John Marcus

They've made one stipulation, which is you can't just call them a bachelor's degree.

You have to call them an applied bachelor's degree or an accelerated bachelor's degree or a career focused bachelor's degree.

And these are now for the first time being offered in person and some of them online.

You can get in certain fields where there's very high demand, criminal justice, graphic design, some health care fields.

We don't know yet what will happen to those students, but I'll tell you, I have visited a program

a criminal justice program where the students will graduate in three years with 90 credits.

The way they do this is essentially they get rid of all of the electives.

And these students were laser-driven to finish.

And so I think this actually has legs.

I think this could work.

It's the first new kind of a degree since essentially the advent of the community college.

The big question is, will employers accept them?

And can you use them to go to graduate school?

Exactly.

Employers probably don't care as much as faculty and registrars do about how you got your bachelor's degree.

They just care that you have it.

And in fact, a survey by one of the colleges that's doing this, Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, a survey of its employers who typically hired its grads, the employers are like, yeah, we love this idea, do it.

On the other hand, graduate school admissions officers said, no, we won't take people with a three-year bachelor's degree.

Or importantly, they said, we won't take American students with a three-year bachelor's degree.

We will take international students