The Dispatch
The rise of the US’ College-in-3
Some American universities are undertaking a radical shift to three-year bachelor’s degrees, offering domestic and international students faster employment and cheaper tuition.
By Jamaal Abdul-Alim
"The degrees will cost students a quarter less in tuition than four-year degrees."
“The main focus for the accreditors was to make sure that we had very solid student learning outcomes.”
"We wanted to make these programmes more equitable to more students across the world.”
"There’s also less debt and faster completion of the degree, and they can return to their home country.”
In brief
- US universities are launching three-year bachelor's degrees to provide students with cheaper tuition and faster pathways into the global workforce.
- Once blocked by accreditors, these programmes focus on rigorous learning outcomes in high-demand fields like computer science, healthcare, and business management.
- By removing elective "filler," this model promotes equity and affordability, allowing international students to complete degrees faster and with significantly less debt.
Before Johnson & Wales University began offering a three-year bachelor’s degree – a credential that takes one less year than the norm for bachelors’ degrees granted in the U.S. – campus leaders checked with a group of constituents who will play a critical role in many of the students’ futures.
“Before we did anything, we sat down and did in-person interviews with the 25 largest employers of our students and explained the degree, what students would experience, the outcome students would have upon graduation,” recalls Richard Wiscott, Provost at Johnson & Wales, a medium-sized nonprofit university that serves about 3,900 students in Providence, Rhode Island in the US Northeast.
“And unanimously, they were in favour of that degree and excited about it because – especially in some of the industries that we serve – they're looking for employees as soon as possible,” says Wiscott.
The school offers three-year degrees in four majors: computer science, criminal justice, graphic design and hospitality management – all fields that are on pace to grow in the coming years.
“And so, having someone complete in three years versus four is a benefit to them,” says Wiscott.
So goes the three-year bachelor’s creation story for one of a small but growing number of colleges and universities in the US that are offering such degrees, or taking steps towards doing so.
Proponents of the idea point out that the degrees will cost students a quarter less in tuition than four-year degrees and move students into the workforce more quickly.
Although three-year bachelors’ degrees are standard in Europe under the Bologna Process, the three-year bachelor’s degree still represents a “radical” idea stateside, where four-year, 120-credit degrees have largely been codified into state law, proponents say.
“This is really gaining traction in the US. It’s a pretty radical idea,” Madeleine F. Green, Executive Director of the College-in-3 Exchange – a group of institutions of higher education that are offering or exploring whether to offer three-year bachelor degrees – tells QS Insights.
Robert M. Zemsky, the University of Pennsylvania Education and Policy Professor who has been pushing for three-year bachelor degrees since 2009, says he has been pleasantly surprised at how many colleges and universities have joined the College-in-3 Exchange, of which he is a co-founder.
“We’re talking to a 100-something institutions,” Professor Zemsky said. “I would have never bet that three years ago. We’ve made more progress than I could possibly imagine having made. I think we will be at 200 institutions a year from now,” tells Zemsky in a January 2026 interview with QS Insights.
Professor Zemsky says when he first started advocating for the idea over a decade ago, it died after higher education accreditors balked at the idea.
“Accreditors said: ‘No way. A baccalaureate degree is 120 credits. Period,” said he says. “But accreditors now see that that is not going anywhere. What is interesting about college-in-three is that these are institutions that are trying to do things differently.”
That account is corroborated by the experience of Brigham Young University – Idaho.
“We first thought about these types of degrees in 2009, but our accreditor was not interested in having a conversation at that point in time,” recalls Van Christman, Associate Academic Vice President for Curriculum at BYU-Idaho. Christman says the idea “resurfaced” in 2019 and that the school’s accreditor was “more open to the idea.”
But it was not a short and easy process.
“We spent about four years working with them on the design of the degrees and doing work to make sure that these would be accepted by employers,” Christman explains. “The main focus for the accreditors was to make sure that we had very solid student learning outcomes.
“We had a list of requirements that we needed to measure as we launched these programmes.”
BYU-Idaho moved all of its online programmes to the three-year format in 2024, Christman says.
“So all new students in online [courses] are signed up in them because that is the only option available,” he continues. He estimates that there are “at least 10,000” of the school’s 42,000 students enrolled in the online programmes.
Asked how the programmes are viewed by international students, Christman describes feedback that shows students are “very excited about having these programmes available to them.”
“They are more attainable than the 120-credit programmes offered before,” he says. “We have not seen any negative. We have students in more than 150 countries. Our largest growth recently has been in countries in Africa.”
Christman says one of the reasons his school began offering three-year bachelor’s degrees to students across the world is because university officials had grown “concerned about the amount of time it would take a student to complete a traditional degree going part time, while also supporting a family, and/or working.”
So BYU-Idaho initially designed its online programmes as “stackable” certificate programmes.
“Students would earn certificates first, interspersed with General Education courses,” Christman explains. “We felt it was unfair to tell a student that they had completed all the learning outcomes for the programme of study and for GE, but they still needed 25-30 credits before we would award them a degree.
“Many of the students are adult learners who know what they want to pursue,” Christman continues. “The free electives were not serving the purpose of exploration. We wanted to make these programmes more equitable to more students across the world.”
The school offers three-year degrees in a variety of subjects. They include: applied business management, software development, applied health, marriage and family studies and professional studies.
The top benefits to students, according to Christman, are being able to complete a bachelor’s degree in a reasonable timeframe, afford an education and thereby achieve equity with other students.
Wiscott, the Provost at Johnson & Wales, which boasts being the first institution in the US approved to offer in-person courses that lead to a three-year degree, expressed similar thoughts.
“The primary benefit to students is the shortened time to completion, which comes along with a lower price tag to complete their college education, all while assuring that the outcomes of the programme that they're enrolled in are the same exact programmatic outcomes that our four-year degree students face,” says Wiscott.
Interest among international students has been “minimal”, but Wiscott stopped short of blaming it on the Trump administration’s more stringent policies regarding visas for students from abroad.
“We had interest from the international student market, and we expect that to grow over time,” says Wiscott. “But this year [2025], the number was minimal just because of things that are happening in society right now.”
Johnson & Wales provided a series of testimonials from students and employers praising the three-year bachelor’s degree. In the student testimonials, which are public, students spoke of how three-year degrees save them money and help them “fast-track” through school and into a career. Employers spoke of similar benefits and called it a “win-win” for students and employers.
In order for the college-in-three movement to make the three-year bachelor’s degree a reality, it’s going to have to produce evidence that three-year-degrees are paying off.
Carleen Vande Zande, Chief Academic Officer at the National Association of Higher Education Systems, is leading the effort to assess three-year bachelor’s degrees among the College-in-3 Exchange members. She says it’s too early to provide evidence on how they’re doing because they’ve only just begun.
“College-in-3 is just starting to collect the data. We only have six or seven institutions with a programme approved by their accreditors and/or states,” Vande Zande said in a written statement to QS Insights. “You will have to check in with us in three more years to see how learning or other outcomes differ for three-year degree students compared to four-year degree students.”
Even without data, Vande Zande says she believes the three-year bachelor’s degree will have much appeal to international students, in part because many foreign universities already have three-year undergraduate degree programmes.
She also says they will appeal because they are linked to programmes in high-demand areas.
There’s also less debt, she says, and “faster completion of the degree, and they can return to their home country.”