Here in Canada it’s still substantially possible to get one,*at least at a few schools–although, the momentum is away from the practice. An engaging Newsweek article, however, has this trending the other way in the States:
Hartwick college, a small liberal-arts school in upstate New York, makes this offer to well-prepared students: earn your undergraduate degree in three years (six semesters) instead of four, and save about $43,000—the amount of one year’s tuition and fees. A number of innovative colleges are making the same offer to students anxious about saving time and money. The three-year degree could become the higher-education equivalent of the fuel-efficient car. And that’s both an opportunity and a warning for the best higher-education system in the world.
There’s plenty wrong with the argument at the margins (the author also blames tenure for stifling academic debate), but the key problem is elsewhere. Matthew Yglesias hits it on the head:
…the claim you’d want to make as a proprietor of a three-year college is something like “our students get 95 percent of the learning in 75 percent of the time and at 80 percent of the cost.” But we don’t have any systems in place to measure, even very roughly or extremely imprecisely, how effective different colleges are at actually teaching people. Instead we have this kind of prestige-based economy of higher education in which basically nothing can change. There’s an aristocracy of fancy private institutions that raise tons of money and get tons of applications and can thus be very selective in their admissions and raise tons more money. And in any given state university system, a couple of campus are designated as the “good” ones so they get the best applicants and thus wind up with the best students and thus stay as the good ones. The other branch campuses tend to languish in semi-obscurity.
The Brits, notably, have this sorted out, more or less. Indeed, they practice this sort of assessment right down to the student level, with redundant grading major assignments. This is, of course, expensive, and is probably predicated on a public university system. Private institutions like Harvard wouldn’t likely stand for this sort of assessment. They would risk being ranked below public institutions, something reputation alone doesn’t likely permit.
Still, it’s a good point, and it raises the larger (and older) question of what value lies in a jarringly priced education at a private university. Reputation? Well, perhaps that’s just what’s in doubt.
* Key difference here is that in Canada one gets the degree with fewer credits–hense the movement away from it, in line with degree/education inflation generally.
