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Students haven’t been completing college in four years—that’s a bad thing. And since we can’t rely on Congress to make meaningful fixes—like when the House’s attempt to raise Pell Grant eligibility from 12 to 15 credits per semester fell by the wayside—reformers need to look elsewhere. That elsewhere is making cuts to the bloated core curriculum. Not all of it, of course—sadly, colleges still have to remediate what K–12 fails to teach—but much of the excess could and should be cut.
Few issues in higher ed get less attention than the growing time it takes students to earn a degree. The average time to complete a bachelor’s degree in the U.S. is now five to six years. That’s insane. The longer students stay in school, the more it costs taxpayers, delays workforce entry, and increases reliance on aid. As Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz of the New York Fed note, the clearest cost is tuition—about $6,500 a year after aid—but the bigger loss is time. These students could be working. Instead, they’re stuck in class.
One reason for the delay? Degree requirements are bloated. A standard bachelor’s degree requires about 120 credit hours, but at least 25 percent of those are unrelated to the degree itself, and probably 10 percent are completely useless.
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At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, for example, students must complete 11 general education courses—nearly as many as some majors require. A core curriculum is supposed to enrich culture, cultivate character, and expose students to a broad base of knowledge. But categories like “Social & Cultural Diversity” often translate to semesters spent in courses unmoored from academic rigor and laden with ideological messaging, which not only keeps students in college longer but also delays maturity. Glenn Ricketts, a political science professor at Raritan Valley Community College and Public Affairs Director at the National Association of Scholars, says his students “often behave like middle schoolers—who endlessly defer making adult decisions about their lives.”
Some core classes offer real value. But requiring every liberal arts student to take multiple math and science courses—or STEM majors to slog through multiple English courses and diversity studies—is a waste. They don’t retain the material anyway. I had to take a geology class to meet my core requirements, and I can’t tell you a damn thing about a rock.
I’m not saying we cut core requirements entirely.
America’s K–12 system is so weak that colleges have little choice but to spend time catching students up. Many arrive with fifth-grade reading skills and no grasp of basic civics.
Ricketts put it plainly: “An increasingly large number of students arrive for college seriously deficient in reading and writing ability … and so they need to register for remedial courses simply to get up to speed.”
So yes, we still need some core classes. STEM majors should know how to write a clear sentence. And liberal arts majors like me should know enough arithmetic to avoid embarrassing ourselves.
But colleges can still cut the fluff—like the golf class I had to take just to hit 120 credit hours, or the ideological detours into “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or other pseudo-academic electives. Does a bachelor’s degree really need 120 credit hours? Should we still be clinging to the Carnegie Unit from 1906? Does a toaster need a user manual?
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Judging by the actions of some states and institutions, the answer is increasingly no.
Indiana now requires all state universities to offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years. Utah’s public system is developing a streamlined Bachelor of Applied Studies. More than a dozen schools—from Portland State to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh—have joined the new College-in-3 Exchange, a pilot program to rethink the standard degree timeline.
These aren’t signs of cutting corners—they’re signs that it’s possible to cut the nonsense while keeping what is essential to education.
Raising the Pell Grant threshold to 15 credits would likely have been an effective way to nudge students to progress more quickly; however, the fix we need to consider now is lowering the total credit hours required for a bachelor’s degree. If we want students to graduate on time, we should stop wasting their time.
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Image: “College graduate students” by Kit on Wikimedia Commons
