Residential Undergraduate Education and the Great Abbreviation
The reelection of President Trump has many conservatives excited to make war on higher education, targeting progressive interpretations of Title IX, the relatively young Department of Education, DEI initiatives, or programs to cancel or lighten student loan obligations. There is talk of further taxing the huge endowments usually found at Ivies and public Ivies. Conservatives should probably cheer these reforms, but they must not overlook a much more significant force shaping the future of traditional residential undergraduate education.
This shaping force is not the financial pressure that is closing campuses. Nor is it the challenge of online education, magnified during COVID-19 lockdowns when some became positively giddy at the prospect that once all classes were online, a presumed spell would be broken. Parents and students would learn that online education was as good or better, and the dorms and dining halls could just fade away. The results of that forced experiment began to be gathered in 2022 and can now be cherry-picked to support any number of conclusions.
The most significant change on the horizon is what I call “The Great Abbreviation,” and it has far greater destructive power than online classes and degrees because its appeal is much broader and deeper. Egalitarians and efficiency mongers appreciate how it increases access while decreasing costs. Those wary of innovation or entrepreneurial efforts appreciate how it shores up many existing educational institutions. Those who cynically (or accurately) see higher education as just left-wing DEI catechesis delight that credentials are earned without spending as much time with presumably left-wing peers and faculty.
However popular these programs are, however, the existential threat they pose to residential campus education should prompt educational traditionalists to decide whether residence is an essential part of higher education, and if so, what must be done to preserve it.
Abbreviating Time on Campus
While it is true that undergraduates can now avoid residence altogether through a combination of commuting and online education, many expanding programs shorten the time needed on campus for traditional undergraduate students.
The College Board, a private company, administers two testing equivalence programs for college credit: the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) and the Advanced Placement (AP) program. AP is the more popular of the two and, though sometimes denounced by DEI advocates as elitist, is increasingly available to all college-bound students completing AP classes. The score on those exams, available in thirty subjects, may enable one to receive credit for a course in college. Receiving credit could mean replacing a required course with an elective, but it could also mean shortening the time needed on campus to complete degree requirements. Over time, the AP program has migrated from upscale prep schools to something now mandated by state law at high schools across socioeconomic spectrums. Low-income students now enjoy fully or partially funded AP exams in more than thirty states, and there have been significant increases in students taking the AP exam. As of 2022, thirty-six states have adopted statewide or systemwide policies that require public institutions to award credit for AP scores of three or higher (out of five).
Taking the AP exam and testing out of a class is therefore considered a new entitlement, the presumption being that it saves students time and/or money. Of course, there is no way that a standardized test captures what should happen in the college classroom; instead, it treats a college course as a fungible set of testable information. Not surprisingly, elite schools have distinguished themselves as a premium good and refuse the equivalency. Dartmouth began denying equivalency credit in 2013 because the AP class graduates they admitted didn’t demonstrate sufficient understanding of the class material to progress to their upper-division classes. William & Mary denies placement from AP exams because they emphasize interdisciplinary courses and seminars to acculturate first-year students in good academic habits that are not gained from AP classes.
Dual enrollment, whether done as dual enrollment (DE) or concurrent enrollment (CE), is another route to shorten residence. (These terms are often used interchangeably, but DE usually means that the secondary student enrolls in the regularly offered college course, while CE suggests that the college course is taught at the high school for the students on that particular campus.) Though its origins also date back to the 1950s, DE/CE is growing in popularity much faster than AP because it is perceived as less elitist and more accessible. Rather than creating a second tier of classes presumably kept separate based on academic merit, it solicits existing two- or four-year institutions (usually commuter-focused community colleges) to either designate high school teachers as adjunct faculty onsite or else enroll students in courses at the colleges in person or online. DE can begin as early as sixth grade in some states.
The appeal of these programs might be status or presumed efficiency, but DE/CE is also advancing because it is a way to deepen funding for both secondary education and struggling junior colleges. Some states enable all secondary students to attend tuition-free. However, DE/CE presents the same challenges that AP does for academic equivalency insofar as high school teachers often become junior college adjuncts for its purposes. Baccalaureate institutions—many of them forced by state legislatures to create seamless transfers from junior colleges—become obliged to decide the equivalencies of even more classes that, though transcripted as junior college classes, are essentially high school classes. Unlike the College Board programs administered by a private company, legislators have much more leverage over DE/CE because it involves more public institutions (secondary, junior, and many baccalaureate) over which they have direct control: forty-nine states have dual-enrollment policies, and more than thirty require college credits earned through the program to transfer to public postsecondary institutions. California’s community colleges chancellor Sonya Christian has called for automatically enrolling the state’s eighth graders in a college course. These courses will probably be online, but one can imagine how course dynamics will change once they are populated by eighth graders.
A third initiative doesn’t try to shift college graduation requirements back to completion in high schools, but instead shortens college graduation requirements altogether from the 120-credit-hour range to the 90-credit-hour range. Though there is some murmuring about deliberately shifting general education back to high school (de jure rather than de facto), as in Canadian or European degrees, the more viable proposal is to replace credit hours with “competency-based education” replacing classes with tests, portfolios, or projects.
Not surprisingly, some of this proposal’s ardent advocates have included Capella University and Southern New Hampshire University, both online universities populated mostly by part-time students already on a career path. However, 90–94-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees are now offered by more traditional schools like Brigham Young University–Idaho and affiliated Ensign College. All are in professional programs like applied business management, software development/IT, or applied health. These truncated degrees eliminate electives and build a “nested certificate structure” alongside general education.
