Giles Sims, 34, was sick of getting passed over for jobs because he didn’t have a college degree.

But with a wife and a widowed mother to help support, he needed a quick solution. So the laid-off web developer turned to one of a growing number of three-year degree programs.

“I can’t afford to be out of the workforce for four years. That just seems like forever, and the three-year made it seem less daunting,” said Sims, a student at Ensign College, a private Salt Lake City school that recently changed all its bachelor’s degrees to require fewer classes than a traditional four-year degree.

The condensed programs have exploded in popularity. As of this spring, 26 U.S. states have a college that offers at least one reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s, according to the nonprofit research group .

Advocates say these programs are a solution to the college affordability crisis and a godsend for non-traditional students like Sims.

Critics, however, worry that they’ll narrow too much what students learn, confuse employers, limit graduate school options and create headaches in fields that require state licenses.

The American Association of University Professors, for one, says the programs devalue the meaning of a college credential.

“This is not innovation. This is just cutting corners,” said Todd Wolfson, AAUP’s president.

A new option to graduate more quickly, but with reduced credit

For decades, colleges have offered accelerated programs that let students finish faster, often by forgoing long summer breaks, maximizing transfer credits and condensing semester-long courses into shorter, five- to 10-week terms.

But those programs maintained the same course load, measured as credits. The new programs let students finish faster by completing as few as 90 credit hours. That shaves a year off the typical 120-hour bachelor’s degree.

Three-year bachelor’s degrees are common in other countries including the United Kingdom, India, France and Italy. But they can create complications for graduates seeking admission to U.S. graduate schools, which sometimes require extra coursework.

Some of the earliest colleges in colonial America, modeled after English institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, initially had three-year degrees, said John Thelin, the author of “A History of American Higher Education.” By the 19th century, the four-year format had taken hold, partly because there wasn’t an established system of public high schools to prepare students, Thelin said.

“The colleges would have to kind of start from scratch,” he said.

A change in accreditation opened the door to shorter degrees

The idea of bringing three-year degrees to the U.S. got attention in 2009 when Robert Zemsky, the founding director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, argued in a Newsweek cover story that three-year degrees could shake up a broken system.

But there was a roadblock, he recalled recently. “Accreditors said, ‘College is 120 credits, not 90 credits,’” he said.

Years passed. And in 2022, amid mounting concerns about college affordability, Zemsky helped revive the idea. The College-in-3 Exchange was born, and  of higher education institutions joined the network to look for ways to help students get degrees faster.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities was the first accreditor to say yes in 2023, when it approved reduced-credit programs at Ensign and Brigham Young University-Idaho. Other accreditors quickly followed.

As of May, 119 reduced-credit programs had been publicly announced, according to the RAND analysis, which was conducted to help education officials in Ohio as they weigh the feasibility of reduced-credit degrees.

It comes at a time when tuition and fees averaged $11,950 for in-state students at public schools and $45,000 at private nonprofits last school year, although many students get discounts that reduce the price, according to a , the nonprofit that oversees the SAT.

Some degrees are easier to compress

Private nonprofit schools offer three-quarters of the reduced-credit programs, frequently online. Typically, they compress the majors by reducing electives. Business degrees in fields such as marketing and management are the most common, followed by computer and information sciences.

Other majors, such as engineering, with its extensive math requirements, have been harder to shrink. And RAND found just six reduced-credit degrees in teacher education, which involves real-world experience requirements and state licensure.

Jill Cohen, 42, lives on a ranch in rural Yoder, Colorado, and is completing her teaching degree through one such program at Indiana Wesleyan.

She quit her old job selling life insurance and turned to teaching after a farming accident nearly claimed her life. Already, she is in the classroom, teaching middle school English, as she works on the degree through a special “Grow Your Own” program designed to address staff shortages.

Because her home is busy — she has twin 12-year-olds, along with a menagerie that includes horses, goats and chickens — she appreciates the streamlined degree.

“Why do I need to take, you know, underwater basket weaving when I could just take the evolutionary structure of the English language — what I’m going to be teaching,” she said.

However, programs with state licensing requirements are one of the biggest worries for Jenna Kramer, a policy researcher at RAND.

Indiana Wesleyan, which has a growing slate of reduced-credit offerings, said its education programs are specifically designed to meet Indiana licensing requirements. Students from elsewhere will need to check if the programs meet their state requirements, said Pam Downing, the school’s director of communications, in an email.

The RAND report also found the programs are so new that there are no standard practices for admitting three-year degree recipients into graduate school.

Students acknowledge it’s a gamble

Gabriella Staten, a 20-year-old student in the reduced-credit digital marketing program at Mount Mary University, a Catholic women’s institution in Milwaukee, estimates it will save her at least $20,000. While she sometimes wonders whether employers will take her degree as seriously as a four-year degree, she decided she could prove herself.

“Even if they were to look a little bit down on the three-year pathway, I can show them otherwise with the work,” she said.

Wesley Hardy, who is three semesters into a bachelor of applied science in accounting at Ensign, also sees the pros and cons. He likes that the three-year format will get him into the workforce faster.

But he noted that the requirements to become a certified public accountant — something he has considered — vary by state. Many require 120 semester hours to sit for the exam and 150 to become licensed. Graduate school often is needed.

Bruce Kusch, president of Ensign, said he has talked to multiple college presidents and doesn’t anticipate that graduate school will be a problem. But Hardy, 22, has questions about how it would work.

“Would I have to take extra classes?” he asked. “It’s definitely something I’ve thought of.”

