Three

Just before Christmas, an interesting blog post appeared on the Canadian conservative website The Hub. It was by Mitch Davidson, late of the Ford Administration in Queen’s Park, and his subject was the topic of three-year bachelor’s degrees. Davidson is pro-, and he advances some fairly spectacular claims on behalf of such credentials. Just look at the headline: How Switching to three-year post-secondary degrees could kickstart the Canadian economy, or the claim later down in the paper that “widespread adoption of accelerated three-year degrees…are a simple, powerful fix for Canada’s stagnating productivity.”

Now, I happen to agree with Davidson that there is nothing sacred about a four-year undergraduate degree (it’s actually five in some disciplines, but we’ll leave that aside) and that three-year degrees are worth exploring. The number of years in an undergrad degree is basically arbitrary. As Davidson points out, in Europe, bachelor’s degrees are usually three years, not four; the same is true in Australia and New Zealand. There’s nothing stopping us from re-adopting that standard. They were after all, common in most of the country until the 1980s – we only added a fourth year really during the period of very high youth unemployment between 1981 and 1997 or so, when it seemed like spending another year in school couldn’t be any worse than tempting fate on the job market (for those of you who think today’s levels of youth unemployment are unprecedently high, I urge you to go look up the rates from 1992 or so.  I’ll wait.) Also, in Ontario at least, the decline of three-year degrees was at least partially related to the elimination of grade 13. And of course, in some parts of the country, the three-year degree never went away: it’s still pretty common in Manitoba, as well as standard in Quebec. 

All that said, though, Davidson’s analysis, proposal and justifications are just nonsense. 

Let’s start with the obvious: Davidson does not understand the meaning of the word “productivity”. As an economic term, this is a ratio of outputs to inputs: economies become more productive when the ratio of one to the other increases. Simply adding numbers to the labor force – which shorter degrees would surely do – does nothing, on its own to productivity. The productivity implications depend what kinds of workers get introduced, in what jobs, with what access to technology, etc. If simply adding numbers were all it took, the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of international students working 30-40+ hours/week in 2019-2022 (and their sudden disappearance in 2025 and 2026) should have exerted huge upwards (then downwards) pressure on Canada’s productivity numbers. Suffice to say they did nothing of the sort.

As for economic performance as a whole: it’s hard to say that there’s any obvious evidence that three-year degrees are a short-cut to prosperity. Is Europe more prosperous than Canada? Does Scotland, which has four-year degrees, shine brightly compared to the rest of the UK, where three-year degrees are the norm? I happen to think that Manitoba is pretty cool, but the idea that it has some kind of economic secret sauce because of three-year degrees is…well, unhinged. (I leave Quebec out of this discussion because I understand Davidson’s argument to be in favour of a K-15 system, but Quebec, like most of Canada, still has a K-16 system, just divided up differently). Basically, shortening degrees would likely provide a one-time boost to the size of the labour market (which, ceteris paribus, would probably result some one-time downward pressure on wages), but the idea that it would do anything more than that relies on a great deal of hand-waving.

There is one more piece of magical thinking at work in this piece. Among the regulatory changes Davidson wants to make in order to make his dream work is one that would force institutions to accept graduates of three-year degrees as graduate students. This would be quite a departure in Canada: four-year degrees have more or less always been the de facto entry requirement for graduate school in Canada going back at least to the 1970s. In fact – that used to be the distinction between 3- and 4-year degrees: one got you into graduate school and the other did not. The big innovation of the 1990s, if you want to call it that, was that universities made four-year degrees the norm for students who weren’t (necessarily) interested in grad school. 

My view is that we should move back to a system where students who don’t want further education and who want to get into the labour force quickly should be able to do so with some kind of certification after three years. Davidson’s view, much like the Red Queen and indeed like Kim Il-Sung in the 1960s, is that government should be able to wave a magic wand and declare that shorter degrees mean exactly the same thing as longer degrees. The logic here seems to be that if the shortening takes place due to curtailing breadth requirements (i.e. electives), then the value of the degree does not change. There’s nothing wrong with debating the value and place of breadth/electives of course; personally, I think there is a good argument for more of it rather than less, though most defences of breadth presented in public are extremely fluffy. But pretending that degrees that lack breadth are identical in value to those that have it? Or forcing institutions to suspend their judgement about educational quality in order to ram through some apparatchik’s whims about misunderstood qualities like productivity? No. Just, no.

And now, on to the last disagreement I have with Davidson, which has to do with funding. One of the reasons I think we should have fewer four-year degrees – in addition to the basic reason that I think many students without ambitions for graduate school would prefer it – is that governments quite clearly aren’t willing to fund post-secondary education in the way they used to. I think it therefore makes sense for institutions in provinces like Ontario to say: “OK, if you don’t want to pay as much, perhaps we will simply deliver less”. You get what you pay for.

But no, Davidson – who was part of a government that has overseen some of the largest real cuts to post-secondary education income that this country has ever seen – wants to use shortened degrees as an excuse to cut institutional grants still further. That, unfortunately, is the thing with the Ford government: it’s just institutional vandalism all the way down.

I could go on but perhaps best to leave it there. I appreciate the Hub taking some time out to talk about higher education – we need more of that. But at the same time, we have to hold public arguments to account. And sadly, Davidson’s economically confused combination of magical thinking and institutional defunding just doesn’t cut it. I like the idea of three-year degrees, but if this is the only version on offer, I’d stick with the status quo.