Three year bachelor’s degrees the wave of the future?
Posted: May 27th, 2009 | Author: Ron Bronson | Filed under: Higher Ed, Ideas | Tags: BAs, degrees, undergraduate | 4 Comments »You are currently browsing comments. If you would like to return to the full story, you can read the full entry here: “Three year bachelor’s degrees the wave of the future?”.
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Three-year baccalaureate degrees may be conceivable for some disciplines. But for other fields, especially those that rely on much math, science and technical expertise in addition to liberal arts prerequisites — i.e., most engineering fields — to graduate in three years would be nearly impossible. On our campus, most engineering students take five years to complete their bachelor’s degree. But part of that time includes one or two semesters of full-time employment as part of a co-operative education program. That co-op program pays great dividends in the future and the work experience looks great on a resume.
Yeah, I know for fields like engineering it’d never work. I guess the question I’d have is whether 3-year degrees would be adjudged to be lesser than their 4-year counterparts.
I think it’s something a lot of liberal arts programs might consider, but it seems the 4-year degree here is entrenched and isn’t headed the way of the dodo anytime soon.
On a more basic level, are grant and loan programs in the U.S. even set up to provide assistance for year-round schooling? If not, then there is an institutionalized disincentive.
Well..I think there is a mechanism for getting summer aid, though it’s quite limited. But no I doubt there is a financial infrastructure for year-round school, though I suspect if schools found a way to keep tuition rates flat over an entire year (ha) that it might manage to even out.
I think the real question is going to be how schools justify their prices as the economic crisis depends. (Ironically, I blogged about this in a post that’ll publish later today.)