Two Paths to the Future

Higher Education Can Become Cheaper and Faster — or Deeper and Better

This summer, I am teaching two compressed, six-week online courses with a combined enrollment of fifty-four students. By almost every measure, they are working better than the standard fifteen-week versions.

I’ve gotten to know the students more personally. I am able to comment on their essays in detail and return the work while the ideas were still fresh. Discussions carry over from one class to the next instead of losing momentum. Students who are confused can stay online after class and speak with me immediately.

The experience revealed something I had taught around for decades without seriously questioning. Students usually take four or five unrelated courses at the same time. Each course meets only twice a week. Assignments compete, feedback often arrives after students have moved on, and ideas introduced on Thursday may not be revisited for days. The result is divided attention, delayed response, and weak continuity.

This arrangement was not created because anyone proved it was the best way to learn. It grew out of credit-hour rules, room schedules, faculty workloads, financial-aid requirements, and long-standing institutional habits. The fifteen-week semester is not a natural unit of learning. It is the system colleges built and then came to treat as inevitable.

Higher education is now under intense pressure to change, but the real question is not whether change will occur. It is what those changes will try to accomplish. One path aims to make the degree cheaper, faster, and easier to complete. The other aims to make the education itself stronger. Those two paths lead to very different futures.

The Throughput Path

One path is already taking shape. Maine approved pilot ninety-credit applied bachelor’s degrees in 2025. Minnesota issued standards for shorter bachelor’s programs, and Oklahoma created a process for ninety-hour degrees tied to workforce needs. Florida sharply reduced the number of courses approved for general education, while California simplified lower-division transfer requirements.

States and university systems are also awarding more credit for learning that takes place outside college: workplace training, corporate certificates, examinations, and self-paced vendor courses.

These reforms address real problems. College costs too much. Transfer students often lose credits for no good academic reason. Working adults may be required to repeat material they already know. Many students borrow money, earn substantial credit, and still leave without a degree. The current system does fail many people.

The problem is that these reforms are mainly designed to increase completion, not improve learning. The degree becomes less a planned course of study and more a credential assembled from credits earned in different places through very different kinds of work.

A college may accept transfer courses, examination scores, workplace training, and corporate certificates, then decide the student has accumulated enough credit to graduate — having provided only part of the education and exercised little control over how the pieces fit together.

That approach can make sense for experienced adults completing a degree. A forty-year-old with substantial professional knowledge should not be treated like an eighteen-year-old entering directly from high school. But a model created for adults who already possess knowledge becomes far more troubling when applied to younger students who still need a broad and carefully structured education.

The larger danger appears when completion becomes the main measure of success. Every requirement then begins to look like an obstacle. A four-year degree begins to look like a ninety-credit degree burdened by thirty unnecessary hours. Colleges can claim lower costs and shorter time to graduation — but mainly by asking students to complete less. The degree remains the same while the education behind it becomes smaller and less coherent.

The Existing Model Is Not Good Enough

The problems with the throughput agenda do not make the current undergraduate model worth defending. At many colleges, the curriculum is fragmented, the expectations are unclear, and the pieces do not add up.

General education is often little more than a set of boxes to check. Two students can satisfy the same requirement by taking courses with almost nothing in common. The college can claim that both received a liberal education while being unable to identify the knowledge, works, or methods they now share.

The major usually has more structure, but it can be too narrow. Most graduates will face problems that do not fit within a single field — climate change, public health, inequality, artificial intelligence, migration, aging.

Students at selective institutions often respond by adding credentials: two or even three majors plus minors and certificates. This can look intellectually ambitious, but it is often a makeshift response to a curriculum that leaves integration to the student. A double major in history and psychology does not by itself produce a coherent understanding of childhood. Students may learn several disciplinary approaches without receiving much help comparing their assumptions, methods, and standards of evidence.

There is another problem colleges have been reluctant to address: academic expectations have weakened.

Grade inflation is now common enough that high grades often reveal little about what a student has actually learned. Students respond rationally: they devote less time to courses whose grades seem nearly assured and more time to internships, jobs, and campus organizations that may matter more to employers and graduate programs. Reading assignments have grown shorter, writing requirements less demanding, and rules about deadlines less firm.

The result is an unstated bargain. Instructors ask for less, students do enough to satisfy the course, and grades remain high enough to avoid conflict. Everyone’s immediate interests are protected, but the quality of learning suffers.

Artificial intelligence has made this weakness much harder to ignore. Take-home essays and research papers were already vulnerable to outside assistance. Large language models can now produce readable prose on almost any undergraduate topic within minutes.