One must ask, however, what distinguishes practitioner degrees from apprenticeship or other non-degreed training if the goal is competence at the expense of a more robust academic experience? Why not simply require a two-year degree in general studies, if any degree at all, and shift all the professional competence to work environments or contract training?
Increased Cost and Declining Benefit?
“Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die,” as the song says. Parents and students have borne a near-deadening financial burden to reach higher education heaven, and probably because they perceived as heavenly both the campus experience and the ensuing credential. They now seem intent on finding routes to the latter at the expense of the former. Currently, 12 percent of full-time private and 10 percent of full-time public university and college students are finishing four-year degrees within three years, though this may be owed to preemptive completion of degree requirements or to accelerating coursework completion.
What is motivating this shift to abbreviating time on campus? Cost is often cited, and the 169 percent increase between 1980 and 2020 for the average price of one year of tuition, fees, and room and board, together with the increase in average student loan debt to $40,681, is certainly intimidating. While some are finishing “early,” however, many do not finish in the traditional timeframe and therefore incur additional costs.
One could go on about rising costs, forced both by students who expect improved facilities and by administrative bloat, for example, but what of it? Americans not only splurge on premium goods all the time but tie up billions in worse investments than college. But as enrollment steadily declines, a problem that began before COVID, it is apparent that colleges have lost their perceived luster as premium goods or investments. Four years to potentially secure what is increasingly perceived as overpriced admission to the workplace looks less like heaven and more like purgatory.
What Should We Think about Abbreviated Residence?
Should we join the call to abbreviate residence on campus, especially given its high cost? If the path to a college degree ought to be a unique and invaluable experience and not merely a means to satisfying a Human Resources requirement to get a job (as many students think), objections to the concept of equivalency must be offered.
One objection, already noted, is that high school and junior college classes do not provide enough academic quality and rigor; but what does academic quality and rigor mean? To understand it simply as more objectives or skills to “assess” (whether in portfolios or papers), or as the amount of “critical thinking” required by a course (as described in Bloom’s Taxonomy) misses the point. Likewise, the education, training, or credential of the instructor, while important, is not the central principle. It may be true that traditional universities or liberal arts colleges may boast better faculty credentials, exams covering more content, or more critical thinking required by their course objectives. But this collection of factors should not be considered the institution’s sole comparative advantage.
Education, like work, church, or family life rightly understood, is done in dedicated like-minded communities where students share one another’s progress and struggle toward common milestones. When students enter and progress together as a cohort, rather than being inserted at various points in a program based on credits already earned, community and common cause are strengthened. Transient students, by contrast, resemble what we used to call “off-sequence transfers.” The revolving door and unpredictable placement undermine what colleges once emphasized as a “first-year experience” transitioning students from high school and binding them to their future alma maters. Without a cohort, students are more isolated in already isolating mental work. Without deep connection to one another or their school, any particular institutional ethos is negligible. The student enters upper division coursework, especially his major, with the ethos and habits of his high school or, at best, his junior college.
Campus communities also encourage civic education insofar as students live life together in clubs, sports, and residence halls. They transition to citizenship, however imperfectly, as young adults who are no longer minors under the direct control of their parents or the politics of their local school board. Students seek out duties in the little civil society of the campus, often among colleagues different from friends back home. With these new colleagues, they share investigations and deploy new skills, mentored by scholars modeling a curious spirit hopefully deeper than their secondary teachers did. As one study of higher education put it, however idealistically:
Full civic literacies cannot be garnered only by studying books; democratic knowledge and capabilities are also honed through hands-on face-to-face active engagement in the midst of differing perspectives about how to address common problems.
Colleges should capitalize on these comparative advantages to build transformative and holistic experiences for their residents, something less likely to happen when acting merely as credit and competence mongers.
But the books matter, too, and curricula for transients can no longer be scaffolded as they once were from Freshman to Senior Year. Furthermore, campuses risk becoming societies of haves and have-nots: graduates of robust college-credit granting secondary schools advance to junior and senior level courses while others fill the “intro to” courses. Unfortunately, it is many of these “intro to” courses, like economics or history, that speak directly to the concerns of citizens. Not surprisingly, freshmen and sophomores feel that their campuses are more connected to social, political, and economic issues while upper-division students do not. The former are taking courses more obviously connected to such issues. What happens when these are taken in high schools instead?
This forces us to ask about maturity, something that any experienced college professor teaching upper-class students immediately understands. In his Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle notes how age and maturity contribute to practical wisdom, the virtues for living one’s life. Insofar as a broad range of college subjects (not merely business or STEM, but the humanities and social sciences) are to be lived rather than theoretically or abstractly considered, how can we expect salutary study of them by children? How do we expect the dilemmas raised in medical or law schools to be taken seriously by students who only recently finished high school?
It is certainly not surprising that many students are asking themselves whether college is for them, and there should be no doubt that trades and other routes to one’s vocations might fit some students best. For the college-bound, however, The Great Abbreviation only brings credentials closer or cheaper; it does not make the true advantages of higher education more accessible. Residential undergraduate matriculation may not be worth what is being charged for it now, but if it continues to atrophy and lose its comparative advantages, it may become worth nothing at all.
Image by zimmytws and licensed via Adobe Stock.