Rising tuition, enrollment pressures fuel CT colleges’ push for three-year degrees

Connecticut’s private colleges are developing three-year bachelor’s degrees that could lower costs for students while helping schools attract new enrollment and revenue, but state regulations currently prevent them from offering the programs. The proposed degrees would require 90 to 96 credits instead of the traditional 120, potentially eliminating a year of tuition and living expenses without requiring heavier course loads. The movement is gaining momentum as colleges face increasing criticism over the rising cost of higher education and student loan debt. At the same time, schools are under financial pressure and competing for a shrinking pool of traditional college students. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects the number of U.S. high school graduates, after peaking in 2025, will decline 13% by 2041. The Northeast and Midwest have already begun experiencing declines. Quinnipiac University has already put money behind its three-year degree ambitions. A faculty working group spent a year studying the concept, and the provost’s office funded three proposals through an innovation incubator. Faculty members from four schools — arts and sciences, health sciences, business, and computing and engineering — submitted plans. The shorter programs would generally take three years to complete, costing students less but potentially leaving colleges with one fewer year of tuition revenue. College leaders contend the programs could generate new revenue by attracting students who otherwise would not enroll. “If these are new populations of students who add to our applicant pool, then we’re talking about additional revenue,” said Adam Roth, executive dean and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Quinnipiac. Connecticut schools, however, cannot enroll students in the programs unless the state changes its regulations. The New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), which accredits colleges in the six New England states, will not consider a reduced-credit proposal unless an institution demonstrates that their home state has authorized the degree or does not require authorization. The state Office of Higher Education says it cannot approve a 90-credit bachelor’s degree under its current regulations. It’s an issue state lawmakers began debating this year and are expected to revisit during the 2027 legislative session. Elsewhere in New England, the degrees are already being offered. Three University of Maine System campuses recently launched 90-credit “applied” bachelor’s degree programs in public administration, business management and psychology. The system is led by Chancellor Dannel P. Malloy, who spent eight years as Connecticut’s governor and has advocated for reduced-credit degrees. “Our postsecondary institutions and our economy cannot afford to leave behind the hundreds of thousands of adults who started college but never completed a degree,” Malloy said in a statement to the Hartford Business Journal, citing a NECHE finding that 17% of working adults in the region have some college experience but no degree. Maine’s programs are fully online and limited to students who have been out of higher education for at least two years. Participants may receive credit for prior learning and work experience, but at least 30 of the 90 credits must come from the university granting the degree. Those safeguards, Malloy said, are designed to keep the pilot programs from drawing students away from the system’s 120-credit degrees, which he called the University of Maine’s primary undergraduate pathway. Meanwhile, Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island became the first institution in New England to offer reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees, launching four programs in the fall of 2025. NECHE has since approved reduced-credit programs at nine institutions in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts. Nationally, the RAND Corp. counted 119 publicly announced reduced-credit programs across 25 states as of May. Private nonprofit colleges accounted for 93 of them. RAND’s analysis found that programs in business, information technology and cybersecurity lend themselves most cleanly to three-year degrees. The poorest fits are in fields with heavy clinical or licensure requirements. ‘Arbitrary number’ Connecticut schools such as Quinnipiac already offer compressed bachelor’s degrees that allow students to complete the traditional 120 credits in three years by taking heavier course loads. A reduced-credit degree is a different product, Roth said. The 120-credit standard is longstanding, but advocates question whether it should remain the benchmark for every bachelor’s degree. That debate is taking on greater urgency as college costs continue to rise. Average published tuition and fees at private nonprofit four-year colleges reached $45,000 in the 2025-26 academic year, up 4% from a year earlier, according to the College Board. Meantime, borrowers who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2023-24 graduated with an average of $29,560 in student debt. “We invented this 120-credit arbitrary number,” Roth said. “It could be 150. It could be 180. It could be 95.” The New England Commission of Higher Education requires reduced-credit degrees to carry a qualifier before “bachelor’s,” signaling to students, employers and graduate schools that they differ from traditional 120-credit degrees. Roth said “applied,” which is used by the University of Maine, has been the most common qualifier. Quinnipiac and the University of Hartford say the degrees would target students they are not reaching now — including adults with stalled credits, transfer students, veterans and people for whom a four-year program is too expensive or time-consuming — rather than move existing students from four-year programs into shorter ones. “For us, it’s less money — yes, we lose 25% of a student’s tuition,” said Hisham Alnajjar, dean of University of Hartford’s College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture. “But it is a new revenue stream. These are students we could have that we would not have had.” Whether the additional enrollment would offset the lost tuition revenue remains unknown. Quinnipiac has not conducted revenue modeling for the programs. UHart Associate Provost R.J. McGivney said he knew of no institution that had completed a financial analysis of the impact of offering a three-year degree. Two schools, two products Quinnipiac and UHart are taking different approaches to developing reduced-credit programs. Quinnipiac’s faculty designed new curricula. The university would reduce general education requirements from its standard 46 credits to 40, the minimum NECHE requires. Faculty members proposed degrees in health sciences, computer science, psychology, criminal justice and early childhood development. Some health sciences programs cannot be reduced below roughly 94 credits without cutting content students need, Roth said. The University of Hartford’s computer science department has drafted a 90-credit version of its bachelor’s degree program by trimming general education requirements and electives. Students in the three- and four-year programs would take the same classes, allowing the university to offer the shorter degree without adding courses or faculty. “We are not creating a new curriculum and new courses and new sections,” Alnajjar said. “It doesn’t work economically and it doesn’t work practically.” The university is also considering reducing its bachelor’s degree in University Studies to 90 credits. The adult degree-completion program includes 29 to 31 elective credits that McGivney said could be eliminated. Neither school is seeking to replace the four-year standard. Most bachelor’s programs would remain at 120 credits, and NECHE limits institutions to five reduced-credit programs. Alnajjar said he expects UHart would implement three or four. Even if the state cleared the way tomorrow, Alnajjar said, the earliest UHart could enroll a class is fall 2027 because the program would still require several layers of internal approval. The law During the last legislative session, state lawmakers debated a bill that would have allowed any accredited college offering at least one traditional 120-credit bachelor’s degree to create a 90-credit program with approval from its accreditor. The legislation died without a vote in the Higher Education and Employment Advancement Committee. Committee co-chairs Sen. Derek Slap and Rep. Gregory Haddad said members of their Democratic caucus had “real concerns about redefining a bachelor’s degree and reducing the academic standards for a liberal arts education by 25%.” However, the 120-credit minimum is established in state regulation, not statute. Noele Kidney, a spokesperson for the Office of Higher Education, said the agency could amend the rule without new legislation, although any change would still require review by the legislature’s Regulation Review Committee. There is no formal process for petitioning the office to change its regulations, Kidney said, and staffing constraints have kept the agency from undertaking a broader update. The regulations were adopted in 1986 and last amended in 1999. The Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges supports changing state policy to allow colleges to offer reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees. The association pursued legislation this year and plans to try again during the 2027 session, according to President Jennifer Widness. “We are not seeking to redefine the bachelor’s degree in Connecticut at this point,” Widness said. “We are seeking limited authority for institutions to … pilot a small number of reduced-credit bachelor’s degree programs.”