On New Year’s Eve, I was walking around Charleston, South Carolina with my family when my eldest son – who’s all too aware of my proclivity for touring college campuses – offered a detour to the College of Charleston. So we walked a few blocks west while I shared the most notable fact about the College: its ping-ponging between private and public status. Founded in the late 18th century as a private institution, College of Charleston was taken over by the city in the 19th century. Then, following World War II, it retreated to private status to avoid integration. Finally, in 1970 – integration battle lost – the college returned to state control in an effort to bolster its finances. It remains a state institution, either proudly or sheepishly depending on how you read the school’s search tag “Welcome to the College of Charleston, a public university.” But before I could finish this head-spinning saga, I lost my audience. Because just as we entered the small quad, a sound-and-light show started up, projected on the columns of the College’s grandest edifice.
How nice, I thought: a New Year’s Eve show just for us (no one else was there). And so we sat on the fountain as Christmas images and snowflakes appeared on Randolph Hall and the Pitch Perfect 2 Snoop Dogg x Anna Kendrick mash up of Winter Wonderland and Here Comes Santa Claus boomed from hidden speakers. But then the holiday cheer dissipated to some extent. You see, someone at College of Charleston had decided that the second song in the holiday sound-and-light show should be Chappell Roan’s Hot to Go. Which would be fine except for two things: (1) Hot to Go has nothing to do with the holidays; and (2) Hot to Go includes lyrics like:
You don’t have to stare, come here, get with it
No one’s touched me there in a damn hot minute
And baby, don’t you like this beat?
I made it so you’d sleep with me
It’s like a hundred 99 degrees
When you’re doing it with me, doing it with me
H-O-T-T-O-G-O
You can take me hot to go
H-O-T-T-O-G-O
You can take me hot to go
These ironies were not lost on my kids. Nor was its incongruousness with College of Charleston’s educational mission. I explained that colleges and universities do lots of random things, albeit generally less lascivious. But the sound, lights, and dirty lyrics engendered a fruitful family discussion about how colleges spend tuition dollars. Like College of Charleston, where cost of attendance (tuition + fees) is $33,612 in-state and $60,622 for the rest of us with an average institutional grant (discount) of about $8,600 and 20% of students qualifying for Pell Grants. So, including travel, the average out-of-state student will spend over $220K for four years at South Carolina’s finest private-public-private-public institution of higher education.
I’m pretty sure I’m not a reactionary and I kind of know who Chappell Roan is, especially after she won the Grammy for best new artist last Sunday. And I recognize that colleges do many, many good things. But they also do a lot of other things. The operative question is whether it’s possible to get the good without the other, or at least more of the good and less of the other in less time for less money.
A decade ago I wrote College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education. By unbundling, I meant that colleges and universities charge tuition and fees for a whole lot of things – instruction, campus life, counseling, career services, real estate, dining, sports, research, sound-and-light shows, and many, many deans – without giving students a choice of paying less for less. I asked what higher education might look like if it followed the same unbundling trajectory as entertainment (music, TV) and surmised we might see the emergence of no-frills, skills-based programs: individualized to meet students where they are, then taking them to successful career launch in a desirable sector.
In retrospect, I gave our sector too much credit. As I like to say, no one’s ever gone broke betting against the pace of change in higher education. Occam’s razor suggests the simplest solution to the unbundling conundrum is change as little as possible and compress same ol’ degrees into less time. Shorter programs allow institutions to check a box without fundamental change.
As usual, the action is starting with MBA programs, the font of much of what passes for innovation in our sector. There are now 210 one-year MBAs accredited by the AACSB. Universities like Penn State have discontinued two-year programs. Except at the most rarefied schools, two-year MBAs are going the way of companies like Enron, Blockbuster, and Lehman Brothers – all now covered quicker in one-year MBA programs.
The idea of completing a bachelor’s degree in less than four years isn’t new. Newsweek covered it fifteen years ago with comments from Penn professor Robert Zemsky, the founding father of three-year college. And now his baby is growing up. Accreditors are broadly allowing three-year degrees. There was even a “College in 3” conference last year. Schools like BYU-Idaho, Johnson & Wales, and Plymouth State are rushing shorter programs to market. Meanwhile states are taking action to ensure institutions and students don’t miss out. Last year Utah’s Board of Higher Education approved 90-credit degrees. Not to be outdone, Indiana required all public four-year colleges to offer at least one three-year program starting this fall; Indiana Tech has already responded, and Indiana privates like Butler won’t be left behind in the race to three years. A new bill in Iowa mimics Indiana’s requirement, giving state institutions two years to get into the three-year game. To paraphrase Peter Thiel’s melancholic maxim “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” in higher education we wanted the Great Unbundling, instead we got the Great Truncation.
Why the sudden rush from four to three? The Iowa bill gives it away. Not a rush to judgment of spicy sound-and-light shows, but rather a rush to work. As Iowa state representative Taylor Collins, Chair of the House higher education subcommittee, told the Iowa Capital Dispatch, “we want to get kids directly into the workforce as quickly as possible.”
The rush to work – or back to work – is most understandable with MBAs as business school students are typically employed before enrolling. “We keep hearing that the return on investment for the two-year program isn’t good enough,” noted Pamela Jorden of the University of Arizona in explaining UA’s shift to a one-year MBA. But if the return on a two-year MBA is dicey, how about a four-year college degree in a field that doesn’t map to any next step besides investing more for a master’s degree? And so the Great Truncation is about to hit undergraduate education.
With the rush to work a direct result of a desperate search for an economic return, the only way to sustain four-year bachelor’s degrees, or two-year master’s degrees, or two-year associate degrees (and perhaps, in time, four-year high school diplomas) is to bring work into school. Bring work into school via connections to apprenticeship programs that don’t require prior technical skills or experience. Bring work into school via systematic co-ops and internships for every student in every program of study, rather than the current informal and inequitable system that most colleges think works great. Bring work into school through relevant capstone real-work projects in every course via new digital platforms that aggregate projects from employers. If colleges and universities did this – if they provided a full spectrum of work-based learning opportunities to all students – they’d easily be able to charge tuition for four years, and perhaps five like co-op leaders Northeastern and Drexel.
But 99% of colleges and universities don’t bring work into school. They don’t because it’s hard. Academic institutions aren’t set up to build employment bridges sturdier than flimsy career services posts and platforms; it’s notable that both Northeastern and Drexel began life as night schools. It’s also clear that even Northeastern and Drexel aren’t doing enough. What happens if a company wants to hire a co-op student before graduation? A Northeastern official once shared with me that “students are expected to complete their degrees” and if any participating employer were to make an employment offer to an enrolled student, the employer’s participation in the co-op program would be in jeopardy. Which, of course, is ridiculous. A good job offer should set off a celebration, not exile to co-op Gulag. But not even vaunted Northeastern has set up the off-ramps and on-ramps necessary to truly bring work into school. So the Great Truncation is an easy out. Perhaps that’s what Penn’s Zemsky means when he says that education leaders he talks to about three-year degrees call it “liberating.”
As the Great Truncation washes over higher education in the next few years, and as leaders slap each other on the back for a job well done, they ought to recognize that three-year degrees and the concomitant 25% discount pale in comparison to what students need, which is to bring work into school. And when clear-eyed, employment-oriented trustees and presidents get inevitable pushback from faculty and deans, they might consider spending some of those tuition dollars on a Christmas light show with a soundtrack that includes my much less salacious version of Chappell Roan’s hit:
No need for three-year vacation
They just want an occupation
Enough with the Great Truncation
H-O-T-T-O-G-O
Students are just hot to go… to work!