Are accelerated degrees the solution to higher education’s problems?

What do you do when your higher education system is facing an existential crisis? Question its basic assumptions, according to Anthony Finkelstein, president of City St George’s, University of London.

In a blog posted in March, Finkelstein argued that amid the financial meltdown that has seen more than 30,000 jobs shed, one thing has not been questioned: universities’ core product, degrees themselves.

He called on the sector to consider a “2+2 model”: a two-year undergraduate degree, followed by an optional two-year integrated master’s. This would require “system-level change, but it would address many current concerns in higher education”, such as by lessening debt, widening access, increasing the UK’s appeal to global students and using university facilities and resources more efficiently by extending teaching across the whole calendar year.

For students, the reduction of debt – and an accelerated route into the workforce – could be a big draw. The English media have been dominated in recent months by concerns about the equity of the student loan repayment system, and the US has been troubled for some time by the level of debt its graduates contend with – prompting Joe Biden’s efforts while president to cancel some of that debt.

Current degree lengths already vary around the world. In England and Wales they typically last three years, while in Scotland (whose students do not pay tuition fees), they last four – although students who leave school with Advanced Highers can often enter their second years. Likewise, the US opts for a four-year system, as does China. While vast parts of Europe opt for a three-year system like England and Australia, master’s degrees often last for two years, instead of one.

England’s three-year degrees are a “historical artefact”, Finkelstein told Times Higher Education. But “at a moment of sectoral challenge, it seems to me astonishing that we shouldn’t be paying attention to our principal product and how we deliver it. If car-makers experienced a crisis, they’d be [asking themselves], ‘What type of cars are we offering? Are we offering the right cars at the right price points?’ And so on.”

While two-year degrees are still rare in the UK, the number of institutions offering them is increasing. The University of Buckingham has done so since its foundation in the 1970s (see below), and, more recently, others have begun to dip their toes in the water.

One example is University Academy 92, which was founded in 2019 by footballer Gary Neville and specialises in sports and management courses. Its students can apply to complete their studies in three years or two, and enrolments on the accelerated courses have “increased consistently” year-on-year, with 37 per cent of its 2025-26 cohort on accelerated routes, according to Gareth Smith, its chief of strategy and student life. Completion rates for those students are 2.5 percentage points higher than those of the institution’s three-year programme, he added.

He noted that accelerated degrees can cut student debt by as much as £15,000. While annual tuition fees for standard three-year degrees are capped currently at £9,535, universities can charge £11,440 annually per year in accelerated degrees. However, that still saves students about £5,800 in tuition fees, on top of more than £10,000 in maintenance loans.

However, UA92’s graduates have to wait a long time before they feel the benefits of that since England’s tuition fee repayment system means that students pay back the same amount of money – 9 per cent of income above the salary threshold – per month regardless of whether they do a two- or a three-year degree – albeit for less time. Smith believes that some of the “benefits to the Exchequer” of two-year students’ lower debt should be passed on to them via lower monthly repayments.

Yet he is heartened by the forthcoming introduction of the lifelong learning entitlement in England next year, which will allow students to use their total four-year loan entitlement in smaller chunks than a traditional degree. “I think the part of [the LLE] that hasn't been fully explored is it also enables students to study faster,” he said. “And surely that's what flexibility needs to be about…[It] needs to enable students to…get to the workplace quicker."

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Across the pond, “higher education in the US is in real trouble”, said Robert M. Zemsky, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the “College-in-3” movement, which helps US universities transition from four-year degrees to three.

According to College-in-3, US completion rates are “lamentable”, with only 45 per cent of first-time full-time students who started at a four-year college in 2017 graduating within four years – and just 63 per cent within six. 

“This is really a retention problem in the US. It’s a product problem,” Zemsky said. What is happening at US institutions is that students are rejecting the experience. Just under half of American institutions lost a quarter or more of their first-year students in the first year. That’s just pure product rejection.”

While in the UK accelerated degrees typically add an extra term in the summer in order to maintain roughly the same amount of content as three-year degrees (an approach endorsed by Finkelstein), the accelerated degree movement in the US has a greater emphasis on cutting “unnecessary” modules.

