The Dispatch

Colleges across the country are shortening the path to a degree in an attempt to cut costs and compete for students.

A growing number are turning to a three-year, reduced-credit bachelor’s degree, which New America recently highlighted as the newest and fastest-growing attempt to reimagine four-year degrees. Programs tend to target transfer students and working adults, and are often in fields such as health administration, business, and information technology, New America said.

Four Michigan colleges have joined the club, including Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Kim Kozlowski, our reporter at partner Bridge Michigan, reported. This fall it’s offering a 90-credit Bachelor of Applied Science in Applied Marketing, designed in part for working adults who want to change careers.

The move is one way the university is trying to respond to workforce needs and address concerns about the time and cost associated with a traditional degree, Anthony Anderson, the university’s president, told Kim. Davenport also saw its enrollment decline nearly 45% between 2014 and 2024, though Anderson pushed back on the notion that streamlining a degree was just about increasing enrollment.

“Students are increasingly asking very reasonable questions: How long will this degree take me to get? How much is it going to cost? What will I be able to do with it once I am finished?” he said. “Higher ed really needs to have good answers to those questions. This is one way to answer those questions.”

📚 Read more: Accreditor explores 3-year bachelor’s degrees to speed workforce entry in high-demand fields (via our partner El Paso Matters)

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Other states with three-year bachelor’s degrees include Indiana, Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Utah. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has told the board that oversees higher ed in the state to work on creating some.

The College-in-3 Exchange, a nonprofit advocating for the shift, expects to have more than 200 member institutions by year-end.

Not everyone is bullish. In June, Connecticut lawmakers rejected a proposal that would allow the state’s universities to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees. State Sen. Derek Slap, a Democrat who co-chairs the legislature’s higher ed committee, told the Connecticut Mirror that it’s not clear if the degrees would be accepted by graduate schools and employers.

Slap also told the Mirror that he worries a three-year program lessens the rigor and value of a bachelor’s degree.

“Are students and society better off if things like electives, study abroad, capstone projects, other enrichment opportunities are all scuttled to join the workforce a little faster?” he said.

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Elsewhere on Open Campus

A student applies for financial aid at Century College. Century employees, whose jobs include helping students navigate the financial aid process, say more and more of their time is going to dealing with ghost student fraud. (Cleo Krejci/MinnPost)

This week our reporters in Minnesota and Ohio dug into an alarming trend facing community colleges around the country: “ghost students” who enroll in classes just long enough to receive financial aid, then disappear. (You may also remember reporting from our partner CalMatters on this issue last year.)

Staff at Century College, a two-year school in White Bear Lake, told Cleo Krejci, our investigative reporter at MinnPost, that they’re spending roughly 60 hours a week trying to combat the fraudsters.

Minnesota’s 26 colleges and seven universities are preparing to test a new identity verification system designed to weed them out. The system, which serves more than 290,000 students each year, says it flagged 2,696 financial aid applications as fraudulent or potentially fraudulent last school year.

Amy Morona, our reporter at Signal Ohio, found that nearly all of the state’s community colleges say they’ve experienced some amount of fraud. Leaders of those colleges have called on the state for more help in combating it.

“The better our technology, our processes can be, the more time our community colleges can devote towards what their purpose is, teaching and learning with their students to help them get jobs,” said Avi Zaffini, president of the state’s community college association.

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