Mount Olive College has figured out a way to save its students a cool $22,000: get them a degree in three years.
The small private college of 800 students in Wayne County is the first in North Carolina to latch onto a burgeoning national trend toward the three-year bachelor's degree.
It is an idea spurred by necessity: with more college students and their families struggling to pay tuition bills, universities have looked for ways to deliver their product more quickly and affordably. The three-year model has gained momentum in the past year, with a handful of small, private colleges unveiling programs of late.
But the three-year plan is not for everyone. At Mount Olive, President Philip Kerstetter thinks the new program would appeal to maybe 5 percent of his student body. That's 40 students who would need to know precisely what they want from the first day of college. They need to enter college with plenty of advanced placement credits from high school and the ability to shoulder a course load of up to 24 credit hours per semester. They'd also need at least a 3.5 grade point average in high school to be eligible.
"It requires a pretty motivated student," said Kerstetter, whose college has six satellite campuses across the state, including one in Research Triangle Park. "A lot of students come into college and want to do some exploration. God bless 'em. But this isn't for them."
The keys to making a three-year program work are advising and class scheduling, Kerstetter said. Advisers would help students find the most direct academic path, and the university would give them scheduling preference during one of college's most frustrating rites of passage - class registration. Kerstetter reasons that a motivated student who enters college with a semester or more of college credits in the bank can graduate in three years if he gets good advice and can schedule all the classes he needs in the right sequence.
The payoff: One less year of tuition, fees, and room and board, which this year totals $22,000.
Getting what they want
At Mount Olive, four-year students can take up to 19 credits per semester, though most take 15 or 18, which means five or six three-credit courses. In a three-year program, they could take as many as eight courses and would need 126 credits to graduate.
Though some students manage to graduate in three years on their own, the formal three-year programs popping up across the country are a step forward, said Molly Broad, president of the Washington D.C.-based American Council on Education.
Most students who want to graduate in three years need the sort of institutional support that Mount Olive has proposed.
And while the program may sound like it takes the fun out of college, Broad thinks some students simply want the degree as fast as possible.
"There are some students who really are not going to college for a social life or cultural experience," said Broad, a former UNC system president. "They can save money for themselves and make space for the next generation of student."
Catching on
The three-year degree idea picked up steam last summer when U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former president of the University of Tennessee, endorsed it in a Newsweek article.
Larger public universities are warming to the idea. In Rhode Island, for example, state legislators last year mandated that two public universities offer a three-year option.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, first-year students routinely enroll with 20 or 30 college credits completed, said Stephen Farmer, the school's director of undergraduate admissions. While UNC likely wouldn't adopt the same sort of three-year bachelor's degree model that Mount Olive has, it might be open to a 3 + 1 model, where a student could get a bachelor's and master's degree in four years, Farmer said.
"We're really interested in making it as easy as possible for students to accelerate," he said.
Greg Doucette, an N.C. State graduate now in law school at N.C. Central University, said most students don't see the big financial picture and thus may not see the value in rushing through college in three years.
And many switch majors once they've been in college awhile, said Doucette, the sole student member of the UNC system's Board of Governors.
"I think everyone thinks they have it figured out at the beginning, and then they change their minds," he said. "I started at N.C. State in computer science. Now I'm in law school."
