During the 2022-23 academic year, Utah public colleges and universities awarded 19,219 bachelor’s degrees. It was about 100 more than the previous year. But, the Utah System of Higher Education wants to see even better outcomes with a new system: giving students the option to get their bachelor’s degrees in three years rather than four.

Utah is the first public system in the country to approve a faster path to graduation by implementing a Bachelor of Applied Studies category. Instead of the regular 120 credits, the new programs would require a minimum of 90 credits.

“This exciting change in policy opens the door to innovation on our campuses and allows each institution to develop proposals for three-year bachelor’s degree programs,” said Aaron Skonnard, Utah Board of Higher Education member in a news release. “We want to be at the forefront of new approaches in higher education that accelerate outcomes for students while better meeting the needs of our workforce.”

The new category established by the Utah System of Higher Education would require national accreditation and need to undergo approval by the state’s Board of Higher Education before it becomes available. Areas of study would also be limited and tied to specific industry needs, the release said.

Southern Utah University already has an option to by allowing students to take summer courses to accelerate their studies.

The school is now taking in mind how to meet the evolving needs of students, said Nikki Koontz, a spokesperson for SUU. Faculty members identified three potential new programs that align with this new approach.

“We are finalizing these proposals in a rigorous curriculum review process and are looking forward to seeing how the accrediting bodies, students, and the employment markets will receive them,” she said in an email. “We want to ensure that each degree meets the standards required for accreditation and eligibility for federal financial aid.”

The 90-credit programs are still in the exploratory phase and need to be cleared through various accreditation bodies, Bryan Magaña, a spokesperson for Weber State University said in a statement. As of now, most departments in the school will continue with 120 credits, but that may change.

“Universities are always looking for ways to show people that college is possible, and a 90-credit bachelor’s degree is one way to do that,” Magaña said. “Weber State is known for meeting students where they are, and some departments here are exploring the possibility of offering 90-credit bachelor’s degrees.”

Roughly a third of Weber State students get their bachelor’s degrees over a three-year period with credits earned during high school, or associate’s degrees, he added.

Other public universities in Utah didn’t reply to requests for comment as of publication time.

Last year BYU-Idaho and Salt Lake City-based Ensign College, private schools founded and sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, announced they would offer a which would preserve major courses while eliminating electives. The courses are to be offered through the faith’s  program.

Utah’s new formula also follows a pilot considered by some U.S. colleges that would remake the curriculum to allow students to graduate faster, according to . Those schools include:

• American Public University System
• Indiana University of Pennsylvania
• Merrimack College
• New England College
• Northwood University
• Portland State University
• Slippery Rock University
• The University of Minnesota at Rochester
• The University of North Texas
• The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
• The University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh
• Utica College

You might call it a bachelor party: Rhode Island saw an almost 4% increase in bachelor’s degrees in 2022, according to from a higher education foundation.

“We did not see this much increase in any other state’s bachelor’s degrees,” said Courtney Brown, vice president of impact and planning for the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation. “And it looks like it’s been going up over the last few years. Sometimes, especially in smaller states, it could be a fluke. Maybe it’s a one-year blip. But when I look at the data from 2017 to 2022, the data have been growing pretty tremendously.”

The foundation focuses on postsecondary attainments — which includes bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees and other post-high-school certifications or certificates. Since 2009, Lumina has tracked the trend of state-led goals for attainment, with a nationwide goal of 60% attainment by 2025.

Rhode Island’s overall attainment rate is 56.7% — still a ways from the 70% goal for 2025, during the administration of former Gov. Gina Raimondo. With 2025 a not-so-distant horizon anymore, the state’s new finish line is 70% postsecondary attainment by 2030, according to a presentation by Shannon Gilkey, the state’s commissioner of postsecondary education, at a Feb. 7 hearing before the Senate Committee on Education.

Rhode Island’s degree-toting population has quietly climbed in number since 2017, Brown noted: “People sometimes think, ‘You know, maybe that’s because there are more people with certificates or certifications.’ But that’s not true in Rhode Island. All of the change has been on degrees.”