That is because its higher education system is internationally unusual in requiring students to complete numerous “general education” modules in their first two years, before they specialise in the latter years of their degrees. Zemsky said this is “nonsense” and many of the early modules “aren’t what students want to learn”.

College-in-3 argues that three-year degrees cost students around 25 per cent less in tuition and living costs than four-year degrees, and about 50 universities have begun trialling them over the past two years, with a further 30 in conversations about it. Zemsky hopes that within five years, 500 institutions will be offering them, which would constitute “a fundamental change to higher education itself”.

Dan Sarofian-Butin, a professor in the School of Education at Merrimack College, whose institution will be partaking in the College-in-3 trial next year, said that “from an educational philosophy perspective, there’s nothing wrong with accelerated degrees, and in some ways they’re great”. Accelerated degrees could be particularly attractive to mature students and those with specific career goals: “If you already know you want to be a teacher, an engineer or a business person then why not focus it” and cut out the “inefficiencies” built into the four-year system, he asked.

One “inefficiency” he resented having to endure as an undergraduate was calculus: “I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. It was horrible,” he said. On the other hand, the study trip to Switzerland he was able to go on was “probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Neither one of those helped me with my professional goal…but sometimes inefficiencies…are great.”

Another example of valuable inefficiency is the general education course that Sarofian-Butin himself teaches on, which he believes gives students “a broader sense of the world”. But he noted that the rise of artificial intelligence has increased the sense among students of higher education as a merely tick-box exercise on the “conveyor belt” into the job market, further diminishing the appeal of learning for learning’s sake.

“On an academic level, [offering a shortened degree is] a fascinating idea. If done well, it can powerfully work, especially with the incorporation of AI. It’s a natural outgrowth of the competency-based education and microcredential movements,” he said. “But it also carries massive risks – if done poorly and without proper guard rails – of turning education more and more into a transaction.”

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Back in England, Paul Wakeling, a professor in the department of education at the University of York, questions the perception that “historical hangovers” in higher education are necessarily bad.

He noted that even within the English system, it is “difficult to describe” a definitive model of higher education. “We’ve got three-year degrees, we’ve got four-year degrees, we’ve got five-year degrees. We’ve got some degrees that are longer because you have a placement in them, and some degrees which are just longer, like architecture.”

But he is not convinced that adding more two-year degrees to the mix is a good idea: “I don't think this is the case for Anthony Finkelstein, but I think many of the other proponents are making a market argument,” he said. “It just seems like it's entirely driven by efficiency and not pedagogically informed. But if you look at what the market has decided about two-year degrees, they've given a massive raspberry.”

And why is that? “There's lots of things in human life which have a kind of a rhythm that we've settled on over a long time, like a seven-day week, that just make sense,” Wakeling reflects. “And I couldn't explain entirely why, but they do. And I think a three-year degree is in there with that…People argue, ‘Oh, it's just a historical hangover from when we had agricultural societies and you had to finish over the summer’, but everywhere else has kept it. And I think there is a benefit to not just trying to cram everything in at once. It's not how learning really works.”

Nor is Wakeling convinced by Finkelstein’s idea of two-year master’s, to allow for “structured work placements, international mobility, and a substantial experiential project or advanced dissertation”. Wakeling, whose research specialises in widening access to postgraduate education, agreed that the UK is an “outlier” in its approach to postgraduate studies and that there may be some benefits to increasing the length of a master’s degree, but he doesn’t believe the cost of doing so would be worth it. Additionally, it would require fundamental reform to master’s tuition and maintenance loans, which he doesn’t believe “is currently on the horizon”.

Besides, he added, telling academics to cut down on their research time – typically completed over the summer, when students are on vacation – would go down “like a cup of cold sick”.

Annie Bell, associate director of higher education at the thinktank Public First, agreed that at research-intensive universities, “you would have to change your staffing models really quite significantly to deliver that accelerated degree model”. She thinks the move is more likely to be made by universities with a focus on widening participation – especially if, like Coventry, De Montfort and UA92, they have moved to a block-teaching model whereby one module is taught as a time, allowing for multiple entry points.

