Cristopher Willis | Less time in college devalues education

Whether you’re a student who spends summer traveling to gain some eye-opening insight, working to earn money for next semester or pursuing individual educational goals (classes, internships, research), you’re still a student. Penn considers us students through the summer months, reflecting the educational importance of the experiences we gain outside of our degree programs. But imagine that you have forfeited all of your summers to cram every class needed to graduate into three years. This is a new norm proposed in a New York Times op-ed last week by George Washington University President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg.

However, before Trachtenberg gains any traction with his proposal, I’d call out his dangerously one-sided argument, which bases itself on financial and degree-granting efficiency. I’d like to think that even at Penn, whose Whartonites and economists study at least one of those fields, the majority would put neither forward as a fundamental principle of an ideal collegiate education.

Trachtenberg insists in his op-ed that an undergraduate degree can absolutely be completed in three years, and he’s right on that count. Barring medical, institutional or national disaster, most undergraduate degrees could be finished in advance of their scheduled four-year time span. We could churn out bachelors more efficiently.

In fact, some students already take this route of their own accord. Rising senior College Sara Cannon will be graduating with the class of 2011 though she matriculated with the class of 2012. “My reasons are mostly financial,” she said. “Saving money on my undergraduate education will help me pay for more education.” And though she said she regrets sacrificing a year studying abroad, an extra year with her friends and the ability to study a language at Penn, she feels that she’s made the right decision for her.

Yet, simply having the possibility does not mean that we should all take it or that it should be enforced as the norm. Though rising College junior Micah Howell joked that classes taken outside of his major are usually “not useful at all and not fun,” he insisted that he would neither be ready to graduate this year nor want to. “I’m in no hurry to enter the real world,” he said. He plans to continue his study of Arabic through senior year.

The efficiency argument is a slippery slope. If a three-year bachelor’s “would increase the number of students who can be accommodated during a four-year period,” as Trachtenberg wrote, then consider what a two-year undergraduate degree would do. We could produce four times the degrees if we squeezed them to one-year processes. This shortening of the college experience belies an economically based desire to rush students through what is the greatest and possibly the last opportunity we’ll have to live among similarly minded individuals in an academically focused environment. Trachtenberg’s goal to “reduce institutional costs per student [to generate] an increase in tuition revenue” very willfully dismisses the primary goal of post-secondary education — namely, education.

Joan Johnson, a commenter on a related post on The New York Times’ blog The Choice added her voice to the fray. “A diploma as an indicator of education,” she wrote. “Not always the same thing, is it?” It’s not. Trachtenberg himself noted that shortening the undergraduate experience “would allow our colleges to be as efficient as they are [currently] effective,” marking a difference between efficiency and that effectiveness he associates with the best college education in the world. Since he’s already said it for me, I’ll simply reiterate: how fast a college can grant degrees does not indicate how well the school can educate its students. While learning and earning a degree may happen simultaneously — unfortunately they are not dependent on each other.

Cristopher Willis is a rising College sophomore from Grand Cane, La. He is studying philosophy. His e-mail address is wicr@sas.upenn.edu.

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