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Hoping to make sure high school students don’t waste time earning career credentials that won’t help them find jobs, Ohio is slashing the credentials counted towards graduation, axing easy ones that thousands of students earn, but don’t lead anywhere.

High schools nationally are increasingly encouraging students, especially those who don’t plan on going to college, to earn certificates and licenses in trades or office skills so they have a chance to earn a living after graduating. Ohio, since 2019, has made earning a credential that’s recognized by employers a key path to earning a diploma.

But concerns have grown in recent years over a mismatch nationally between what schools offer and businesses want, with one study estimating that

Criticism has increased in Ohio of schools helping students with poor academic skills use weak credentials that aren’t sought by employers as a “workaround” or “shortcut” to graduate, but give them little chance of making even $30,000 a year.

In response and at the direction of the state legislature, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce this summer cut its list of credentials that qualify students to graduate from 164 to 70.

The list notably drops two groups of credentials — one for retail sales and one for government management of emergencies — that several thousand students use each year to graduate despite little demand from employers. In the most extreme case, about 9,000 students earned credentials wanted for just three jobs.

“This is a little bit of a game changer when we think about workforce readiness and kids coming out of K-12,” said Steve Dackin, director of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

Dackin said too many students are skipping college without having a plan to make a good salary. The state needs to help these students before leaving high school, he said.

“It’s really, really important that while we have them, that they are earning the kind of credentials and skills that are going to make them employable right away,” he said.

Ohio is also tightening how students can combine more than 700 approved, but lesser, credentials to earn enough credential “points” to graduate, a tactic that one expert described as “random acts of credentialing.” That loophole let students seek easy and basic credentials scattered across different fields, such as drivers licenses, CPR and OSHA safety classes, without learning any skills deeply enough to matter to employers.

Ohio has cut that list from more than 700 credentials to 126, available only as part of 21 pre-determined “bundles” of specific credentials in five fields  — agriculture, business, construction, health care and manufacturing. Each bundle includes “foundational” credentials such as OSHA safety training, but only as first steps toward more advanced training.

Adriana Harrington, managing director of policy for ExcelinEd, a national education advocacy non-profit, said including credentials as a way to earn a diploma is a “slippery slope” that can lead to states approving too many low-value credentials.

“Ohio is a kind of cautionary tale,” Harrington said.  “The intent was very strong a few years ago…but then their list ballooned to over 700 that students could earn. I think we’re just seeing the reckoning and the pendulum shift back.”

Ohio Excels, a nonprofit created by the state’s major chambers of commerce, helped create the new list along with a way to evaluate each credential by how many students find jobs within a year, how much money they earn, whether a field is growing, and if the classes can count toward earning a college degree.

“Grappling with divining exactly what value is for an industry-recognized credential is something that the country has been asking questions about for the last 10 plus years,” said Cassandra Palsgrove, Ohio Excels’ vice president of strategic partnerships and government affairs. “Ohio is really going to take the lead on that.”

Collecting wage and hiring data to fully analyze the value of credentials are important steps all states should take, said Emily Passias, deputy executive Director of Advance CTE, the association for state directors of career technical education.

She had previously helped create Ohio’s early list when working at the since-renamed Ohio Department of Education and is glad the state is one of just a few aggressively using better data available now to refine it.

“We have to move from essentially identifying credentials based on vibes, which is what many, many, many states are doing,” said Passias. “Things would get on the list and then never come off again, and they just led to these enormous lists of credentials that were divorced from actual impact.”

“What Ohio is trying to do here is sort of right the ship and really focus on credentials that are going to create impact both for learners and for the employer community,” Passias added.

The Fordham Institute, a non-profit education advocacy group active in Ohio, also praised the changes. Fordham has reported multiple times the last few years on ways some districts, notably urban, high-poverty ones where some students struggle to graduate, have large numbers of students earning low-value credentials just to earn a diploma.

“Credentials are intended to signify students’ acquisition of technical skills and help them gain an edge in the labor market, not simply be a workaround to a diploma,” wrote Fordham’s Aaron Churchhill. “Ohio schools have discovered the easiest ones to attain and used them to get students to the finish line (and inflate their graduation rates as well as ).”That system, Churchill and Fordham’s Jessica Poiner reported, had more than 9,000 students earning RISE UP retail sales and customer service credentials in 2023 — credentials that, combined, allow students to graduate — but were sought by employers for just three jobs statewide that year.

In addition, more than 4,000 students earned a series of National Incident Management Systems credentials sought for fewer than 300 jobs that year.

In announcing the list, Dackin conceded, “we know this is going to have a large impact on graduation rates.” 

He and the department declined to elaborate on an issue  at the heart of any debate over  graduation requirements — how to balance making diplomas hard enough that they carry meaning vs. making them so hard it shuts out students and leaves them with no diploma and chance to find a job.

The department would say only that the requirements would start with freshmen entering high school this fall, so schools have time to adjust, and that schools can apply to include other credentials, though they should meet standards for pay and employer demand.

The Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati school districts, all flagged by Fordham as having large numbers of students using weak credentials, also declined to address that question directly, other than to say they support having credentials that matter and that other credentials could be added later.

Adding new credentials to the list is the likely next battleground, since districts and businesses are open to apply to include any they can show have value. Fordham’s Churchill said the state’s decision to include cosmetology licenses on the new list of standalone credentials despite low pay, raises concerns for him. He hopes the state will stand its ground, stick to its standards and keep a “clean” list.

“Vendors and industry groups with financial interests and schools looking to maintain sky-high graduation rates could urge the committee to approve their favored credential or pressure it to set a low bar,” he wrote. “If cosmetology is in, what about others?” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story was missing some words in the second to last paragraph.