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 Suzannah Alexander and Richard Vedder.

Virginia and Ohio have announced plans to establish a three-year bachelor’s degree program for their public colleges and universities. This is a good idea. The three-year bachelor’s degree will not be a travesty of a college education. It will reveal that college education has become one long process. And this revelation is a necessary first step for true reform of higher education.

Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) dealt a fatal blow to the traditional model of college more than half a century ago. Griggs forbade any job test with “disparate impact,” which meant that it forbade any effective job test at all. Employers resorted to requiring degrees as horrifically expensive, time-wasting proxies for an IQ test that would keep them lawsuit-free. College, since then, has become an ill-designed machine to produce a job credential. Each year, it keeps millions of uninterested students chained to their seats, enduring tedium in hopes of securing a job and a decent life. Colleges have used some of the new tuition money to employ professors and adjuncts to fill the new students’ course schedules. They have used it more to hire vast numbers of bureaucrats to engage in make-work and to transform the universities so vast and rigid that they are virtually unreformable.

Too many students have also welcomed the chance for a four-year vacation from the workforce, although the more economically minded simply work full-time and give what little remains of their attention to classes in the evenings and on weekends. Too many politicians have welcomed the artificial reduction in the reported unemployment rate that results from removing several million young Americans from the official pool of job seekers. But the central obstacles to higher education reform are Griggs and the higher education establishment.

Griggs may at long last be falling. At any rate, many states are moving to remove the college degree as a job requirement, and the federal government has begun to attack the “disparate impact” doctrine. But the sclerotic college machine still stands and will proceed by inertia unless it is forcibly disassembled.

It would be wonderful if we could reform the university by normal means. Set aside the need to eliminate the illiberal discrimination of higher education’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” machine. We should restore rigor to admissions and grading, re-establish core curricula, and make college a full-time pursuit in which you can complete what is now a four-year education in at most three years. But the higher education establishment is too hidebound to reform itself. Certainly, it will not make the proper reforms on educational grounds.

Ohio and Virginia’s approach is correct and necessary. They treat the B.A. as nothing more than a job credential and seek to make it more efficient by chopping off a year. Of course, this will make college more efficient for that purpose; the closer college becomes to an IQ test written on sheepskin, the better it will serve the job market. More importantly, what Ohio and Virginia do is a revelation: an unveiling, an apocalypse in the true sense of the word. They dispel the illusions by which the higher education establishment justifies its endless subsidy. That is the indispensable prerequisite for effective reform of our colleges and universities.

Which, ideally, will culminate in the explicit overturning of Griggs, the re-establishment of effective job tests, and the return of millions of 18-year-olds from the tedium of mandatory college to the financial and spiritual rewards of work. When they have gone, and all the bureaucrats and professors unnecessarily employed by their tuition money have gone, then we can at last begin on the campaign to refashion our colleges and universities into actual institutions of higher education.

Ohio and Virginia have begun the needful demolition work with their plans to introduce three-year degrees. These will make apparent the truth that makes all other change possible: that the Emperor has no clothes.

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