Editor’s Note: This article is part of a Minding the Campus discussion on the growing movement toward three-year bachelor’s degrees. Read the introduction to the discussion, “Three Years or Four?“, along with companion essays by David Randall and Richard Vedder.

In a welcome but unexpected move, Virginia and Ohio have announced plans to create a three-year, 90-credit bachelor’s degree. The goal is to make college “responsive to today’s students and the workforce,” according to Scott Fleming, executive director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia.

While the average 17-year-old may not recognize the significance of this shift for another seven years when their prefrontal cortexes mature enough to fully weigh the consequences of five- and six-figure debt, a three-year degree would be a win for students.

This also marks the first structural reckoning for the institutions that have been benefiting from the bloat. This change is long overdue, and as such, it won’t be enough to prevent coming contractions, but the three-year degree does force the question that higher education has spent decades avoiding: if you’re asking young people to take on debt that rivals a first mortgage, what exactly are they paying for?

The answer is increasingly an incomprehensible list of unverified promises of “intellectual development,” “critical-race-theory”, an extended therapeutic environment, and communism. And the people objecting loudest to reform are the ones with the most to lose.

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), released a joint statement after Massachusetts approved three-year bachelor’s degree programs, arguing that such programs “[threaten] academic integrity by substituting for a comprehensive education a stripped-down curriculum that prioritizes speed over essential intellectual development.”

That’s quite a claim when the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has put together a comprehensive study of core curriculum in higher education and a system to weigh the value of such in what a college or university offers. By ACTA’s measures, only 1.7% of all higher education institutions earn an A for their core curriculum.

The “comprehensive education” that the AAUP and AFT want us to think it defends doesn’t exist at most institutions.

What you see instead are things like Champlain College’s required “Reading, Writing, and Marx,” or UNC Chapel Hill’s “Queering China” and “Global Whiteness.” Similar offerings turn up across the country.

These subjects are paired with new teaching styles such as trauma-informed pedagogy and the pedagogy of discomfort, some of which kids have now encountered during their K-12 years. This “education” isn’t just thin. It’s corrosive. These pedagogies philosophically dismantle the connection between effort and mastery, replacing it with consciousness-raising advocacy.

This has left our youth in the inevitable position of being taught that striving is wrong, only to face complaints that they don’t show the diligence of their ancestors, all while being asked to shoulder a debt burden that means many will have to wait for a death in the family before they can own a home.

The AAUP and the AFT called three-year degrees a threat to “academic integrity.” What they are really defending is a faculty work year of just 32 weeks and a course structure so insulated from accountability that, at many institutions, students can’t see a class syllabus until after they’ve signed on the dotted line and arrived for their first class. With tuition already in first-mortgage territory, the AAUP’s and AFT’s solution is to call for more Pell Grants. But grant money doesn’t grow on trees. This is a demand that taxpayers subsidize this grift, without acknowledging that these same students, as taxpayers, will ultimately foot the bill through the national debt.

Virginia and Ohio deserve applause for saying the quiet part out loud and acting on it. Other states should follow their lead. Unions may insist that a fourth year is sacred, but families have already stopped believing them. The enrollment numbers bear that out, as does every parent comparing the tuition bill against the course catalog and the job prospects of today’s graduates.

A three-year degree is not a radical experiment; it’s just the first official admission that higher ed is feeling the changes families, students, and reformers have been calling out for years.

If the AAUP and AFT want to defend the four-year degree, there is an easy way to do it. Show us data that the years of education and opportunity cost justify the additional debt. They have not, because they cannot. And until they can, states should keep cutting.

Follow Suzannah Alexander on X.