While associate degrees haven’t changed much — 8.4% attainment in 2017 versus 8.1% in 2022 — bachelor’s degrees have seen a meteoric rise, especially among people aged 25 to 34. This demographic’s baccalaureates rose from 23.7% in 2017 to 32.5% in 2022.

“A 10-percentage point increase over five years is attributable to something that’s happening in the higher ed system,” Brown said. “There are practical policies that had to have been put in place years ago, to help more people get into and complete a bachelor’s degree…None of this was overnight.”

From a national vantage point, it wasn’t immediately clear to Brown what fostered the change. She estimated these structural changes may have taken place about a decade ago. The numbers are also something of a mystery to education commissioner Gilkey, whose featured the Lumina data.

“We still need to have a deeper understanding about what’s really happening underneath the hood, if you will, of this attainment goal and progress towards that attainment goal,” Gilkey testified.

One factor might be the founding of the Promise scholarship in 2017. It helps students attend the Community College of Rhode Island tuition-free, easing access to a four-year degree if a student decides to pursue that path.

“[A transfer] helps with affordability,” Brown said. “I can more affordably complete a two-year [degree] so I only have to think about financing two years of the four year degree.”

The Lumina Foundation’s data paints a generally positive picture of postsecondary education stateside — after all, Rhode Island was only at 42% attainment in 2009 — but it’s not pollyannaish. Brown noted that Rhode Island’s recent successes aren’t excused from the usual disparities involving access and race.

“There’s a slight decline in the Black attainment population, which makes me wonder if a number of people who identify as Black Americans have left Rhode Island,” Brown said.

Black Rhode Islanders went from 34.7% attainment of associate-or-higher degrees in 2021 to 31% attainment in 2022. The Hispanic population’s attainment rose from 22.9% to 25.8% in that same time period.

Several states like Utah, Colorado and Massachusetts have reached the 60% goal. Washington, D.C. — a typical outlier — is highest, with 75.4% of its population holding a postsecondary credential.

But numbers only tell so much of the story: Education after high school, Brown noted, is about more than diplomas.

“It’s not just about increasing the number of people with bachelor’s degrees,” she said. “[People] want bachelor’s degrees that can get…a good job and a good life.”

Nationwide results, including Rhode Island, are available in Lumina’s report.

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OMAHA — Nebraska’s “brain drain” of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher leaving the state is persistent and worsening, according to newly released U.S. Census data.

But the same survey also raises an alarm about who else is fleeing.

“Notably, the data reveals that individuals 25 years and older with other (lesser) levels of educational attainment also are leaving the state,” says Josie Schafer of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Her office, which consults with state policymakers and legislators about workforce and economic development patterns, analyzed migration-related findings from the American Community Survey’s five-year estimates through 2022, which were released this month.

In 2022, the state lost an estimated 1,089 adults aged 25 and older with an education of high school diploma or less. While a relatively small slice, Schafer said that the drop marks a shift from several previous years when Nebraska was attracting individuals in that education group.

In the category of individuals with some college or an associate degree, Nebraska saw a net gain in 2022, though small: 35. For perspective, the state in 2019 had a net increase in that population of more than 2,000.

Schafer said the data did not allow her to drill into specific reasons why the people with less education than a bachelor’s or professional degree might not be finding Nebraska as alluring as in the past.

She believes patterns could be driven by job availability, better wages and job benefits offered elsewhere, or perhaps quality of life factors such as housing and child care.

“The idea of Nebraska being a low cost-of-living-state — they might not be feeling it,” said Schafer.

Erin Porterfield, executive director of nonprofit Heartland Workforce Solutions, which serves Douglas, Sarpy and Washington Counties, checked with network partners to better understand why their clients might be eyeing the exit door.

Among reasons cited are that negative experiences with racism “contribute to feeling unsafe” and to reduced employment and social opportunities.

“Feeling like Nebraska isn’t for everyone,” was another refrain, along with increased limits “on rights for people of diverse identities, including transgender care.”

Porterfield also said Nebraska is relatively early in establishing a solid “employment pipeline,” which leaves some young adults unclear about their employment and career opportunities.

While employers generally are “trying now, more than ever” to connect with young people to show what a career pathway could look like, she said, such linkages have a ways to go.

