idea, and that they’d consider three-year degrees just as good as conventional four-year ones.
On the other hand, graduate school admissions officers in a small, separate survey released in January by College-in-3 said almost unanimously that they wouldn’t take domestic applicants with bachelor’s degrees of fewer than 120 credits, though most said they were reconsidering this as more reduced-credit undergraduate degrees are being introduced.
Letting students graduate with bachelor’s degrees in three instead of four years, of course, means less revenue for colleges and universities. But in addition to pulling in more customers, boosters said, those programs will appeal to results-oriented students who are less likely to drop out. Already, the reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degree candidates at Johnson & Wales have had lower dropout rates between their first and second semesters than their classmates on the conventional track, the university said. And three-year-degree recipients might be persuaded to stick around for graduate school on the same campuses, which are more likely to accept the shorter-term degrees conferred by their undergraduate faculty counterparts.
“We’re hoping it’s attracting a really engaged, focused student, and hopefully they stay for that master’s degree as well,” said Stephen Smith, interim associate vice president of academic and strategic operations at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, which got approval in December to offer 96-credit bachelor’s degrees in public health and educational studies — both fields in which the university also offers graduate programs.
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Still, some faculty and even students have raised objections.
Accelerated bachelor’s degrees will create a two-tiered system in which the most affluent students will have the luxury of spending four years in college, the president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has contended.
Shorter-term programs with fewer electives won’t do as good a job of teaching such important skills as critical thinking, ethical reasoning or “how to form and answer questions using a variety of intellectual approaches that different disciplines require,” the North Dakota Student Association argued in a resolution against shorter-term degrees.
North Dakota’s State Board of Higher Education voted anyway, in February, to let public universities in that state test “bachelor of applied science” degrees of less than 120 credits.
“We’re trying to be responsive to the needs of employers and, frankly, the desire of students who do want to work their way through school as quickly as possible,” said Kevin Black, who chairs the board, which voted to reassess the move in four years.
Just a few days later, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education invited proposals for reduced-credit degrees.
A bill under consideration in the Iowa legislature would direct that state’s public universities to develop reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees. An Indiana law passed in 2024 already requires the same thing.
In Utah, addition to Ensign, Weber State and Utah Valley universities are adding three-year bachelor’s degrees after Utah approved reduced-credit “bachelor of applied studies” degrees.
Mount Mary University in Wisconsin is adding 95-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in cybersecurity and digital marketing; Manchester University in Indiana, 90-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees in accounting, pre-athletic training and pre-physical therapy. Upper Iowa University said in January that it would launch a 90-credit, three-year online bachelor’s degree in business administration. And Loma Linda University in California has added a three-year degree in global health.
Now there’s talk of shortening graduate and professional programs such as medical school — which some educators argue should be three years instead of four — to speed up the production of new doctors and others and reduce the price, especially with limits on federal graduate student loans set to take effect. More than half of current and aspiring medical students said in a survey they’d prefer a three-year over a four-year medical degree, mostly to save money.
As she neared the end of high school, Jazmin Cuello was impatient to get on with life. But when she looked around for bachelor’s degree programs in the subjects she wanted to study, they required four more years of classes.
“A lot of people, if they do want to go to college, just want to get it over with,” Cuello said.
She, too, signed up for the three-year criminal justice program at Johnson & Wales.
Now, said Cuello, sitting in the university’s criminal justice lab and smiling, “I’m almost a third of the way done. And I’m saving a ton of money.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about three-year bachelor’s degrees was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
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