How to Save 25 Percent on College Tuition

Only slowly does change come to American higher education. It's as if we remain frozen in time. We teach pretty much as we were taught. We lecture. Most of our classes meet three times a week for an hour. We give midterms and finals and occasionally assign term papers before sending our students on to their next semester. It's more than just tradition; in our teaching we have made sticking with the tried and true a practical obsession.

In the meantime, nearly everything and everyone else around us—technology, medicine, politics—has changed. Not surprising, then, there is across higher education a palpable sense that at last we too will have to rethink what we are about. There's plenty of reason to do so. Students and parents are increasingly alarmed by the high cost of attending college. (Though in fact these same students and their parents consistently choose the higher-priced school over the lower-priced public and private institutions.) No one seems to know quite what is being learned or why. And then there is the growing conviction that colleges and universities have become just another set of businesses principally focused on enhancing their reputations, rankings, and endowments. But these are old laments that have never resulted in much of anything—a lesson I learned firsthand while serving on former secretary of education Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

No, the change I have in mind is of a different order. We need a dislodging event that compels us to think differently about what we do. I believe we should make three years the standard length of time for attaining an undergraduate degree. It would have to be a true three-year degree: it would require 90 (as opposed to the current 120) credits for graduation and leave summer vacations just as they are now. This would immediately address complaints about high tuition, reducing by 25 percent the price of an undergraduate education. The longer-term and more important benefit would be a revitalizing of college curricula and faculty teaching.

Part of the educational appeal of a three-year degree is that it can help realign what happens in high schools and colleges. Today, too many of our best high-school students find their senior year boring and a waste of time. For less-well-prepared students, high school is too often a way station of missed assignments and forgotten opportunities. That lost year carries a high price: students in the 11th and 12th grades who cannot read at grade level and have not mastered elementary algebra and geometry are much less likely to graduate from college—unless, that is, they receive some real help.

At the same time, the baccalaureate degree isn't the finishing touch it once was: more college freshmen report that they intend to pursue a graduate degree, if not immediately following graduation, soon thereafter. Today, professional master's degrees in business administration, health care, and information technology have become industry standards. Since 1987 the number of master's degrees annually awarded by American colleges and universities has more than doubled.

All of this makes a three-year baccalaureate degree worth thinking about. In the future I have imagined, most high-school students will be assigned to one of two college-bound programs—an accelerated one with truly challenging courses for the well-prepared student and a more basic one with courses that emphasize reading, writing, and quantitative skills for those who need to catch up. As the college-bound programs succeed in preparing more students in reading, writing, geometry, and algebra, more and more of these students will succeed in earning a two-year associate's or three-year baccalaureate degree. And the number of students needing continued remediation in college could be substantially reduced, perhaps even cut in half.