Especially for Nebraskans who need to support themselves financially after high school, Porterfield said, “they often feel lost.”

Meanwhile, said Schafer, the exodus of people with a bachelor’s degree or more remains a “critical issue” for Nebraska.

Her showed a sustained trend, with the state losing a net 4,610 people with that higher education level in 2022, compared to the previous year’s 4,415.

To be sure, there are still more than 400,000 individuals with a bachelor’s degree or higher living in Nebraska. “Lots of people stay in Nebraska,” Schafer said, “But the fact the trend is continuing to be negative is certainly something that should give us pause.”

A controversial report on the “return on investment” of a UNC System education is on its way to the North Carolina General Assembly, which required the system to study the issue two years ago.

Key findings from the , discussed Wednesday by the UNC System Board of Governors:

North Carolinians who receive bachelor’s degrees through the UNC system were found to earn a median of $572,000 more than those without, a “return on investment” for students of about $500,000. Those with bachelor’s degrees earned a median of about $1.2 million over their lifetimes.Those who earn graduate-level degrees saw a median “return on investment” of $938,000 compared those with bachelor’s degrees, earning a median of about $2.1 million over their lifetimes.

To come to those numbers, the private research firm worked with the consulting firm �����Ի� to study more than 700 undergraduate and 575 graduate programs in the 16-campus university system along with decades of earnings data for graduates still living in the state.

Using that data, the researchers compared “the expected lifetime earnings of UNC graduates against the expected lifetime earnings of those without a college degree for undergraduate programs or with a bachelor’s degree for graduate programs, as measured by the American Community Survey, in the state,” according to the report.

“The way to essentially interpret it is, the instant you graduate from that program, it’s like I wrote you a check for $500,000,” said , in a committee meeting with members of the UNC System Board of Governors Wednesday.

Of course, Fritz said, some degrees are more lucrative than others.

The report found 94 percent of the system’s undergraduate programs and 91 percent of its graduate programs resulted in a positive return on student investment.

The highest return was in science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) fields, the report found. Degrees in Biotechnology were found to be the most lucrative, with a median lifetime return of more than $3.2 million.

Among graduate students, the study found medical science programs provided the highest return on investment, with a median lifetime return of over $5.2 million.

The study found graduates of 42 of 235 undergraduate programs and 83 of 244 graduate programs earned a median lifetime return on investment of more than $1 million. Many of these high-return programs are aligned to critical workforce needs in the state.

But the study doesn’t just emphasize which programs lead to the highest earnings for students or concentrate on creating “the next wave of millionaires,” Fritz said.

Upward economic mobility for graduates across programs and disciplines is significant, he said, with 89.6% of graduates whose families were in the lowest income group at the time of enrollment moving up at least one “income band” as their careers progress.

“For low-income students (defined here as students with an income of less than $17,900 at time of enrollment), 89.6% experienced some economic mobility — meaning they moved up at least one income band from where they started over a 20-year period,” the report reads “[Forty-two percent] of all low-income students rose four income bands leading to a yearly income of $91,300 or greater after 20 years while 65.4% of low income students rose at least 3 bands to an income of more than $51,800 per year.”

“This data demonstrates that by removing barriers to access, the State of North Carolina and the UNC System have ensured that students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds have a high likelihood of upward economic mobility if they complete a degree,” the report reads.

Limitations and political friction

While important in demonstrating the value of higher education at a period when more American are skeptical about it, the study’s authors acknowledge it has limitations.

An important blind spot in the study: students who earn degrees in the UNC System but move to other states to pursue their careers, making their wage data unavailable through the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

“One of my early questions was about the school of the arts,” said UNC System President Peter Hans Wednesday. “Most of their graduates immediately go to New York and Los Angeles and such.”

Graduates in journalism and media related fields often leave for major media markets outside the state as well and high performing graduates in political science and the social sciences may also decamp to Washington D.C. or to political careers in other states.

In Wednesday’s committee discussion of the return-on-investment report, members of the board of governors and UNC System President Peter Hans suggested it took as long as it did to produce — more than 18 months — because of resistance from the state Department of Commerce.

The system and its outside firms needed to partner with the department to get wage data. The system would also like the department to approve a partnership that would help them access wage data at the federal level, board members said Wednesday.

