Is It Time to Ditch the Four-Year Degree?
Carnegie Foundation President Timothy Knowles speaks to American Enterprise Institute’s Senior Fellow and Director, Education Policy Studies Rick Hess on what K-12 educators can do to support alternative career pathways. This interview was originally published in Education Week.
The winds of educational change are blowing. Tim Knowles is the 10th president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the 120-year-old organization that birthed the Carnegie Unit and the Educational Testing Service. Knowles is intent on steering into the teeth of that gale, working to retool the Carnegie Unit and intent on assessing the promise of innovations like the three-year college degree or micro-credentials. These reforms, especially micro-credentials, could open the door to dramatic changes in K–12 education. I caught up with him to discuss what’s on his mind and what it means for America’s high schools and colleges. Here’s what he had to say.
Rick: Tim, last year you spoke about the need to rethink the Carnegie Unit, arguing it’s outlived its purpose. Along the same lines, you recently critiqued the traditional four-year college model. Can you say a bit about your thinking?
Tim: I’ve been thinking about achievable ways the nation can crack the $1.77 trillion student debt problem. As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s fair to point the finger at the soaring cost of college tuition fueled by the widespread availability of student loans. However, there is another culprit that has escaped scrutiny—the 120-credit degree.
The main problem with the 120-credit requirement is it leaves nearly 40% of students who start college with some credits but no degree. That’s tens of millions of students who invest time, effort, and money in college but have little to show for it other than debt. Suffice it to say, a 60% success rate is a far cry from excellence. When I was in college—which was way back before grade inflation—60% wasn’t even passing.
Like many things in education that have outlived their shelf life, the 120-credit degree was created with good intentions. In 1906, to address the poor pay of college professors, Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where I now serve as president. The first trustees of the foundation established the 120 “Carnegie Unit” standard to quantify the amount of teaching required for college professors to earn a pension. It was a tidy, time-based metric that quickly became an attractive tool for measuring student effort toward earning a degree. To this day, it dictates how much time and money students must invest to obtain one. Fixing the college-debt problem requires acknowledging that outmoded, time-based measures of learning have shaped secondary and postsecondary schooling for far too long.
