Rethinking the Four-Year Default

For more than a century, “bachelor’s degree” has meant more or less the same thing in the United States: 120 credits earned in a university classroom through four years of a mix of general education and major-specific coursework. That formula has been remarkably durable. It’s also, increasingly, being questioned. Across the country, states, systems, and individual colleges are testing degree structures that break from the standard template, not by watering down what a bachelor’s degree means, they argue, but by rethinking which credits students actually need and how and where those credits are delivered.

Three-year, reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees are the newest and fastest-growing version of the re-examined bachelor’s degree. But they’re not the only innovation on the market. Community college baccalaureate (CCB) programs and degree apprenticeships are pursuing a similar goal: a more affordable, more directly job-connected route to a four-year credential. All three of these models are worth understanding alongside each other, because they’re being asked to answer many of the same hard questions.

The idea of the three-year bachelor’s degree is simple. Instead of 120 credits over four years, students complete something closer to 90 credits in three. They’re not just compressing the timeline, as in an “accelerated” bachelor’s degree.  Institutions are cutting what they consider elective or duplicative coursework and building a leaner path to the same credential.

The pace of adoption has picked up fast. The College-in-3 Exchange, a nonprofit formed in 2019 is now the central hub for this movement. They counted roughly 70 member institutions in mid-2026, and that number is growing quickly. Member institutions represent a mix of public, private not-for-profit and private for-profit institutions. 

State systems and accreditors have moved in step, according to Inside Higher Ed’s reporting on the movement. Accreditors, once the biggest obstacle, have largely come around. The Higher Learning Commission finalized a review process for reduced-credit degrees and has since approved eight programs. And the New England Commission of Higher Education issued its own guidelines before approving four reduced-credit degrees at Johnson & Wales University.

The first three-year degrees, online programs at Brigham Young University–Idaho and Ensign College in Utah, won approval from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in 2023, and the model has since spread quickly. The Utah System of Higher Education created a new “bachelor’s of applied studies” category for degrees between 90 and 120 credits and approved the state’s first reduced-credit programs in 2025. Indiana passed a 2024 law requiring public bachelor’s-granting institutions to develop at least one three-year option, which led Manchester University to win the state’s first approval, for reduced-credit degrees in pre–athletic training and pre–physical therapy. 

Who are these programs for? Mostly not first-time-in-college eighteen year olds. Programs so far tend to target transfer students, working adults, and military-connected learners. For example, the University of Maine System has proposed five online, 90-credit programs specifically designed to serve adult learners who’ve been out of school for at least two years. Proposed programs often, but not always, cluster in applied fields like health administration, business, information technology, and engineering technology. Some colleges also offer the degrees in traditional fields such as psychology and communications.

Community college baccalaureates are bachelor’s degrees offered by a predominantly associate degree-granting institution. Like 3-year bachelor’s degrees, CCBs are also structural innovations aimed at addressing affordability and serving the same adult learner population. However, CCB degrees have a two decade-plus head start and comparatively richer data. 

Twenty-four states now authorize at least some community colleges to confer bachelor’s degrees. The most recent count identified 214 institutions running 763 CCB programs and awarding around 16,000 degrees a year. Most states require CCBs to address a labor market need, and current programs are concentrated in applied majors, such as nursing, allied health, business, and education. 

Community college bachelor’s degrees are designed to make the degree more geographically and financially accessible to students, especially adult and working learners, and to foster improved earnings and career advancement for graduates. In the two states with the longest track records, Florida and Washington, CCB graduates look a lot like the population these programs were designed for: students who are older, more racially diverse, and more likely to be balancing school with work and caregiving than students on the university transfer track. A 2026 analysis found that 70 percent of CCB graduates are over age 25 compared to 28 percent of bachelor’s degree graduates nationwide.

Degree apprenticeships are Registered Apprenticeships for which the related supplemental instruction culminates in a college degree. For starters, Registered Apprenticeship is an education and training model that incorporates paid on-the-job learning under the guidance of a designated mentor and classroom learning that complements on-the-job training and prepares an apprentice for a specific occupation. In a degree apprenticeship, the classroom learning component is delivered by an institution of higher education and culminates in a degree aligned with the occupation they’re preparing for; sometimes the on-the-job training yields credits toward that degree, but not always. It’s pretty common for colleges, especially community colleges, to provide the related supplemental instruction component of apprenticeships. It’s much less common for apprentices to earn a degree over the course of their apprenticeship. 

The model is expanding its reach, though. New America conducted the first-ever national inventory of degree apprenticeships in 2026, locating 579 programs in 49 states. We found degree apprenticeships that prepare participants for 91 occupations, ranging from construction fields to respiratory therapy to cybersecurity. About two-thirds of these degree apprenticeships yield an associate degree. The remaining third at the bachelor’s and master’s level are strongly concentrated in teacher education. 

Degree apprenticeships help address some persistent barriers related to the time and money required to earn a bachelor’s degree. Often, apprentices’ tuition is covered, either by their employer or financial aid. And apprentices earn wages for all of their required on-the-job learning hours, earning progressively more as their skills grow over the course of the apprenticeship. The consistent income from on-the-job learning in a degree apprenticeship removes barriers for students who cannot forgo earnings to spend more time on coursework or complete unpaid work hours, as is common in traditional student-teaching arrangements.

As different as these three structural innovations on the bachelor’s degree are, they keep running into a common set of questions. Will graduates of these programs learn what they need to get value from their degrees? Will their employment and earnings outcomes differ? What about graduate school admissions? 

CCBs, the oldest of these innovations, have the most evidence behind them. For example, research has found that completion rates in Washington are comparable to those of university transfer students, and CCB graduates in Florida out-earn peers with only an associate degree by roughly $10,000 a year. There is more to learn about their impact on students, graduates, colleges, and local economies. The ink is hardly dry on the only national count of degree apprenticeships, and research is only beginning to examine enrollment and outcomes of these programs. The College-in-3 Exchange is building research and data, but with the first cohorts only now enrolling, there isn’t yet a track record to point to—just early, largely qualitative signals that employers and graduate programs are open to the idea of a reduced-credit bachelor’s degree. 

None of these approaches yet has the kind of large-scale, causal outcome data that would decisively settle questions of rigor and value. As these new models of bachelor’s degrees expand, policymakers and practitioners will need answers about how well they deliver on the aspirations of labor-market relevance and affordability.