Colleges have responded by looking for ways to detect AI-generated work, but detection is unlikely to solve the problem. The deeper issue is that the standard assignment model was never very good at showing what an individual student knows and can do.

An instructor assigns a paper, the student completes it outside class, and the instructor grades the finished product. The process reveals little about who generated the ideas, how the argument developed, or whether the student can explain and defend the work. AI has not created that weakness, but ithas made it impossible to overlook.

None of this supports the throughput agenda. Cheaper and faster degrees will not restore demanding reading, serious writing, or reliable assessment. What colleges need is a different kind of reform — one that changes not only what students study but how they learn and how their learning is demonstrated.

Instead, most institutions have built what might be called the add-on university. The regular curriculum remains largely unchanged, while colleges attach certificates, badges, internships, leadership programs, innovation labs, and research opportunities around it.

Many of these additions are worthwhile, but they rarely repair the underlying curriculum. Students must fit them into schedules already crowded with unrelated courses, access is uneven, and the students who would benefit most may be least likely to participate. The college can point to these programs as evidence of innovation while the daily experience of most students remains much the same.

The result is like an old house expanded one room at a time. Each addition may be useful, but the building as a whole becomes harder to navigate. What undergraduate education needs is not another addition. It needs a better plan.

A Different Path

The alternative begins with a different view of the problem. The chief weakness of undergraduate education is not that degrees take too long or cost too much. It is that the experience is often divided among too many unrelated courses, offers too little personal attention, and asks students to spend too much time receiving information rather than using it.

My summer courses work better not simply because they were shorter, but because the shorter schedule creates greater focus. Students return to material several times each week, so discussions can continue rather than start over. I return essays while students still remembered the questions they had been trying to answer.

With fifty-four students in two courses, rather than 80 in two “small” classes and 400 in a regular survey, I can notice confusion, respond carefully to writing, and follow each student’s thinking. Students learn more because they can concentrate on fewer subjects, meet frequently, receive prompt feedback, and work in classes small enough for real instructor attention.

A serious alternative would not impose one new format on every course. It would organize undergraduate education around eight connected reforms.

Assessment Based on What Students Can Actually Do

Most colleges are treating AI-generated writing as a problem of cheating and detection. That misses the larger issue. Many common assignments no longer provide reliable evidence of what an individual student knows or can do. A paper written at home over two weeks may reflect the student’s own thinking, substantial outside help, or work produced largely by a language model. Better detection software and stricter honor codes will not solve that uncertainty.

The better response is to assess students through work that instructors can observe, question, and verify. Mastery-based assessment — in the stronger sense of the term, not a checklist of minimal competencies — asks whether students can perform the central intellectual tasks of a course.

In a history course, a student might analyze an unfamiliar primary source in class, explain and defend an interpretation orally, construct a causal argument within a limited period, or complete a research project in stages the instructor follows from beginning to end.

This is not a return to the old blue-book exam. Traditional timed exams often emphasized recall. The aim here is to make understanding visible: students should interpret evidence, build arguments, respond to objections, revise claims, and explain the limits of what they know.

Oral examinations are especially useful for this purpose. They allow an instructor to hear whether a student can state an argument clearly, answer follow-up questions, and respond when challenged.

Staged projects offer another strong model: a student might submit a proposal, analyze sources, draft, and revise, with the instructor seeing the work develop at every step. In-class analytical exercises — given an unfamiliar document, develop an interpretation, defend it, then revise — measure the skills the course is supposed to teach and make it much harder to hand the work to someone or something else.

This approach fits naturally with the other reforms described here. Compressed courses make frequent, staged assessment easier to organize. AI can provide practice between class meetings without replacing the student’s own performance. Learning communities make demanding expectations feel normal. And clearer assessment standards help distinguish reasonable accommodations from changes that remove the central task: a student may need more time or a different means of access, but must still demonstrate the required understanding.

The main obstacle is cost. Oral examinations, staged projects, and closely supervised analytical work require more instructor time than collecting finished papers. But if an assignment cannot show whether a student actually understands the material, it is not serving its basic purpose.

The important question is whether the current system is measuring learning at all.

Fewer Courses at Once, More Sustained Attention

Most undergraduates take four or five courses simultaneously, constantly shifting from one kind of work to another. A more concentrated schedule might allow students to take two courses during a six- or eight-week block, followed by two more in the next.

Students would face the same academic demands over the year; the difference is that they could give each subject more continuous attention, allowing ideas and discussions to build from one class meeting to the next.

