A Return of Harvard's 3-Year Degree?

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???Test drive a new version of Buyers and Sellers.?Since?Who Gets In and Why?was published last year, thousands of readers have downloaded the list of Buyers and Sellers—my shorthand?for how colleges approach financial aid.

• Now I’ve?updated the list and turned it into a data visualization?to make it easier to navigate, with the assistance of?Andrew Palumbo, an enrollment managment leader.
• Before we launch it to the world, we want NEXT readers who are interested in the list to take it for a spin.
• You’ll have to?register to access the visualization.
• Then if you want, provide any?feedback here.

?? TOMORROW, December 15 at 2 p.m. ET,?please join me for the last edition of the NEXT Office Hour?for 2021, “Delivering Value to Students, Post-Pandemic,” with the?chancellor of the?University of Minnesota at Rochester, the president of?Denison University, the vice president of marketing and communication at?Purdue University?and?the vice provost for academic alliances at?Arizona State University.

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A Flexible and Fast Degree

When Harvard University was founded in 1636, it started by offering three-year degrees. By 1654, it switched to a four-year plan. Most of higher education followed, of course, because even then colleges followed Harvard.

What’s happening:?During the pandemic, campuses embraced flexibility—from the curriculum to the academic calendar.

• At Georgetown University’s?Red House, which is its R&D arm, Randy Bass is working on a more flexible degree.
• Bass, vice president of strategic education initiatives, calls it a “3-to-5 flex” that gives students opportunities to earn a what we now know as a bachelor’s and/or a master’s degree, all in a less structured time period.
• “We have a flex system now by chaos and negligence,” he told me in an interview for?LinkedIn’s 29 Big Ideas that will shape 2022. “Some kids go faster, some kids go slower, but it’s not with any kind of intentionality as a system.”

Driving the news:?More than a dozen institutions have joined a pilot to create a brand-new three-year bachelor’s degree,?according to?Inside Higher Ed’s Emma Whitford.

• The effort is being led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Bob Zemsky and Lori Carrell, chancellor of the University of Minnesota at Rochester.
• The goal isn’t to “design a program that packs 120 credit hours into three years, but to overhaul the curriculum” and allow students to learn in a shorter amount of time.

Why it matters:?Three-year degrees are nothing new, but they often failed to catch on because traditional students didn’t want to speed through college feeling like they missed out on key experiences.

• What’s different now is that colleges are reconsidering degree requirements and how to give credit for outside-the-classroom experiences that students value but often don’t count toward the bachelor’s degree.
• At Georgetown, “we’re actively talking about how to use the summer,” Bass told me. “We’re mobilizing as many departments as are willing to consider what their major would look like if the summer was in play.”

What’s next:?Carrell’s campus, the University of Minnesota at Rochester, will launch a new degree in the fall?called “Next-Gen Med.”

• The university has redesigned the student experience to offer a year-round, two-and-half year bachelor’s degree in health sciences in partnership with Google Cloud.
• Every student in the program will be assigned a coach as well as mentor from the?Mayo Clinic, research experiences, a paid internship at Mayo, and a digital portfolio to track their learning, among other things.
• “The key to speed is how can we drive down costs but also drive up retention,” Carrell told me.

???Read more on LinkedIn’s big idea for higher ed in 2022.

• Here are the?28 other Big Ideas for 2022, according to LinkedIn

It Turns Out, There Was No Gap

Last year, one enduring story in the media was that graduates from the Class of 2020 delayed college in droves because of the pandemic.

Background:?The worry among parents of teenagers from the Class of 2021 was that those graduates of the previous year who took a gap year would take precious seats in the freshman class this fall.

• That was the question I regularly got asked in talks with parents and counselors—even though many colleges reported their numbers of deferrals for the fall of 2020 were similar to previous years.
• It seems the legend about the Class of 2020 taking a gap year got started with—Harvard (of course).?20% of its incoming class?deferred admission.

By the numbers:?It turns out that just 2% of students from the high school Class of 2020 who didn’t immediately enroll in college in the fall of 2020 went on to enroll this fall, according to a report out this month by the?National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

• “We found that very few high school graduates followed the gap year enrollment pattern,” the report’s authors noted. “In fact, the gap year enrollment rate for the class of 2020 declined slightly from previous classes.”

Bottom line:?More than 650,000 fewer students enrolled in colleges and universities in the?fall of 2020?compared to the?fall of 2019, a decline of more than 3%. If they didn’t take a gap year, as we now know, what happened to them? And will they ever enroll in college?

• Since the turn of the century, we talked about the Class of 2020 as this almost mythical thing. Now, it might be better known as the Lost Class.

Until next time, Cheers — Jeff

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