Race to the Finish

To Gordon Jones, president of the College of Western Idaho, the case for allowing community colleges like his to offer baccalaureates is clear: Employers are in desperate need of skilled labor, and workers need faster, cheaper ways to advance in their careers.

“This is a time to put all our oars in the water — not to be selective about who offers the pathways to prepare workers,” Jones said.

But when the College of Western Idaho sought state permission to award a bachelor of applied science in business administration late last year, Idaho’s public four-year colleges protested — loudly. Boise State University, 18 miles to the east, called the degree duplicative and warned that it would cannibalize limited state resources.

“Community colleges’ offering four-year degrees weakens the systemness of public higher education in Idaho,” Boise State wrote in comments to the state’s Board of Education, which approved the program anyway.

That’s not the only movement to lower the hurdles to a baccalaureate: Last summer, another panel — this one the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a regional accreditor — approved a plan by a pair of four-year colleges in Idaho to offer bachelor’s degrees consisting of just 90 credits, 30 fewer than normal.

The new three-year degrees, which will be offered by Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College starting next month, are among the first in a pilot program involving more than a dozen colleges from across the country. Like the proposal at Western Idaho, they aim to get working adults into well-paying jobs more quickly and cheaply. But by making it easier to get a bachelor’s degree, the programs could also siphon some students away from community colleges.

Taken together, the two recent decisions illustrate a blurring of the lines between the two- and four-year sectors that is taking place not just in Idaho, but nationwide, as colleges struggle to overcome enrollment declines and skepticism about the value of a bachelor’s degree.

“It’s pretty clear that higher education is in a funk,” said Robert M. Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor, who has been advocating for three-year programs for more than 15 years. “There’s a sense that we have to do something to make the product better, more relevant, and less costly to students.”

Whether this convergence of the sectors represents progress or an existential threat to higher education depends on who you ask. But one thing seems clear: Insisting that colleges stay in their lanes isn’t going to turn things around. And an “us vs. them” approach to the challenges facing higher education might well make things worse.

The fight over community-college baccalaureates in Idaho comes as a growing number of states are authorizing the degrees, citing the need to produce more skilled workers. Close to half of the states have approved at least one program, an inventory by the Community College Baccalaureate Association shows.

But the programs remain concentrated in just a handful of states, with four of them — Washington, California, Florida, and Texas — accounting for 60 percent of community colleges conferring bachelor’s degrees, the inventory shows. Almost half of all programs are in Washington and Florida, the first state to pass a law authorizing them, in 2001.

Idaho approved its first degree, a bachelor of applied science in advanced food technology, at the College of Southern Idaho in 2019. The degree, which was designed to train managers for local food-processing plants, elicited limited concern from the state’s public four-year colleges, which were not offering anything too similar.

Yet when the Colleges of Western and Eastern Idaho pitched three more applied baccalaureates to the Board of Education in December, resistance was fierce. Boise State, the University of Idaho, Idaho State University, and Lewis-Clark State College all registered objections to one or more of the degrees, claiming they would compete with existing four-year programs. Idaho State called Eastern Idaho’s proposed degree in operations management an “inefficient use of taxpayer resources,” arguing for “open and collaborative engagement,” rather than “wasteful duplication.”

In an interview last month, Adam Bradford, Idaho State’s interim provost, said the problem was not just redundancy, but program quality. Students might not understand the difference between an applied bachelor’s program, staffed with adjunct faculty borrowed from industry partners, and a program taught by tenure-track professors and accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), Bradford said.

“When the conversation becomes a reductive conversation strictly about cost, and we’re not talking about quality, we worry students will simply choose the lowest-cost option,” he said.

Boise State raised similar concerns in its comments on the College of Western Idaho’s proposed degree, drawing attention to the college’s lack of AACSB International accreditation and its “dismal” 14 percent on-time graduation rate, “substantially lower” than the 36 percent on-time graduation rate of the state’s public four-year colleges.

Jones, Western Idaho’s president, bristled at that comparison, noting that community colleges are open-access institutions serving large numbers of low-income, working adults — a different population than at four-year colleges.

“It’s apples to pineapples,” he said. “I can change the graduation rate tomorrow if I start rejecting people.”

Jones said Western Idaho requires its faculty to hold master’s or doctoral degrees, and holds accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Business Schools and Programs, the equivalent body for two-year colleges. He called it “uninformed fearmongering” to suggest his college’s bachelor’s program would be inferior to those offered by the state’s four-year colleges.

“This is a story of strengthening, not weaking, our higher-education system,” he said. “We’re serving people who are not being served.”

The three-year degrees that will be offered by Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, both of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also target nontraditional students, many of whom are juggling work and family responsibilities and take just one or two courses a semester.

