More Four-Year Colleges Should Offer Two-Year Degrees | Opinion

Many young people are dismissing the value of traditional four-year colleges. And we are wrong to do so, according to some spokespeople of such colleges—a liberal arts education improves us as citizens; the career-long financial benefits of college are clear. Perhaps these are strong arguments.

But today traditional colleges seem to foster a homogenous environment of thought that could spread divisive views yielding antisemitism and other forms of hate, distasteful to most employers. The value of traditional schools further erodes when heeding alternative and upcoming higher education pathways. If colleges want to offer something substantive again, reform of the bachelor's degree model must happen.

The traditional bachelor's degree historically signaled expertise and employability because only the privileged few could attend college and learn specialized knowledge. But today many other players in higher education exist. Google, for instance, grants professional certificates that get enrollees job-ready in just half a year. Coursera and edX offer online degrees that also take a few months to complete, not a few years. Given these alternatives, an undergraduate degree's only distinct benefit is a sign of employability, not employability itself.

And what matters now is not that you attend college, but which one you attend. Private college counselors are a burgeoning industry helping children of the upper-class gain acceptance into the Ivies. And the better the school, the less the field of study matters. Goldman Sachs, for instance, encourages students from "any field of study" to apply for their analyst position. But this denotes a want for talent more than skill—the firm, as many similar ones, prefers applicants from top schools.

So is it so bad that my generation rejects the superficial need for a degree and so rejects this kind of elitism—perhaps the only selling point of traditional college? Now even community colleges, often stigmatized by employers and my peers alike, are seeing an increase in enrollment while four-year ones are suffering a drop. The trend could continue if more employers loosen their degree requirements, which is currently happening.

Proponents of the four-year degree point to data touting its excellence as an investment. Yet we cannot evaluate its true opportunity cost when little return-on-investment data exist on the alternatives. Professional certificate programs for practical fields like finance and computer science could be well worth the cost, since the fields bring the highest returns for college graduates. And learning hard and valuable skills is becoming much easier with artificial intelligence (AI), which is free through Khan Academy and its AI Khanmigo. When free education contributes to earning income, the return on that investment is infinite.

Here tertiary education flourishes and innovates due to the internet and now AI age. The four-year degree model (or even the British three-year model) remains stagnant. Yet traditional colleges are desperately clinging to the construct that everyone needs a bachelor's degree to succeed.

But this is what they need to say to survive.

Rather than buoying an outdated narrative that slows progress, confuses the benefits of attending with what historically made it important, and makes millions of young people default to doing something that might not be best for them, traditional universities need to adapt to today. They must offer better alternatives to a bachelor's degree without the exorbitant financial and opportunity costs.

Some schools rightfully have made their degrees available online as cheaper options. Others have cut their tuition fees, since their brand is not strong enough to outweigh the costs of their degree. But many remain with the status quo. Tuition can only rise so much until people decide college is not worth the cost.

My experience at the University of Chicago provides a great example. Regardless of its quality-of-life changes like a better career advancement office, which are expected with rising tuition costs, the model it and its peers operate is outdated. We still need to take courses that teach us academic writing, even though it is well-established that the academic writing style is poor communication. We still need to do a year of general education, whose standard is so foundational—whether Homeric poems or basic biology—which can be learned for free on YouTube. And in schools around the nation, general education classes are known as "GPA boosters" because they are so easy.

These systemic issues, and the increasingly promising alternatives, justify young people's resistance toward attending college. More universities should offer the option of associate degrees that reconsider what is essential to learn. The degree could require year-long internships to prepare students for the workforce and would focus on field-specific knowledge, accommodate those less academically oriented, and carry the brand of a four-year school. Schools with the means must lead the way.

Aman Majmudar is a senior at the University of Chicago. His guest essays have been published in Times Higher Education, The Scientist, Undark, and other outlets.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.