In Defense of 120 Credit Hours

Insights  ·  Higher Education

There’s already an established pathway to a three-year degree: taking more credits each semester. Do we really need a new one?

My grandmother completed a bachelor’s degree in three years. Newly married, with an infant, she somehow found the time to get through all her coursework to graduate with a major in math and a minor in physics at the same time as my grandfather. It was 1963. She was, and is, in my grandfather’s words, a “barnburner,” staking out a long and successful career for herself in a male-dominated field. Getting a degree in three years certainly didn’t slow her down.

One of the brilliant back page editors of my undergraduate newspaper, the Rice Thresher, also graduated in three years. He wanted the experience and prestige a Rice education had to offer but could only afford three years of tuition instead of four. He graduated in three years while also being involved in a wide range of extracurriculars, getting the full “college experience” even if it was in an abridged format.

I think about people like this often when the conversation turns to three-year degrees. People have been graduating in three years for decades, but they’ve still been completing 120 credit hours to get there. It’s feasible, if brutal — instead of taking 15 or so credits a semester, you have to take 18–20 a semester and/or supplement with additional credits from summer or winter sessions. A highly motivated, focused, organized person can do it. They usually also get involved in extracurriculars or other activities while they’re studying. It’s a cost-effective option, too, since most colleges charge by part time vs. full time, not by the credit hour, so they only have to pay for three years of full-time tuition.

College-in-3

Today’s three-year degree is about reducing the total number of credit hours so that a student doesn’t have to do any extra work during those three years to graduate early. It’s an easier path to a college degree. Proponents would add that a three-year degree has the potential to improve completion rates and support better workforce-aligned programming by necessitating comprehensive program redesign. But at the end of the day, it’s a shortcut — especially given that a three-year path already exists for the motivated student.

There’s broad agreement that a college degree is valuable. The College-in-3 Exchange never once calls the value of a college degree into question. A degree is so valuable, they argue, that it should be more accessible, with more barriers to achievement removed. The question I don’t see getting asked is: Do we need to make it easier to get a college degree?

A lot of data suggests that it’s already easier to get a college degree than ever before. The average GPA in 2020 was 3.15, up from 2.81 in 1990. Students spend less time on average studying; a 2010 study revealed that the average college student studied 14 hours a week, down from 24 hours a week in 1961. So it should actually be easier and faster than ever for a student to complete 120 credit hours in three years — and they’d only need to put in about half the effort my grandmother did in the 1960s.

The 90-credit-hour bachelor’s degree movement requires reworking the degree to be more “intentional,” removing the “fluff” that we often find in a 120-credit-hour program. This leads to the question that’s been at the center of much of the chatter around higher education recently: What is the purpose of going to college?

Why Students Choose College

Something surprised me when I was researching this article. In 2025, 89% of students cited “expected future job opportunities” as a main factor for their decision to enroll in school. This is, apparently, a shift that has been ongoing at least since the 1960s. Back in the day — 1968, to be exact — 82.5% of first-year students cited the “importance of developing a philosophy” as their primary driver for going to college. By 1998, 74.9% of first-year students reported “being well off” as their essential goal for going to college, and “developing a philosophy” had dropped to 40.8%.

From this perspective, the three-year degree starts to make more sense. If college is solely about gaining a credential employers will accept — or graduate schools will accept if a master’s or doctorate is necessary for a chosen career — then gaining that credential as quickly as possible is the most logical move. Who wouldn’t want to just get the token and move on to the next thing the token unlocks?

But the other thing that surprised me was what employers had to say about the value of a college degree. You know who’s a big fan of gen ed? Employers. They strongly value the higher ed campus as a place for open discussion and dialogue, and they want graduates to be able to engage constructively across disagreement. They think it’s important for college to prepare students to become “informed citizens.” Perhaps most critically, employers don’t see a problem with the current higher ed model — 85% feel that colleges and universities are doing a good job of preparing students for the workforce.

The Case for Exploration

The 120-credit-hour degree is built to do more than prepare students for a job. Exploration and discovery are built into the American liberal arts education — and they’re part of what has made the American university experience distinct from other places, including well-regarded schools like Oxford, where students already finish in three years. The 120-credit-hour degree is structured to promote exploration and discovery. Students are supposed to take courses that seem “impractical” or outside of what they would normally encounter, with the notion that this will enrich their understanding of the world around them. That’s kind of the core of the whole “liberal arts” thing.

Gen ed requirements are at the core of what makes a college degree transformational, and they may be some of the only moments that a STEM major encounters the humanities. We’re at a moment where there seems to maybe, just maybe, be an acknowledgement that the liberal arts bring something real to the table — that investing in exploration and discovery and critical thinking may be just what today’s student needs in our AI-enabled era. Taking some time with the humanities, whether it’s to learn a new language or reading a postmodern book you might never have encountered otherwise, causes you to think and see the world differently by challenging your assumptions.

And of course, humanities majors have plenty to learn from their STEM gen ed requirements. I genuinely still think about the sustainability course I reluctantly signed up for to meet my science requirement (it seemed the least technical) — I learned lessons about single-stream recycling I think about every time I take out the recycling. It didn’t make me change my major, but it did give me a deep sense of appreciation for a completely different line of study, helping me see not only why people might be interested in it but also why it’s important. That’s the transformation in education, and that’s what we risk losing if we compress the degree.

The Future of the Three-Year Degree

Right now, the three-year degree is in a real wait-and-see moment. There are actual students enrolled in three-year programs who will graduate two years from now, and that’s when we’ll start to see some real data on the outcomes and efficacies of these degrees, as well as what students themselves feel like they are or aren’t getting out of the experience.

Given the number of states that are opening up pathways to three-year programs and schools that are building out these programs, there’s little doubt that this three-year degree experiment is here to stay. It’s probably even a smart investment for many institutions, especially those that are already struggling with enrollment. Maybe it really will help students who are looking to get into the workforce faster. But let’s not pretend it will be equivalent to a 120-credit-hour degree.

If three-year degrees gain traction, it will lead to a bifurcation that’s already been starting in higher ed between those who can attain and afford a “classic” education (a 120-credit-hour bachelor’s with strong gen ed distributions) and those who seek something that’s more workforce-applied. Maybe that’s a necessary correction in a market where every job seems to demand a bachelor’s degree. But those students in 90-credit-hour programs will lose something. And wouldn’t it be ironic if those degrees were less attractive to employers precisely because they cut the classes that lead to more open-ended inquiry and exploration outside of a student’s chosen major?