President of Association of American Colleges and Universities denounces recent trend toward 3-year degrees

The president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, an organization representing member universities focused on undergraduate liberal education, issued a statement recently denouncing a recent trend toward three-year degrees, or reducing the number of credits required to earn a bachelor’s degree, at a growing number of universities.

“While the pressure to graduate more students at a time of ever-decreasing resources is acute, we do a disservice to individual students and our society if we confer degrees that do not assure that students have learned all they need to know in this very demanding global century,” says a statement issued in June by Carol Geary Schneider, who, as the association’s top official, took the position on her own.

In a news release accompanying the statement, Ms. Schneider said, “The amount of wishful thinking driving this three-year degree discussion is stunning to me,” adding, “It’s time to take a hard look at the actual evidence on students’ achievement shortfalls.”

“We would do better,” she said, “to focus on helping students actually finish in four years.”

In her statement, Ms. Schneider makes clear that she does not object to accelerated programs that allow “a small number of highly motivated, high-achieving students” to graduate in as little as three years by earning college credits in high school and attending college throughout the full calendar year. But she argues that the three-year option “will be helpful only to a small number of students” and that “we should not, as some have suggested, just shave off an entire year’s worth of expected learning, either at the college level or at the high school level.”