Lori Carrell and I had just finished Communicate for a Change (Johns Hopkins University Press) and were speculating on a next project. Lori surprised me by asking if I was still interested in a three-year bachelor’s degree for American higher education. A dozen years earlier Newsweek had made my public ruminations on the idea a cover story. For about a week, there was lots of chatter and then, not unexpectedly, a gaggle of accreditors declared the idea was dead in the water. I went on to do other things.

I doubted the idea of a three-year degree could be resurrected but agreed to sound out some of my former students who had become Presidents or Provosts as to their interest. Lori agreed to reach out to some of her former colleagues. We were amazed at what we heard back. Within two weeks we had ten institutions who told us they were willing to test the idea with their faculty on the one hand and with their accreditors on the other.

Thus College-in-3 began. Within the year we had twenty institutions pursuing the idea, a small grant from the Strada Foundation, and a host of press clippings added to the clamor. By fall 2024, our nascent project was transformed into an IRS certified non-profit enterprise: The College-in-3 Exchange. By the Spring of 2025, we had fifty members designing three-year programs or seeking regulatory approval for them. Six of the first 50 institutions had actual enrollment, while an additional ten prospects were actively considering joining us.

With a facilitating grant from Arnold Ventures, we began populating a database with elements drawn from IPEDS: the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the National Center Educational Statics (NCES). With IPEDS data that reflected the individual signatures of our first members we were finally able to answer the question most often asked of us: Who is joining the College-in-3 Exchange?

We started by plotting the size of 2,013 institutions with the undergraduate enrollments each reported to IPEDS. Next, we divided this set of institutions into quartiles of 503 or 504 institutions each. Then we divided our set of member institutions into segments whose minimums and maximums matched the distribution of IPEDS institutions.

The results are reported below.

More than half of the College-in-3 institutions were midsized. In fact, truly small institutions were substantially underrepresented among our members as were large institutions both public and private.

We turned next to the race/ethnicity of students. In Figure 2 a pair of conclusions are readily apparent. First, how students are distributed at our member institutions differ hardly at all for Asian, African-American, Hispanic, or White students, giving us confidence that our sample of College-in-3 institutions is broadly representative of American higher education in general. Put more colloquially, knowing that an institution offers a College- in-3 option tells us little about the race or ethnicity of students in that institution’s student body.

In our sample College-in-3 institutions there is just one predominantly African American and one predominantly Hispanic Institution. College-in-3 institutions were neither more nor less likely to enroll African American or Hispanic students than most other institutions submitting their data to IPEDS.

Turning to financial aid, it is important to note the outsized role that Student Loans rather than Pell Grants play in the financing higher educations at our College-in-3 members. In the broad set of IPEDS institutions, however, students were forty to fifty percent more likely to use Pell grants to finance their undergraduate educations. Among smaller institutions there was a similar gap between the two sets of institutions utilization of federal and related student loans though the gap disappears among midsized and larger institutions. The question as to why remains unanswered though it probably has something to do with the relative wealth of larger institutions across all of higher education.

We turn finally to the Mean Undergraduate Retention Rates and the story is essentially the same—no significant difference between College-in-3 institutions and the general population of institutions reporting their data to IPEDS.

Based on the IPEDS data presented above, we believe we can state with confidence that College-in-3 can appeal to a broad sample of undergraduate institutions across the United States. The only significant difference is the one I noted at the beginning of this report: size of institution does matter. Look again at Figure 1. There is a significant bulge reflecting that it is not the very small, but rather the midsize institutions that appear to be the most interested. And true enough, our College-in-3 Exchange includes no members of the Ivy League and only two members of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), whose members are highly selective institutions. Also missing are large public flagship institutions, though our Exchange contains a significant number of important midsized state colleges and universities.

To repeat our central conclusion: College-in-3 is primarily dominated by midsized colleges and universities—few high fliers, no major public state universities, lots of public state colleges, and many smaller private colleges. While including one predominantly African- American and one predominantly Hispanic institution, in general, the student populations of our institutions differ hardly at all from the broad set of institutions completing the IPEDS data in terms of their proportion of White students.

A concluding observation: in late March of this year Lori Carrell and I at the invitation of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education presented a webinar with the ambitious title “Degree in 3? Promoting the Benefits and Accreditation Myth Busting.” It was an event that attracted 450+ registrants. It was also an event that testified to the sustaining interest now vested in the idea of a college education that takes up to a year less to complete and that pays more focused attention to the first year as opposed to the final year of enrollment. Our College-in-3 Exchange is on track to have 200+ members by the close of 2026.