It’s coming: Three-Year Bachelor’s Degrees Could Become the Standard—If Accreditors Allow It
Much if not most of the world already has 3 year Bachelor degrees. In the US and Canada, it’s 4-years.
That occurs, in part, because U.S. universities saddle students with a large number of “General education” courses having nothing to do with their degree major, where many foreign schools do not have that requirement.
With the decline in the young cohort due to the low fertility rate, we no longer need to use 4-year college programs as a filter to reduce an oversupply of new workers – now we have the opposite problem with low unemployment rates and shrinking young cohorts.
A related issue is that the cost of college has skyrocketed many times faster than the inflation rate – and the value proposition has been falling apart. Colleges are notoriously inefficient and resistant to change. But their customer base – the students and their families – cannot continue to pour money into inefficient programs. Cutting a year off of college would cut costs for families.