Not every course belongs in this format. Languages, laboratory sciences, and subjects that depend on extended practice may work better across a full semester. But many courses in history, literature, philosophy, policy, film, and writing could benefit from immersion. The point is not to impose one calendar on every subject, but to stop assuming that every subject belongs in the same fifteen-week schedule.

High-Impact Learning for Every Student

Undergraduate research, writing-intensive courses, internships, service learning, capstones, and learning communities can be valuable — but only when they require sustained effort, close guidance, useful feedback, and serious reflection.

Access remains uneven: students most likely to find these experiences are often those who already understand how college works, can afford an unpaid internship, or form early relationships with faculty.

Students who most need close guidance may instead receive large lectures, asynchronous courses, generic advising, and disconnected requirements.

Every student should have several opportunities to do consequential work: a first-year inquiry course, a collaborative project, a research or creative experience, a work- or community-based assignment, and a final project that brings together what they have learned. The aim is not to add five more requirements to an already crowded degree. It is to use existing credits to give students more meaningful experiences.

More Ways to Teach and Learn

Lectures and seminars should not be the default format for nearly every course. In a studio course, students create something, receive criticism, and improve it. That model is common in art and architecture but could be used much more widely: history students building an exhibition or documentary argument, policy students developing and defending a proposal, literature students producing an edition or public criticism, social science students conducting field observation or data analysis.

Courses modeled on “Reacting to the Past” ask students to enter historical conflicts rather than simply read about them, using evidence to argue, persuade, and decide. Maker spaces apply the same principle: knowledge becomes something students use to build, test, or solve.

What is hard to defend is the assumption that nearly all undergraduate learning should take place through lectures and seminars.

Learning Communities and Intellectual Cohorts

Honors programs succeed not only because they admit strong students. They also provide small classes, close advising, regular faculty contact, and a sense of community. Those advantages should not be limited to a small, highly selected group.

A large university could create thematic cohorts organized around democracy, health, climate, technology, migration, childhood, arts and culture, or law and public service. Students in each cohort might take linked courses, receive common advising, attend shared events, and complete a project together.

They would still have access to the university’s full range of courses and opportunities, but they would also belong to a group with common interests and a more coherent path through college.

Interdisciplinary Pathways Built Around Problems

Students who want to study a subject that crosses departmental boundaries usually face two unsatisfactory choices: add a second major, which crowds the schedule further, or assemble courses from several departments and hope the pieces cohere. A stronger approach would organize study around an important problem rather than a single department.

A pathway on childhood might include developmental psychology, history, sociology, education, law, economics, anthropology, disability studies, and children’s literature — plus practical experience in a school, museum, hospital, or juvenile court. A sustainability pathway might combine climate science, ecology, economics, engineering, environmental history, politics, ethics, and law.

The central question would be: what must students know and be able to do to understand this subject and make sound judgments about it?

The difference between a weak and a strong interdisciplinary program is the difference between a course list and a real curriculum. A weak program tells students to choose eighteen credits from several departments. A strong one provides a common introductory course, training in several methods, a cohort of students with shared interests, experience outside the classroom, and a final project requiring genuine integration.

A Genuine Common Core

General education should offer more than distribution requirements. Students should graduate with some shared knowledge of the ideas, works, methods, and discoveries that have shaped human understanding.

A modern core might introduce students to major philosophical and religious traditions, important works of world literature, significant achievements in music, visual art, and performance, central ideas and methods from the social sciences, statistical and causal reasoning, the scientific discoveries that transformed how people understand nature, and current developments in biology, climate science, computing, and artificial intelligence.

This does not require every institution to teach the same fixed list of books. It does require faculty to decide that some knowledge matters enough for all students to encounter it. Students do not learn to think critically in the abstract. They learn by examining important claims, weighing difficult evidence, interpreting major works, and comparing competing explanations.

A common core would give students a shared basis for serious conversation — not to make them agree, but to give them enough common knowledge to disagree intelligently.

AI to Deepen Learning, Not Cut Costs

Artificial intelligence could easily become another way to reduce instructional costs: automated advising, automated grading, larger classes, fewer instructors. That is the most likely outcome if institutions treat AI mainly as a tool for efficiency.

A better approach would use AI to address the passivity built into large lecture courses. Lectures can give hundreds of students access to an expert, but they provide few opportunities to practice the work of the discipline. In a history course, students may hear about interpretation, evidence, and causation without regularly having to interpret evidence, build arguments, or answer objections themselves. AI can provide that missing practice.

