John Marcus

We need them in some form to continue to educate young people for jobs that require those skills.

For a long time, colleges didn't do anything about this.

There's a lot about American higher education that consumers don't immediately know.

We've held colleges and universities until the more recent past.

We've kind of held them on a moral high ground.

But in fact...

Of people that go to four-year universities, fewer than half of them graduate within four years.

A quarter of freshmen drop out before their sophomore year.

Colleges and universities in the United States, and I'm talking collectively, many of them have very high graduation rates and do an extraordinarily good job.

But collectively, they have terrible outcomes.

We are paying an enormous amount of money.

Not just families and students, but taxpayers are injecting enormous amounts of money into institutions that have not only not done a great job at actually graduating students, which is their basic and most simple promise, but doing it on time, doing it affordably.

And so...

We're in an existential crisis, and there's nothing like an existential crisis to kind of focus people's attention.

And by people, I mean the people that run colleges and universities.

So finally, we're getting some reforms.

Here's a couple of things that are happening.

The most dramatic one that, again, I don't know that people are paying close enough attention to is that accreditors have finally approved something that a small group of reformers has been pushing for a long time, which is the idea that you could get a bachelor's degree in three years instead of four.

That's true in many countries that you get a bachelor's degree in three years instead of four, but not in the United States.

Now, the creditors who are also under a lot of pressure have approved an idea that they previously rejected, which is a bachelor's degree that only requires 90 credits and three years instead of 120.