Van Christman, the BYU-Idaho associate academic vice president for curriculum, said students in many of the university’s online programs can complete their learning objectives in the first 90 credits. Requiring them to stick around to take 30 credits of electives had long felt disingenuous, he said.

“It just didn’t feel like we should keep these students, who are already disadvantaged, from moving forward with their lives,” he said.

Christman said the university’s leaders considered condensing the programs as far back as 2010, but they set the idea aside until last year, when BYU-Idaho and Ensign joined a coalition that is experimenting with different ways of designing three-year degrees. The group, known as the “College in 3 Exchange,” is led by Zemsky and Lori J. Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota at Rochester. Carrell’s university was the first out of the gate, with an accelerated degree in health sciences in which students take courses year round and finish in just two and a half years. Another Minnesota college, the University of Minnesota at Morris, will offer a three-year option in more than 30 majors starting next fall. All of the Minnesota programs consist of 120 credits, the number typically required for a bachelor’s degree.

Until recently, the only way to complete college in three years was to load up on credits in high school or cram more courses into an academic year. Students could take a heavier course load during the year or study over the summer, sacrificing extracurricular activities or summer vacation.

Though Zemsky’s push for three-year degrees got the attention of policymakers, faculty members were resistant, worrying that cutting credits would cheapen the bachelor’s degree and lead to faculty-job losses. Accreditors were wary as well. But accreditors have recently begun warming to the idea, seeing three-year degrees as a way to shrink spiraling student-debt burdens and reduce stubbornly high dropout rates. Programs that trim the credit requirement to 90, as the programs at BYU-Idaho and Ensign will, have the potential to reduce the time and cost of a degree by 25 percent.

Sonny Ramaswamy, president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, said his organization determined that the learning outcomes for the three-year programs were comparable to those of a four-year degree, and that graduate schools would accept them. He pointed out that three-year degrees are common in much of Europe and in his native India.

“Why is it the rest of the world thinks that an undergraduate degree can be accomplished in three years, and we don’t?” Ramaswamy asked.

Even the New England Commission of Higher Education, which rejected two separate bids for three-year degrees last year, is coming around. This month, the commission announced, in guidance to colleges, that it would consider proposals for programs of less than 120 credits, provided they met certain criteria. These include having a name that clearly distinguishes the program from a traditional baccalaureate and making clear to prospective students that some graduate programs and employers might not accept the degree. The college must have a plan to study student outcomes, and the curriculum must include an “appropriate mix” of credits in the major, general ed, and electives, the guidance says.

Asked if this last requirement would preclude programs that eliminate all electives, as the seven approved BYU-Idaho and Ensign College programs do, Larry Schall, the commission’s president, said that the organization would “address each proposal that comes independently.”

Suzanne T. Ortega, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said in a statement that, while the group and its members “care deeply about” finding ways to address the cost of higher education, they “caution against promising students that a three-year bachelor’s degree will prepare them appropriately for graduate school in all circumstances.” She pointed out that graduate schools must comply with requirements set by accreditors and state boards, and noted that admissions committees consider applicants’ extracurricular activities, research, and internships — experiences that an accelerated college degree may not allow time for.

Others worry that by eliminating electives, programs like those at the Idaho colleges will limit opportunities for students to practice the soft skills that employers are seeking — skills like taking someone else’s perspective, communicating across differences, and “considering the possibility that some of one’s own most fundamentally held beliefs might be mistaken,” as Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, put it.

“College should prepare students for success in work, citizenship, and life,” Pasquerella said. “I worry about the latter two when we abandon electives grounded in the liberal arts and sciences.”

Idaho isn’t the only state that has seen strong objections to the creation of community-college baccalaureates. In California, which has a master plan that sharply delineates the roles of two- and four-year colleges, the two systems have been fighting over the degrees for a decade.

In some cases, public four-year colleges in California have protested programs that would be offered hours from their own campuses, on the grounds that the programs would duplicate their own.

But research from Florida, the state with the longest history of offering community-college baccalaureates, suggests that it is for-profit colleges — not public four-year ones — that suffer when community colleges compete for students. In fact, programs at public colleges in Florida awarded 25 percent more degrees after community colleges began offering a similar program, a finding that could be explained by the transfer of more students into four-year public colleges after starting at a two-year one. For-profits, which tend to be more expensive than community colleges but serve a similar demographic, awarded 45 percent fewer degrees.

In surveys, students who enrolled in community-college baccalaureate programs have said that they chose the programs because they were affordable and accessible, and that they wouldn’t have considered a four-year college, according to Debra Bragg, a researcher and consultant who works with the Community College Baccalaureate Association.

There is also little evidence for the claim that community colleges that create baccalaureate programs are abandoning their mission to serve underrepresented students, said Jeremy Wright-Kim, an assistant professor of education at the University of Michigan’s Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education. Students who enroll in community-college bachelor’s programs tend to mirror the sector’s students in general: older, lower income, and more likely to be members of a minority group than students attending four-year colleges.