Its role should not be to give students another summary or explanation, but to ask questions, press for evidence, challenge weak claims, and require students to explain how they reached a conclusion.

A student examining a photograph or political cartoon should not simply ask the AI what the image means. The AI should ask what the student notices, which details seem important, what relationships of power or status appear, what is missing, and what visual evidence supports the interpretation.

The same principle applies to written sources: rather than summarizing a document, the AI might ask students to distinguish between what the author openly argues and what the source reveals unintentionally, who the intended audience was, and what questions the source cannot answer.

Socratic dialogue can push students beyond their first response. Suppose a student argues that the American Revolution was revolutionary because the colonies became independent. The AI might ask whether political independence necessarily produced social change, whose power increased or declined, and what evidence might support the opposite conclusion.

The aim is to make students define their terms, qualify broad claims, consider counterevidence, and identify what might change their minds.

AI can also make historiographical disagreement active. Instead of memorizing that historians disagree about whether the New Deal transformed or preserved American capitalism, students could question two competing interpretations, identify the assumptions behind each, compare their evidence, and explain which argument they find more convincing.

Decision exercises can add another dimension: students might confront Lincoln’s choices about emancipation, a factory worker’s decision about striking, or a civil-rights organizer’s need to allocate scarce resources — limited to the information and options available at the time. After deciding, the AI reveals consequences and asks them to reconsider.

In a large course, these activities can create a more productive rhythm. Before class, students complete a brief AI-guided exercise that surfaces their assumptions and misunderstandings.

During class, the instructor shows anonymized patterns from those responses and shapes the lecture around the issues students found most difficult. After class, students complete a more demanding task — revising a historical claim, writing a decision memo, or explaining what changed in their thinking. The lecture becomes one part of a continuing cycle of preparation, practice, feedback, and revision.

The instructor remains essential. AI cannot replace the judgment required to select important questions, build a historical narrative, or explain why an issue matters. What it can provide is something most students in large courses rarely receive: regular opportunities to explain, defend, reconsider, and improve their own thinking.

Used this way, AI would not make education cheaper by removing instructors. It would make large courses more intellectually demanding by giving every student more chances to do the work of the discipline.

Why These Ideas Rarely Become Institutional Priorities

Faculty members and administrators can understand each of these proposals on its own. The harder step is to see them as parts of a different model of undergraduate education and to commit the money, authority, and sustained effort needed to build it.

The financial incentives favor reforms that remove or simplify requirements. A college can create a ninety-credit degree by cutting thirty credits. It can serve more students by expanding asynchronous online courses.

Learning-centered reforms work differently: a learning community must be organized and advised, a studio course must be staffed, a common core must be designed and maintained, intensive courses require rapid feedback and manageable enrollments. Under financial pressure, institutions are much more likely to choose changes that lower the cost of delivering a degree.

The measures used to judge colleges also favor completion over learning. Institutions regularly report graduation rates, time to degree, and accumulated credits. They have much weaker evidence about whether students have become better writers, more careful readers, or stronger reasoners.

When completion becomes the main measure of success, requirements begin to look mainly like obstacles. Over time, completing the degree comes to stand in for receiving a strong education, even though the two are not the same.

Departmental organization creates another obstacle. Departments hire faculty, control budgets, and set requirements. But most of the reforms described here cross departmental lines.

A common core, an interdisciplinary pathway, a thematic cohort, or a block schedule requires several units to share courses, faculty time, and authority. That creates immediate practical disputes: which department receives enrollment credit, who pays the instructor, who governs the program. A program may make excellent educational sense and still have no secure institutional home.

Faculty autonomy can also stand in the way. Professors reasonably value control over their courses, but a coherent curriculum requires more than independently designed classes. It requires faculty to agree on sequences, shared expectations, and linked assignments. Efforts to coordinate are often viewed as administrative interference rather than shared faculty responsibility.

Colleges have also become hesitant to say what students should know. A common core requires deciding which works, ideas, and methods deserve broad study. Rather than make such judgments, institutions often offer long menus and describe the result as flexibility — while taking little responsibility for whether the choices add up to a coherent education.

Finally, colleges routinely expect innovation to save money, promising small classes, personal advising, research opportunities, and low tuition simultaneously. Those promises cannot all be fulfilled. Serious teaching requires time — reading student work, conducting oral examinations, guiding research, creating intellectual communities. Human attention is expensive.

A serious learning reform must begin with an honest admission: deeper education may cost more than thinner education. The question is whether colleges are willing to spend their resources on the work they claim is their central purpose.

