gettyThere’s good news for parents of college-bound kids: A three-year college degree is coming. It’s no secret that higher education in the U.S. has a cost problem. Tuitions and other expenses are breaching $100,000 a year at more and more institutions. No wonder there’s a student debt crisis. Defenders of the status quo point out that most students can get discounts of one sort or another from the college sticker price. And it’s also true that for a handful of elite universities, certain parents of qualified students would gladly pay double the asking price to have their offspring attend such prestigious places. But for most parents and students the financial burden of a higher education is huge. The good news is that there’s a growing movement to replace the traditional four-year degree program with a three-year version. We’re not talking about cramming four years of courses into three years, which is what about 10% of students do now. Rather, a number of states and institutions are betting that a well-designed three-year degree can cut costs without cutting quality. The momentum is real. The College-in-3 Exchange, a non-profit organization promoting accelerated undergraduate degree programs, was launched in 2021 with just 13 participating colleges. It has now grown to 60 member institutions. In the past year alone, Massachusetts approved three-year programs at Suffolk University and Merrimack College, joining more than 60 institutions nationally that have gone this route. North Dakota, Louisiana, Maine and North Carolina have all greenlit or piloted similar programs. This is clearly not a fringe idea being tested at one experimental college.The College-in-3 approach asks institutions to redesign their curriculum down to roughly 90 credit hours by eliminating low-value electives, i.e. junk courses. The financial case is compelling for families. A 90-credit degree instead of a 120-credit one saves a quarter of total tuition, along with a year of room, board and foregone wages. For a generation drowning in student debt, this is a substantial structural fix.It’s also a plausible fix for what’s actually driving college costs up. Decades of spending data show that instructional costs—the part of the university that actually teaches students—have grown far more slowly than the surrounding administrative bureaucracy. Shortening the credit path not only saves students a year of tuition but also forces institutions to ask which of those 30 extra credit hours were ever essential to the degree in the first place, rather than accepted as fixed cost.Will employers and graduate schools treat a 90-credit degree as equivalent? Will it create a two-tier system in which only less-advantaged students opt for the “faster, cheaper” track? Most employers will recognize the value of a degree given after three years of substantive coursework, given the questionable quality of all too many of today’s graduates of the traditional approach. A goodly number of graduate schools will eventually do the same once it’s apparent that the academic substance of the three-year scholar is equal to or better than the four-year one. Three-year degrees, done right, are one of the few reforms that address both a family’s affordability crisis and a university’s cost structure at the same time.