In an article on education reform, The Daily Record discussed PPI Senior Fellow Paul Weinstein’s paper on three-year college degrees:
What if the traditional four-year undergraduate degree went away?
What if getting a bachelor’s degree in just three years became the norm?
That’s the proposal put forth by Paul Weinstein, director of the public management program at Johns Hopkins University.
Weinstein suggests that moving to three-year degree programs would solve many of higher education’s ills, namely the soaring cost of a college education and the staggering levels of student loan debt.
The Progressive Policy Institute in Washington recently published Weinstein’s proposal in a paper titled “Give Our Kids a Break: How Three-Year Degrees Can Cut the Cost of College.”
“For generations of Americans, earning a college degree was considered the surest way to achieve the American Dream,” he writes. “But the rising cost of college and the tremendous debt burden it will place on our children is now threatening to derail that track to prosperity. While many policymakers have focused on ways to augment financial aid, the question of how to cut the actual cost of getting a degree has been largely ignored. We can no longer afford to discount that crucial second question.”