More generally, she believes that the more diverse the country’s higher education offerings are, “the better the sector can serve the needs of a wider range of students” – many of whom are not 18-year-olds looking for the traditional student experience.

Finkelstein stressed that he is not just advocating for accelerated degrees, but wider sectoral change. His blog post – whose title references Jonathan Swift’s satirical “modest proposal” for the poor to sell their children to the rich as food – is purposely a “provocation”. He thinks universities need to be jolted into asking themselves: “Are we providing learning outcomes as efficiently and effectively as we need to?”

And the clear answer, in his view, is no: “I think it’s clear the existing system cannot persist, and therefore we need a new disposition. Slowly shifting [things] around will not work.”

His blog concedes that his reform ideas are “unlikely to happen” owing to the sector’s ingrained conservatism. But “we need to be brave about change”, he told THE. And the financial crisis should not be used as an excuse to duck the challenge. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“There’s never a moment when creativity isn’t a good thing,” he said. “Very few universities have got at this moment the will and collective bandwidth to contemplate change, but I think that’s a mistake. When things get hard is exactly when you should do your radical thinking.”

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Two-year degrees have proven value, so why the delay in take-off?

Anthony Finkelstein was right when he wrote in his blog that the three-year degree is an inherited habit in English higher education, not a pedagogical necessity. What is striking is how cautiously the sector discusses a reform that some of us have been delivering for decades.

Employers consistently signal that they prioritise a graduate’s capability, work-readiness and focus – not their time served in higher education. Our continuous teaching at the University of Buckingham delivers the same total contact time as a typical three-year course, in a structured, active learning environment that limits learning loss between modules.

Our longstanding experience shows that continuous study reduces repetition, academic regression and disengagement. And the shortened structure eliminates long periods of unsupervised study, where attrition of engagement often occurs; students often have exams on their return from the traditional Christmas and Easter university vacations, for instance. There is no sense in which accelerated degrees dilute academic depth and intellectual development.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that acceleration privileges a narrow, elite student profile. In fact, it is the reverse. The two‑year model reduces tuition and living costs, as well as lowering the opportunity cost of studying in terms of deferred income. This appeals to those who want a faster route into employment with less debt, such as mature students, career switchers and higher fee-paying international learners.

In the context of a cost-of-living crisis, students are increasingly questioning the value of long periods of independent study and life away from universities, during which they still must pay for services and accommodation they are not using. Buckingham students do get 10 weeks of annual vacation, but that is spread across four separate breaks of no more than two weeks each, ensuring uninterrupted academic development. This high-contact, structured model, with regular engagement and clear academic progression, aligns more closely with contemporary student expectations of value.

Of course, research-intensive universities argue that year-round teaching would deprive their academics of vital research time, particularly during the traditional summer vacation. But Buckingham demonstrates that high-quality teaching, scholarly engagement – in the sense of anything that allows for thinking to be developed, including with industry or professional bodies – is compatible with accelerated delivery.

The question is not whether research-intensive universities can adopt such structures. Addressing legacy approaches that were not built with student outcomes in mind isn’t about reducing research-intensiveness. It’s about tackling long-established staff resourcing constructs and workload models that do not foreground the interests of students’ learning journeys or reflect their current economic reality.

Students come to universities today as a stepping stone for the next stage of their life. It is wonderful to be taught by academics whose research informs their teaching practice, but when this research comes at the expense of student interactions or when this comes at the cost of being taught by PhD students, this rightly affects student perceptions of value.

The two‑year degree is not simply a compressed version of a conventional pathway. At its best, it is a relational model of education in which engagement is continuous and learning is communal. If anything, the traditional three-year degree must explain why it needs additional time to achieve the same outcomes.

Deba Bardhan Correia is dean of the Faculty of Business, Humanities and Social Sciences and Chris Payne is registrar and chief administrative officer at the University of Buckingham.