The Quiet Redesign of the Bachelor’s Degree

American higher education has a completion problem it doesn’t like to advertise. For decades, the bachelor’s degree came in one shape: four years of typically uninterrupted coursework delivered on one campus. But this model is being dismantled nationwide, with little coordination and even less fanfare, leaving colleges and universities struggling.  

The reason is a number that most Americans have never heard. At the start of the 2023-24 academic year, there were 43.1 million individuals who carry some college credit and no credential. This population has grown in every state and the District of Columbia since 2021, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. For decades, the policy answer to this predicament was some version of Try harder, come back.  

But that’s changing. State policymakers are quietly rewriting what a bachelor’s degree is, letting community colleges grant them outright, compressing four years into three, and dissolving the line between high school and college altogether. The moves are separate, disconnected, and rarely discussed as a single trend. But together they amount to a wholesale redesign of the undergraduate degree, who provides it, and a real test of whether American higher education can build more than one model for getting a diploma. 

The some-college, no-credential population, known as stopouts, accounts for nearly one in five working-age American adults. And the trend line is going the wrong way. That population grew by nearly 800,000 individuals between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years, even as national college completion rates hit a 12-year high.  

Community colleges are both the leading source of these non-completers, accounting for around two-thirds of them, and the leading destination for those who return.  

This stopout conundrum should anchor any conversation about degree redesign. The question isn’t whether the traditional four-year bachelor’s degree benefits students who complete it. It plainly does.  

The question is whether it’s the best route for the stopouts for whom it hasn’t worked and for those just starting their postsecondary journey who look nothing like the 18-year-old, full-time, residential student that the traditional degree was built to accommodate. 

The simplest development is for community colleges to offer bachelor’s degrees directly, eliminating the need for students to transfer to four-year universities. Florida has the longest history with this model. Currently, over 200 community colleges across 24 states offer at least 767 bachelor’s degrees, according to the Community College Baccalaureate Association.  

The logic is geographic as much as economic. Many states are pushing community colleges toward bachelor’s-granting authority to reach “education deserts.” These are typically rural and lower-income regions where the nearest four-year campus may be hours away, making a local community college often the only realistic option available to a working adult.  

There isn’t much evidence on outcomes just yet, but early signs are encouraging. Researchers comparing Florida community college bachelor’s degree graduates to associate-degree graduates found community college baccalaureate (CCB) completers earned about $10,000 more annually just one year after graduation. This pattern appears in Florida, but also in Texas, Washington, and California, which together award over 80 percent of the nation’s community college bachelor’s degrees. 

Many four-year institutions see this as an encroachment on their traditional turf and are spoiling for a fight. On the other hand, community colleges see it as an overdue correction to a system that has rationed the bachelor’s degree by geography and income for a century. 

The second experiment is more innovative and disruptive. Rather than changing who can grant the degree, it shortens how long it takes to earn a degree. A coalition called “Scaling College in 3,” backed by Jobs for the Future, Arnold Ventures, the Strada Education Foundation, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, is working with states and individual institutions to design bachelor’s degrees built around 90 rather than traditional 120 course credits. 

The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education approved three-year pilot programs at Merrimack College and Suffolk University this year. Virginia and Ohio have since signed on to a joint effort to design their own 90-credit models, with proposals expected by 2028. California State University’s 22 campuses and seven University of North Carolina institutions are pursuing parallel pilots. Earlier this year, more than 60 U.S. institutions were offering or considering some version of a shortened degree. 

The rationale is straightforward: Shave off a year, and you cut tuition, room, and board costs by roughly a quarter. Graduates enter the workforce a year sooner. This is a big deal for a generation increasingly skeptical about the value of a four-year degree.  

But it’s a cost-and-speed issue, not necessarily a completion one. Most stopouts leave in their first year of enrollment, long before a shortened senior year would ever come into play. So, the three-year model is best understood as a faster, cheaper path for students already likely to finish, not a rescue plan for the 43.1 million Americans who already left without a credential. 

