Three-year degrees won’t save higher ed. Better teaching will. 59%
By Jonathan Zimmerman75%
7/24/2026, 5:30:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Hasty Generalization, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 30.5% saturation with 264 hits. Analysis detected 1,972 faulty-reasoning hits from 865 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 55.5% and a BS Rank of 59% (9,005 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 58.90% of the article peer group.
In 1992, I started teaching at West Chester University.
My students were mostly working-class kids from the collar counties who saw higher education as a way to move up in the world.
But they often struggled in subjects like history — my own field — which they saw as irrelevant to their future employment.
So let’s make college shorter, shall we?
We can save a year by paring away the dull “general education” classes — in English, history, and so on — that the students hate anyway.
They can focus on their majors, graduate in three years, join the workforce, and save a quarter of their tuition costs.
That’s what the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PSSHE) is considering for its 10 campuses, including West Chester.
Around the country, more and more schools are offering three-year B.A. degrees.
I think that’s a bad idea, but I don’t blame people for wanting it.
Instead, I blame us.
I’m looking at you, my fellow professors.
Put simply, we didn’t do a good enough job with what we have.
College is expensive.
Families are strapped.
And a lot of general education courses are — as the students correctly perceive — a waste of time and money.
The only way to make the case for them is to make them better.
But you won’t hear that from our educational establishment, which pretends that we were delivering on the promise of college before the three-year proposal raised its ugly head.
Witness the joint statement from the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers condemning Massachusetts’ approval of three-year degrees at two state colleges.
“Compressing or reducing the curriculum threatens to narrow students’ education at precisely the moment when society needs graduates with stronger critical thinking, communication skills, scientific literacy, and civic understanding,” they declared.
Kenneth M.
Mash, president of the PSSHE faculty union, said almost exactly the same thing.
“At a time when there are calls for critical thinking, calls for knowledge about civics, what we’re doing is reducing the amount of time that students have to get that in,” Mash warned.
But here’s what these spokespeople won’t tell you: We’re not teaching those skills now.
Even with four years of college, our students remain woefully undereducated.
According to a survey administered earlier this year by the American Council of Alumni and Trustees, only 39% of college students know that U.S. senators serve for six years and representatives for two.
And just 37% can correctly identify the branch of government that has the power to declare war.
(Answer: Legislative.)
So much for civics.
What about critical thinking?
Cornell University has instituted an online module to teach it to students, precisely because their coursework often didn’t.
“Many of us include it in our learning objectives,” one faculty leader admitted, “but when you look at courses, it’s often not taught explicitly.”
That’s especially alarming in the face of artificial intelligence, which threatens to envelop our students in mindless slop.
Unless they learn to use their own brains, they won’t be able to critically evaluate what A.I. spits out.
And we’ve never taught critical thinking well.
In 2010, when generative A.I. was still science fiction, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that nearly half of all college students showed no improvement in critical thinking skills during their first two years on campus.
Unless they learn to use their own brains, students won’t be able to critically evaluate what A.I. spits out.
There’s no evidence that things have picked up since then.
Instead, a growing body of research suggests that A.I. is eroding students’ capacity to think.
The bots have made it easier to cheat your way to a B.A. while pretending that you know what you’re talking about.
So why not reduce the degree to three years?
Or two, or one?
Heck, why not just give it to anyone who will pay?
Because we’re not simply selling credentials, that’s why.
I don’t get out of bed in the morning and say, “I’m going to help people affix letters next to their names today!”
My goal is to help them learn.
And if you think we’re doing that well, you just haven’t been listening.
I know our students need jobs, too.
But when you survey employers, it turns out they want precisely the critical thinking skills that we’re not teaching.
Those irrelevant gen-ed classes could have a real market value, if we played our cards right.
That means giving future professors serious training for the classroom, which we have never really done.
It means evaluating and rewarding them for their teaching, not just their research.
And it means creating new core classes that require students to think, not simply regurgitate.
Last week, I had dinner with a beloved student from my days at West Chester.
She succeeded wildly there, but many of her peers failed.
They didn’t need a shorter college experience.
They needed a better one.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania.
His next book, “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.
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