What Would Make This Vision Real

A stronger model will not appear through a sudden, university-wide overhaul. It must begin with limited experiments that are visible, carefully designed, and evaluated over time — and protected from the institutional habits that usually weaken innovation as soon as it grows.

Build a voluntary learning-centered pathway. A large university might begin with a cohort of 100 to 200 students. The pathway could include a shared first-year seminar, linked general education courses, an interdisciplinary theme, common advising, an AI-supported inquiry lab, and a culminating public project.

It might also include an ethnography-of-work experience — modeled partly on CUNY’s approach — in which students investigate how a profession or institution actually operates, interview practitioners, and compare the public image of an occupation with its realities.

Students would still complete a major, but the rest of their education would have a clearer structure. The pathway should carry visible value: priority registration, close faculty mentorship, research access, transcript recognition, and clear benefits when students apply for jobs or graduate school.

Test schedules with fewer simultaneous courses. Universities should pilot schedules in which students take two courses at a time in six- or eight-week blocks, then compare learning, engagement, stress, and later performance with students in conventional semester courses.

The evaluation should focus on actual student work — not merely completion or satisfaction surveys. Did students write better by the end? Could they explain and defend an argument? Did they retain the material months later? My summer courses have provided an informal version of this experiment; the results suggest that concentration, frequent contact, and rapid feedback can improve learning. That possibility deserves serious testing.

Turn add-ons into connected experiences. Colleges should connect internships, certificates, and undergraduate research more closely to the curriculum. An internship should include preparation beforehand, structured observation during, and academic analysis afterward. A certificate should have a clear sequence and a final project.

The important questions are always: what prepares the student for the experience, what follows it, and how does it change what the student knows or can do?

Fund reform from the center. Interdisciplinary programs and learning communities cannot depend on departments donating faculty time. Central funding should support course releases, curriculum-design grants, teaching assistants, instructional designers, and cohort advisors.

Without that investment, reform becomes another burden placed on the faculty members most committed to teaching.

Reward faculty for building better programs. Designing demanding courses, creating linked programs, supervising field experiences, and developing serious forms of assessment should count in workload decisions, merit reviews, and promotion.

As long as curriculum building is treated as unpaid service, it will remain peripheral.

Measure what students have actually learned. Programs should be judged by what students can do. Evaluation should examine writing, oral argument, interpretation of evidence, quantitative reasoning, collaboration, and long-term retention.

A demanding course may be uncomfortable while still being valuable. The more important question is whether students can do something at the end that they could not do at the beginning.

State essential requirements clearly. A serious learning-centered model must deal honestly with the growth of individualized accommodations — to identify clearly what each course requires. Accommodations may change how a student gains access to material or demonstrates understanding. They should not remove the central purpose of the course.

A student may begin speaking in a small group, but a course designed to teach oral communication may still require public speech.

Programs should identify these essential requirements before conflicts arise. The governing principle should be clear: support should help students meet demanding expectations, not gradually erase them.

Expand successful programs without weakening them. The greatest danger is that a successful small program is expanded in a way that removes the qualities that made it work: larger classes, less faculty contact, automated feedback, standardized modules. A program has not truly been scaled if its central educational features disappear.

Expansion must protect manageable class sizes, coherent sequences, sustained mentorship, and timely feedback.

Two Futures

The throughput path will continue because it responds to immediate pressures. It promises lower costs, faster completion, greater flexibility, and more degrees. For experienced adults who already possess substantial knowledge and need a credential for career advancement, that model may be sensible and humane.

But it should not become the only model, and it should not define undergraduate education for students who are still discovering what they know, what they can do, and what kinds of lives they might lead. For those students, college should offer more than a faster way to collect credits.

It should introduce them to important knowledge, unfamiliar ways of thinking, difficult works, disciplined methods, and responsibilities they have not yet faced. It should require them to read carefully, write clearly, speak publicly, interpret evidence, revise their thinking, and work with people whose experiences and assumptions differ from their own.

I see some of that happening in my summer courses. Students’ essays became clearer and more argumentative. Students who began with vague impressions learned to support claims with evidence. Conversations continued after class because the questions had become real to them.

That happened not simply because the courses were shorter, but because students could concentrate, because the classes were small enough for me to follow their thinking, because feedback came quickly, and because the work carried real intellectual stakes.

The choice facing higher education is not between change and no change. The current system is already changing. The choice is between two kinds of change. One makes the degree cheaper and easier to obtain by reducing what stands between enrollment and graduation. The other asks how college might become more coherent, demanding, personal, and intellectually serious.

A university should not merely help students get through college. It should make their years in college worth going through.