Glenn Murray is a man in a hurry. He talks – it’s never clear how seriously – about shortening degrees to three years within the lifetime of this government. Let’s be generous and grant that the McGuinty government will actually last a full four years – what are the odds of getting to achieving this?

Honestly? Zero. Zip. Bupkis. Here’s why:

There are only two feasible routes to three-year degrees – the compression model and the re-design model. The former is superficially a lot more palatable, in the sense that it doesn’t force profs to re-design curricula and can be implemented more quickly. But in practice, it’s not clear if this is actually the more workable path. The main barrier to this approach is that it still requires a major change in student behavior. And that isn’t going to happen without incentives.

Incentives could be made direct to students by improving student assistance. That sounds simple, if potentially expensive (this is possibly a deal-breaker, given that saving money is job one for Murray). But since only 50% of students use OSAP, half the student body would be unaffected. The only truly effective way to introduce incentives across the entire student body is to change the fee structure, giving students rebates for finishing early or charging penalties for finishing late. But that requires institutions to play ball. So maybe it’s less a matter of incentivizing students than of incentivizing institutions; tweak the funding formula to favour institutions that gets students out in three years, and let institutions themselves work out how best to get students to achieve it. But since most of the economic gains come from larger class sizes and increased student aid costs offset much of the purported gains – can anyone really see the premier sticking his neck out to annoy the universities that way?

The alternative is re-design. This approach has the potential at least to save money and make the system more effective – but even assuming everyone buys into it, drastic curriculum re-design isn’t quick and requires extensive pilot testing. The best analogy here is Ontario’s reducing secondary school from five years to four. This became mandatory in 2002, but was preceded by a fourteen-year period in which four-year graduation was optional. This in turn was preceded by a multi-year period of curricular adjustment; in total, it was almost twenty-five years from the time people began re-designing the curriculum for optional four-year graduation to the time it became compulsory.

I can imagine it being faster for universities; for all their alleged slowness, where curriculum is concerned they change more quickly than secondary schools. But we’re still talking decades rather than years.

Someone needs to tell the Minister.

So, we’ve covered the ideas of cutting graduation requirements, bringing back grade 12, and degree compression as ways to get to a three-year degree. That leaves course re-design.

There are some examples out there of full-on re-design of programs from four years of seat time to three years of competencies. The best known is probably at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), which was the subject of a recent book called Saving Higher Education: The Integrated, Competency-Based Three-Year Bachelor Degree Program. The basics of program re-design are relatively straightforward – working backward from a statement of graduate competencies (outcomes, basically), you work out how to introduce, reinforce and perfect those competencies in the space of 3 normal academic years. SNHU went whole-hog on this, even replacing “courses” with non-concurrent “modules,” hence ditching the idea that all academic units need to be of one term’s duration. Few, in fact, last more than six weeks (in Canada, this would probably force a re-jig of student aid policy due to the 12-week rule).

It’s pretty clear this approach can work in fields like business (which is where it was piloted at SNHU and the University of Charleston); it’s also clear that it can be implemented in a relatively short period of time provided you’re prepared to pay a load of cash for faculty release so they can do the hard slog of program and course re-design. What’s not clear is whether this model actually works in a field other than business. Even SNHU and Charleston – both of whom are fairly evangelical about the 3-year degree – have yet to really see the model break into other areas of study.

There’s no reason it can’t be done, of course. We could go the route of the European Credit Transfer System and base credits on expected hours of work, not seat time. We could re-design whole programs around outcomes, and then put a whole lot more thought into course-sequencing so that students would continue to acquire competencies in a consistent fashion across the curriculum. This is all possible. But what it would really mean – in the arts and sciences, anyway – is ditching the whole smorgasboard curriculum we’ve had since the 1960s. The outcomes-based approach only really works if you keep relatively tight control of courses taken; too much student freedom messes up the careful laddering of competencies.

There’s a case to be made that this kind of change saves money and results in better outcomes. But even if it is the “right” thing to do, it’s not clear that either students or professors are interested. Bluntly, we prefer the inefficiency of the present system. Overcoming that preference is the biggest barrier to three-year degrees.

