It’s a way to cut out all the unnecessary electives that are required to get the degree… why teach social studies and other non related subjects if you’re getting a degree in engineering or chemistry, or why take statistics if you’re degree is in a foreign language or English literature?… why does a medical doctor need to know about Chaucer or Kant?
Maybe to learn the difference between “you’re” and “your.” 
But seriously, this is part of the age-old discussion as to the purpose of a university education. Is it a glorified trade school or intended to impart the modern version of a “liberal education”?
There’s the sticking point!
a real one is to turn out people who can think. And that makes for citizens who understand things, like science and history, and can’t be bullshitted like those who don’t.
yep
All I know is that Texas Tech will probably be first in line to offer these degrees.
Football players, baskerballers will still be in a five year program.
I know one woman who was on a major university basketball team as a player for five consecutive years. She wasn’t red suited – she played all five years.
That was back in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Back then, nobody paid much attention to women’s basketball and there was no limits. If she had stayed for a PhD, she could have kept playing on the team.
nitpick: redshirted, written as one word
After a little bit of reflection, where I get sideways with this isn’t the concept of a shorter degree. It’s that calling it by the same name threatens to lessen the existing degrees into being what amounts to a glorified trade school.
So if they call it something else to explicitly define it as not an Associate’s degree, and not a Bachelor’s degree, I’m fine with that. But it’s pretty annoying and unfair to think that some clown can go get a 90 hour degree in engineering (they’re normally in the ~120-125 hour range) and get the same diploma and everything as someone who took the degree that takes 33% more credit hours.
That’s what accreditation is supposed to address. I have no idea if they’re going to be able to get accreditation organizations to sign off on the plan.
They can proceed without accreditation but unaccredited degrees are going to be an issue for some companies or if they want to pursue graduate studies later.
Or in the case of an engineering degree, getting licensed by the state as an Engineer-in-Training (EIT) and later, as a Professional Engineer (PE). This is far more difficult with a unaccredited degree, and may not be possible at all depending on the state.
In Texas, for example, if your degree is not accredited, the rules require eight years of engineering experience to get your license instead of the normal four years. That is fairly significant. They also want to conduct a “detailed course evaluation” of your transcript.
But even more problematically, in most states (including Texas), the rules require a “four-year bachelor’s degree or graduate degree in engineering, engineering technology, math, or physical science” in order to go the non-accredited route.
Whereas the accredited route requires a four-year degree in engineering or engineering technology.
So either way, you are required to get a four-year degree. And if Texas (hypothetically) were to relax their requirements, good luck getting reciprocity from other states.
Interestingly enough, when I was in college I got into a program to earn a BA in only 3 years. It was for Business Administration. You do 2 years to earn your Associate’s (in my case at a community college), then just one year to get the BA. And this was through the University of Washington, not some diploma mill. Note that this was over 30 years ago.
(Life circumstances forced me to drop out before getting any sort of degree but that’s another story.)
I don’t think a 3-year BA is anything egregious; it’s certainly not a new concept and it can be totally appropriate depending on how it’s done. It just shouldn’t be the norm, or something you try to apply to every degree.
ETA: A quick Google shows that the 3-year BBA is still something being done in places; right now I see Colorado State University, Cal State Fullerton, and the University of Portland among many others who offer it. Though it’s not easy; it requires heavy coursework to make it happen. It’s not just an easy path to a quick BA.
Sure, and there are certainly ways a “three year degree” can be made to work.
What Greg Abbott is, in effect, proposing, though, is reducing requirements for degrees. He’s the sort of lawyer one would describe as “slimy”, though, so he can honestly claim he never explicitly put it that way and he never explicitly stated standards should fall just to make number go up.
I.e. he just heavily implied it, and how dare you say that’s what he meant.
Yeah, that’s bullshit and it would directly devalue the degrees. I can see schools losing accreditation over this. The reason why the degrees are valuable is because they represent the training, time, and effort made to acquire them. The paper itself is worthless without all that, and once you take that away, what is the point?
Number go up! Number go up!
Abbott should really just create “Greg Abbott University”, where he will dispense a “diploma” for any discipline a person wants for a very reasonable fee. Then he can boast about how many Texans have a degree, and also have some good spending money for whatever.
Trump did it with Trump University[/sarcasm], so I don’t know what’s stopping him.
mea culpa, mea culpa,
mea máxima culpa.
Hush don’t give Governor “Hot wheels” any ideas…
That’s basically it… they want to make UT into Liberty University or Prager University. I had a coworker that would lament at lunch about how her son went off to college and came home an atheist and she blamed it on UT teaching “non biblically accurate” courses on biblical history. She is some kind of Baptist that doesn’t agree with higher criticism of the Bible and any church related history…
Texas school board bans trans teens from wearing dresses or skirts. Trans student sues, school board settles before going to trial.
But they now ban all students from wearing dresses and skirts.