Proponents of community-college baccalaureates argue that the degrees expand access to students who have been underrepresented among four-year college graduates. They point to the recent inventory, which found that half of the 187 community colleges offering bachelor’s degrees in the United States are minority-serving institutions, with 76 percent of them designated as Hispanic-serving institutions.

“I reject the notion that it’s got to be us against them — ‘we win, you lose,’” said Angela M. Kersenbrock, president of the Community College Baccalaureate Association. “I don’t think that gets us anywhere.”

But what about outcomes? Research conducted in Washington State found similar completion rates among students enrolled in bachelor’s programs at two-year colleges and students who transferred from a community college to a four-year institution, while studies in Washington and Florida showed that students in two-year programs enjoy a short-term wage advantage over their four-year counterparts, probably because they are older and already in jobs when they enroll, Bragg said. Whether that advantage reverses over time isn’t yet clear, she added.

The financial returns to community colleges are even more uncertain. Research by Wright-Kim and others have found that two-year colleges that created bachelor’s programs have increased spending to hire doctoral-level faculty and expand academic and student supports and financial aid but have seen little to no increase in revenue. Often, the costs have been born by students, in the form of increased tuition and fees.

Though some states provide start-up funds to community colleges creating bachelor’s programs, others provide no additional resources, according to research by New America. Similarly, some states offer bonuses for completions in high-need fields — which nearly all community-college bachelor’s programs represent — while others provide no such boost.

Wright-Kim argues that if community colleges are expanding access to bachelor’s degrees and reducing state labor shortages, then legislatures ought to fund them adequately. Otherwise, the colleges may need to divert resources from other programs.

Convincing adult learners that a bachelor’s degree is both affordable and attainable has become increasingly critical for colleges, which are teetering on the precipice of a long-anticipated enrollment cliff.

Starting next year, the number of students graduating from American high schools will begin to rapidly decline, the result of a drop in birth rates following the Great Recession. Community colleges and less-selective four-year institutions, which have been shedding students for several years, are expected to be the hardest hit.

With fewer traditional students in the pipeline, colleges will need to recruit more adult learners to fill the gap. Yet surveys show that many adults are skeptical of the value of a four-year degree, seeing shorter-term credentials as a better return on investment. In a Chronicle survey last summer, 86 percent of respondents said attending a trade school or receiving other professional training was the same as or better than getting a bachelor’s degree to try to achieve a successful livelihood. Nearly half of respondents who had dropped out of college said a reason they would not return was that it’s not worth the money.

Could community-college baccalaureates and three-year degrees help solve this crisis of confidence? Proponents think so.

“We’ve got to quit worrying about what’s best for the institution, and focus on what’s best for students,” said Boyd Baggett, director of institutional effectiveness and accreditation at BYU-Idaho. “And that will take care of the institution.”

The recognition that higher ed must change to survive can be seen in accreditors’ increased openness to innovation, and in state’s willingness to reconsider the roles that two- and four-year colleges play in higher-education systems. This blurring of the lines between the sectors can also be seen in the embrace of embedded credentials by four-year colleges and the expansion of dual-credit programs in high schools.

Yet there are many in higher education who worry that efforts to make college faster and cheaper could reduce the bachelor’s degree to mere vocational training, cheating students out of the broader skill development they’ll need to grow and evolve not only in their careers, but in their civic lives and personal relationships, too.

“I don’t buy that the learning outcomes are the same in 90 credits as in 120,” said Bradford, the Idaho State University provost. “We just aren’t measuring them all, or valuing them.”

If society starts treating a bachelor’s degree as “transactional,” rather than “transformational,” it risks consigning students to a lifetime of dependency on higher ed, Bradford warned.

“Then we’ve become what our worst critics have accused us of: a racket where folks have to keep coming back to us just to remain relevant and employable,” he said. “That, to me, is not education; that is simply training.”

Christman, the associate academic vice president at BYU-Idaho, said the question isn’t whether students derived any benefit from the jettisoned electives, but whether the benefits were worth the cost. He said the university has worked hard to build soft skills into the curriculum.

“There is some building of the character, the whole person, that has to take place,” Baggett acknowledged. “But we can’t do that without thinking about the cost.”

To Chuck Bohleke, dean of business, technology and trades at the College of Eastern Idaho, the decision to seek state approval to offer two bachelor’s degrees was simple: “The needs of the community were not being met, so we took the opportunity to do so.” He said he sees no problem with four-year colleges offering three-year degrees, if the market demands it.

“We aren’t producing enough people for some of the jobs that are in high demand,” Bohleke said. “Rather than trying to compete, we need to collaborate to get students the skills they need to do the jobs of the future.”