College Minus 1 Year = $40K
College in three years? Nice.
For some time I thought that the best idea for saving really big bucks on college was to attend a community college for a year or two and then transfer to the Big U for your degree. Now comes tiny Hartwick College, in Oneonta, New York , with a new program designed to cut $30,000 in tuition costs and about $10,000 in room and board, textbooks, etc. They call it the Three Degree Program, a name as institutional as green paint and fiberfill desks. I’m going to call it “Three is Good For Me!”
Students at Hartwick can receive a degree while they matriculate (I love that word!) on the semester program and avoid summer school. The simple trick? 18 hours a semester and an additional 4 hours during a special January Term for each of the three years. As a bonus, three year students receive priority course registration and even special academic advisement. Sure it’s hard work but–hello!–$40,000! And summers are still free to pursue internships or study abroad.
It’s catching on like a cold in a classroom. The “Degree in Three” program was just introduced yesterday in the Rhode Island legislature, mimicking programs at Valparaiso, Middlebury and Bates College in Maine.
Quoting from a New York Times article
“Earlier this month, at the American Council on Education’s annual meeting, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a Republican who served as education secretary and president of the University of Tennessee, urged colleges to consider three-year degrees, calling them the higher education equivalent of a fuel-efficient car.
Fuel efficient? Today you could buy 20,000 gallons of gas with that $40k savings (and probably sell it this summer for $80k, saving 2 years of college expense).
Now, there’s an idea…
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After reading your post, I decided that for the next 12 years I will only talk about college as a three-year experience. I can just hear me now, “Macy, those three years you’ll spend in college will be the best three years of your young life… and before you know it, you’ll well on your way to your graduate thesis!” Ha! Seriously, love this idea.
I read this piece as a parent and as a small business owner and want to reiterate to parents that as an employer, I would hire a 3-year graduate over a 4-year graduate anyday. So, the benefit is a double-whammy. You save money and and are more attractive to an employer (as in higher negotiating power). Given the pace of the business world, the increasing pressure to meet faster deadlines and work smarter, it’s the three-year grads that will be the new “creme of the crop.”
I can’t help but multiply the 40K times 3 when I look at my family. I think I just saved 120K in college tuition money…Good thing, because I think I lost that much in my 401K over the last few months!