Those criticisms came as a surprise to the Department of Commerce.

“Having worked closely with UNC to deliver (in August 2022, 15 months ago) 26 years of confidential wage data – dating back to 1996 and representing more than 47.5 million data records and more than $543 Billion in wages, we’re surprised by today’s comments,” said David Rhodes, communications director for the department.

“No one from the UNC System has raised such concerns with us directly since we’ve been working with them,” Rhodes said.

“The wage data is derived from information submitted by employers as part of their unemployment insurance tax accounts,” Rhodes said. “As such, the data set contains highly sensitive personal identifiable information, so called PII, so as you can appreciate the upmost care must be taken to ensure all parties entrusted with such data have the equipment and procedures in place to keep it secure, a process that is complex and can take some time.”

“Even so, our team produced the requested data in a timely manner,” Rhodes said.

Commerce Secretary Machelle Baker Sanders is a Democrat appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper while members of the UNC System Board of Governors are political appointees of the General Assembly’s Republican majority.

Political tensions over the return-on-investment report have been apparent since before the legislature mandated and funded it two years ago in the state budget. Questions about how it may be used and whether those decisions will be made with politically have only grown louder.

A controversial undertaking

Members of the board of governors emphasized Wednesday that the study is just the beginning. More information is needed, they said, before decisions are made about investing in some programs more than others or, as administrators, faculty and students across the system fear, eliminating some programs entirely because they are found to provide a lower return on investment.

But tensions are high across the system, as illustrated by UNC-Greensboro, where the UNC Board of Governors met Wednesday and Thursday of this week.

As , thousands of faculty, students and alumni at the school have signed a petition opposing a review of academic programs at the university that could result in the elimination of some programs.

Protests were held on campus last month and again this week, as the board of governors met on campus.

An independent audit of the university’s finances, funded by the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, found that though UNCG has struggled with enrollment and funding challenges in the last few years, it is on firm financial footing and doesn’t need to cut programs.

Chancellor Frank Gilliam has criticized that audit and its conclusions, saying the university has to align its programs with student and workforce demands.

More business focused language regarding academia – discussions of students as customers, of “return on investment” and upper level administrators as “CEOs” – has gone from conservative think-tank literature to Republican-led legislatures down to the campus level.

One of the firms used to produce  the system level return on investment report and in the academic program review now underway at UNCG is rpk GROUP. That firm was involved in a similar study at West Virginia University, where earlier this year university leaders .

Gilliam has waved off comparisons between West Virginia and what’s happening at UNCG, but in a board of governors committee meeting Wednesday he spoke to the philosophical tie between the return-on-investment report, his own university’s academic program review, and the pushback to both.

“We have made the argument, and we are coming under some fire for it, that we really need this data to do an analysis of how much it costs us to produce a student credit hour,” Gilliam said. “And does that line up strategically with where we’re trying to take the institution. Does it line up, let me say it more bluntly, with student demand? Student demands are high in certain areas. They’ve changed over time. And they’re less high in other areas.”

Gilliam said he was worried public perception will be that if the return-on-investment study shows almost all UNC system programs provide a good return on investment, there is no need for program reviews like the one now underway at UNCG.

“We’re doing well in North Carolina but there are going to be headwinds,” Gilliam said. “I’ve been doing this almost 40 years. The environment is changing at a sea change level. It’s not just little changes. And they’re not going anywhere. So I’ve argued we need to sharpen our focus. It’s not about cutting programs. It’s about meeting student demands and labor market demands.”

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Building upon their earlier blockbuster findings on the link between education and mortality, the researchers said Americans are on two distinct paths based on educational attainment. Angus Deaton, who co-wrote the recently published with Anne Case, calls the current system unfair. 

“The B.A. has become this sort of condition for participation and dignity in the modern economy — and a lot of it is unnecessary,” Deaton, a British American economist and 2015 Nobel Prize winner, told ����Ӱ��.

There was, however, one positive development, the researchers said. While the gap in mortality rates between those with and without a bachelor’s grew markedly since 1990, Black men with four-year degrees fare better than they ever have since such data became available more than three decades ago. 

