Recently, I argued in a Martin Center article that the fourth year of study for the bachelor’s degree is relatively unproductive and that substantial resources could be saved by introducing three-year degree programs similar to those in Europe. What works at Oxford should also work at, say, Appalachian State University.
However, this is only part of the story: Many students pursue graduate or professional degrees afterward. Does the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to these programs as well? Absolutely. Universities offer these programs partly to collect tuition revenues and allow faculty to teach preferred classes, depriving students of the chance to enter the workforce and earn a living earlier.
Let’s start with law schools.
I was once invited by the American Bar Association to speak at a conference on legal education, where a central question was: Why does law school take three years, in addition to four years of undergraduate training? In some countries, notably Britain, students can enter law school straight from high school, significantly lowering their educational expenses. In other places, students can study with a local lawyer and start practicing upon passing the bar exam. Why do we need seven years of university study in the U.S.?
Lawyers often tell me that the essential courses are taught in the first year of law school, with some valuable ones in the second year, and the third year involves taking electives—material that’s not crucial for passing the bar exam and rarely relevant in practice. Why not allow students to choose a two-year law school, or simply let anyone practice law who passes the bar exam, regardless of where or how they learned the material?
Moreover, allowing the American Bar Association to serve as law-school accreditors presents a conflict of interest. They control entry to the profession and use expensive three-year law schools to limit the supply of lawyers, enhancing their own incomes. This extended period of study does not produce more competent lawyers. (An aside: The ABA’s recent attempts to eliminate the mandatory LSAT for law-school admission are beyond reprehensible.)
Similarly, requiring four years of undergraduate training before medical school is questionable. Aside from the years needed to earn an M.D. or D.O. degree, how much residency or intern experience is necessary for competency in good health practices? I suspect that some reduction in current residency practices could occur without negatively impacting public health. Robert Orr and Anuska Jain concluded in their Niskanen Center paper that the U.S. is one of the few wealthy countries requiring a separate four-year bachelor’s degree before medical school. Establishing six-year, single-degree medical education programs would be a significant benefit for the U.S. healthcare system.
Once again, we see excessive years spent in formal education, well past the point of diminishing returns. Graduate education, particularly the Ph.D. degree, involves even more diminishing returns. I have a Ph.D. and have been reasonably successful in my field, if research accomplishments, teaching awards, or consulting opportunities are indicators. Yet, I received my Ph.D. at 24 after less than three years of graduate training. I studied intensively for two years (including summer school), learning economic theory, statistics, and economic history. I took rigorous exams before writing my dissertation, including exams in French and German. This was not uncommon in the 1960s—many peers got their degrees before turning 30.
Today, however, students rarely take less than four years to earn their Ph.D. In the humanities, seven or eight years is commonplace. Since many Ph.D. holders are marginally employed in these disciplines, extended grad school periods are not financially damaging and can be more appealing than low-wage work. Tenured faculty often use graduate students to teach introductory courses, freeing themselves to teach specialized topics. This misuse of doctoral students leads to significant waste of time and money.
There are wide differences by field. Graduate training in English is different from physics or nuclear engineering, but overall, the duration for earning a doctoral degree has increased. We are not necessarily getting a good return on investment.
Master’s-level training, typically one or two years, often involves more in-depth instruction in material first encountered during undergraduate studies. However, I have not seen a detailed cost-benefit analysis of master’s degree programs in standard disciplines or popular degrees like the M.B.A. A thorough analysis would likely reveal that most master’s programs also take more time than necessary for competence.
More use should be made of comprehensive, rigorous examinations to measure competency, like the bar exam, CPA exams, and physician licensing exams. If someone can pass these exams, why does it matter how or where they learned the material? This reform would shift control of training to individuals rather than educational institutions focused on revenue or professional groups aiming to minimize competition.
At the undergraduate level, we could implement a National College Equivalence Examination (NCEE) to measure general and specialized knowledge expected of a college graduate. Outcomes should be the focus, not the number of hours spent in class.
We already have the GED, a high-school diploma equivalent. Why not have a similar test at the college level? A student scoring high on the NCEE could boast, “I scored above the average Harvard graduate on the test!” This change in credentialing could reduce the diminishing returns currently prevalent in higher education.