But the pushback has been sharp and specific. In a joint statement responding to the Massachusetts approval, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers argued the compressed degrees substitute cost-saving speed for intellectual development, without addressing what really drives tuition costs.  

A member of the Massachusetts board raised a related worry: A two-tier system could emerge in which wealthier students at selective institutions take the traditional four years to complete a degree. Students at less-resourced state and community colleges get steered toward the abbreviated track. A three-year degree for those who can’t afford the four-year sheepskin might be seen as less valuable. 

That’s a fair warning, but it’s not a reason to abandon the experiment. States and institutions moving forward should treat it as a design constraint. The three-year degree should come with clear labeling and consent that students can choose, but it should not become a default track that the less privileged are steered toward. 

The third and least visible shift is happening earlier in the pipeline. Dual enrollment allows high school students to take college courses sometimes on a community college campus and earn credit toward a diploma and a degree. Early college schools are high schools built around that idea, structuring four years of coursework so secondary students graduate with a high-school diploma and a year or two of college credit already banked. 

Together, these programs are dissolving the firewall between high school and postsecondary education. A growing share of high schoolers now earns real college credit before enrolling in a postsecondary school. Some even finish an associate degree in the process.  

Instead of shortening the degree after enrollment, or changing who’s allowed to grant it, this approach addresses the cost-and-time problem by moving part of the degree earlier, into a stage of schooling that’s already free. 

These three state-level experiments are just half the story. So, while states rebuild the degree’s architecture, Washington has been rebuilding the rules by which everyone must play. 

This spring, the Department of Education issued three regulatory packages within weeks. The first is for Workforce Pell, extending federal aid to short-term credentials. This was aimed at rapid workforce entry and plays out one rung below the bachelor’s degree. It began on July 1. The second is a proposed earnings-accountability framework called the Student Tuition and Transparency System, or STATS, that would cut off aid to programs whose graduates don’t out-earn high-school graduates. Finally, the department has proposed a sweeping overhaul of accreditation rules to open the gatekeeping process to new entrants.  

Together, the earnings test and the accreditation overhaul shift authority away from accreditors and toward states, the labor market, and students themselves, the same three forces reshaping the bachelor’s degree at the state level. Workforce Pell extends that same approach to the short-term credentials growing up around the bachelor’s degree, not to the degree itself.  

That convergence cuts both ways. An earnings test built to catch low-value certificate programs will measure three-year and community-college-granted bachelor’s degrees, credentials new enough that the data is sparse. If Washington’s accountability push arrives before states have evidence their new degree tracks work, it risks treating experimentation as failure. If it arrives after, it could be the measure that informs states which experiments merit being made permanent. 

Behind the three approaches there’s an underlying shift. The bachelor’s degree is becoming modular, assembled from pieces that can be front-loaded in high school, compressed at a four-year institution, or completed at a community college, rather than delivered as one fixed, four-year product.  

That’s a pluralistic response to diverse student circumstances in a large pluralistic nation. It deserves support and scrutiny. Five principles should guide these reforms.

• Track outcomes by sector and by track. Don’t focus on completion rates. States should publish wage and employment data for graduates of three-year, four-year, and community-college-granted bachelor’s degrees, helping students make informed choices. 
• Make the shortened track a genuine choice. This includes clear disclosure of how employers and graduate programs may view it, not a quiet default steering lower-income students away from the traditional four years. 
• Fund community college bachelor’s programs. Don’t expand degree-granting authority without the faculty, advising, and other resources four-year institutions take for granted. 
• Treat dual enrollment as a completion strategy, not just a perk. That means it should count seamlessly toward a degree, wherever a student enrolls. 
• Re-engage, don’t just redesign. None of these reforms help the 43.1 million Americans already stopped out unless states reach out to them.  

The bachelor’s degree has been one thing. It’s becoming several. That could mean more opportunity. Or it could become a more insidious way of sorting students by class.  

The difference won’t come down to one pilot program. It will come down to something simpler. Will states keep asking who, exactly, each new idea serves?