As we noted yesterday, there are four ways to go about getting university degrees from four years to three. One, cutting grad requirements from 120 to 90 credits, isn’t serious. A second, upping the use of prior learning assessment (or, in extremis, bringing back grade 13), is barely half-serious. That leaves curriculum compression and curriculum re-design.

Curriculum compression is the significantly easier path. No need to change anything other than the speed of students’ path through the system. By getting them to take more summer courses and six courses per term rather than five, they’ll get through that much quicker, saving everyone money.

That’s the theory, anyway. What about in practice? Well, to start with, it’s really not clear that students are interested in this concept. Students can already take six credits a term and take summer credits; they simply choose not to do so. In fact, they are far more likely to extend their programs for four years to five rather than shorten them to three.

There are some pretty basic reasons for this. Students tend to prefer work over school during the summer because they need money. Summer income accounts for something like 65% of all student income, and for a substantial portion of students, it’s their only income. A large number of others prefer to take reduced course loads in order to better balance part-time work with their studies: it’s a lot easier to get four A’s working fifteen hours a week than it is to get five, so students adjust their schedules accordingly. Getting these students to go from four to five classes – let alone six – requires money, and lots of it. They would need to be compensated for lost income, much of which would need to come as grants rather than loans in order to be effective.

How would faster completion save money, then? To some degree at least, student costs align with courses taken rather than time-on-campus; if the number of courses required to get to 120 credits isn’t reduced, it’s not clear how much costs would actually be reduced, other than by increasing class sizes. Come to think of it, this is actually the only way that compression can save cash. Kicking student load up from five courses to six while keeping professor contact hours constant would increase the ratio of outputs to inputs (i.e., “productivity”) by twenty percent. Assuming, that is, that your classrooms are big enough to handle the overflow.

Ceteris paribus, that might save a few hundred million in costs – but that money would almost certainly be consumed by the required increases in student aid. Is that really what the Minister had in mind?

The Ontario Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Glen Murray, has a bee in his bonnet about three-year undergraduate degrees. Basically, he’s been told there’s some fiscal consolidation coming, and he thinks three-year degrees are the way that institutions can deal with the coming troubles without – allegedly – affecting quality.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with three-year degrees. All over Europe they are now standard (although in many countries, 80-90% of bachelor’s graduates go on to do a two-year Master’s degrees, so this might not be as felicitous an example as you’d think). And, of course, it’s not much more than a decade ago that three-year degrees were here in Ontario, too. It can be done.

The issue is – how?

It’s not simply a matter of rolling back time and going back to the 1990s. Back then, one of the rationales for having three year degrees was the existence of a fifth year of high-school. Ontario then – like Quebec today – was still on a continent-wide K-16 standard; the difference was just that the transition points within were slightly out of whack. What the Minister is proposing now is something different: K-15 vs. K-16. That really would put Ontario out of sync with the rest of the continent, with possibly some adverse consequences for student mobility in and out of the province.

There are basically four strategies for reducing undergraduate degrees to three years. The simplest – and most foolish – is simply to lop a year off the degree. Make 90 credits the standard instead of 120. It could be done overnight. I’m not sure what it would actually accomplish, but it could be done overnight.

The next simplest would be to punch up a lot of prior learning. Get more secondary students in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses in high school, and you can start handing out more course exemptions and move students through undergraduate education a lot faster. At the extreme, of course, you could always bring back grade 13. If cost-per-student-per-year is really the issue, getting first-year students out of research-intensive institutions and into secondary schools is about as cost-effective as you’re going to get.

That leaves two other strategies. The first is to allow – or maybe “encourage” is a better word – students to go through the existing system faster. Get them to take a sixth course each term, or more summer courses – anything to get to 120 faster. This is what might be called a “compression” system. The other is to actually re-design degrees from the ground up, mapping desired learning outcomes and working out how to get students to display desired competencies in a three-year period. We’ll look at these over the next couple of posts.