“It used to be that Black mortality rates were not very different whether you had a B.A. or not,” Deaton said. “Now, Black men with a B.A. are much closer to white men with a B.A. than they are to Black or white men without a B.A. The same is true for [Black] women. Blacks with a B.A. have made a huge amount of progress.”

But inequity remains: While 42% of white Americans 25 and older earned a bachelor’s degree, just 28% of Black Americans and 20% of Hispanics have this advantage, according to recent . 

“The B.A. divide is getting bigger while the race divide is getting smaller — but it still exists,” Deaton said. 

The pandemic worsened academic outcomes, particularly for minority men. While undergraduate college enrollment dropped for all students, for example, the figures are startling for Black men: They fell by 14.8% overall and by 23.5% for those enrolled in two-year schools between 2019 and 2021, . 

Latino men also fared poorly during this time, with their enrollment slipping by % overall and by 19.7% among those attending community college.

And COVID’s toll expanded well beyond education: Life expectancy itself fell in the U.S. in 2021 for the second year in a row, the first time it dropped for two consecutive years in a century, .

​​Deaton’s and Case’s work has focused specifically on how higher education has acted to ward off death from a particular type of suffering, calling it a “talisman” against overdose fatalities. 

The death rate from drugs, alcohol and suicide climbed for all Americans in the most recently studied period, they found, but was concentrated among those without a bachelor’s degree: The alcohol-related mortality rate for whites without a bachelor’s degree increased by 41% between 2013 and 2019 for those ages 25–74. The suicide rate jumped by 17%, and the drug-related mortality rate shot up a whopping 73% for that group, researchers said. 

Results were equally troubling for Blacks and Hispanics who did not hold a bachelor’s degree: Drug-related deaths more than doubled between 2013 and 2019 for these two groups. The suicide rate increased by a third for both. Alcohol-related mortality rates rose 30% for Blacks and by 24% for Hispanics who hadn’t completed college. 

The researchers gleaned data about educational attainment, age, sex, race, ethnicity and cause of death through death certificates. They called out how fentanyl, the drug now dominating headlines, had vastly different impacts in the Black community depending on education.

 “The arrival of street fentanyl in 2013 led to a drug mortality rate among less-educated Blacks that was seven times greater than that among more-educated Blacks in 2019,” they write.

Deaton said results were not much improved for those Americans who completed some college — including those who earned an associate’s degree. Their mortality and disease rates and job placement were just slightly improved but far closer to those with a high school education than those with a bachelor’s degree. 

While the calculations, first published in Annual Reviews in August, were made before data from the pandemic became available, there was no reason, researchers said, to think the rates would decline once COVID-19 was brought under control. 

Deaton’s and Case’s earlier work after it identified that mortality rates among middle-aged whites shot up in a relatively short amount of time, between 1999 and 2013, because of suicide, drug overdoses and alcohol abuse. From this finding, they coined the much-quoted term “deaths of despair”.

Back then, the authors linked the deaths of less-educated white Americans to economic and social conditions. Through their later work on their , they cited falling real wages, a decline in religious participation, increasing rates of children born to unwed mothers and a drop in marriage rates overall.

A decrease in availability of good jobs for those without a bachelor’s degree, exorbitant health care costs and a lack of a financial safety net for those who were neither children nor elderly also contributed to a “rising tide of despair,” they said. 

“Both the safety net and the financing of health care are radically different in other rich countries where — with a few exceptions — there are few deaths of despair,” they noted. 

Under these circumstances, they wrote, it was not surprising to see a rise in drug and alcohol abuse, unhealthy eating and suicide.

“We do not believe that the opioid epidemic in the United States would have happened to the extent that it did without the ocean of pain and distress among less-educated Americans,” they wrote.

Deaton told ����Ӱ�� their later research yielded two important findings. 

“These deaths of despair, which were largely confined to whites, later spread to the African- American and Hispanic population, largely to do with drugs, both legal and illegal, including fentanyl,” he said. “The other is that these deaths of despair are not confined to whites currently in middle age, but are even worse among younger people: Each younger-born generation is getting worse than the one before. We know a lot of people who have fallen into addiction traps. Among people without B.A.s, this is much worse.”