For its senior institutions, Louisiana higher education launched their intents and purposes down a slippery scope by allowing a hollowing of select bachelors degrees.
This week, the Louisiana Board of Regents approved a request by the Louisiana State University System to offer “accelerated” such degrees. LSU Alexandria will offer two and another the flagship campus in Baton Rouge will house, which take only 90 hours to complete rather than the typical 120. The system points to nascent programs scattered across the country, local business demand, and average salaries ranging from $68,000 to $145,000 for graduates with these three majors as justifications for their introduction into the degree inventory.
All are related to artificial intelligence, with the LSU one more directly so. The one at LSU is designed to train those in the fields of machine learning engineering/data science, artificial intelligence research (computer and information research scientists), and artificial intelligence software development (including quality assurance and testers). The ones at LSUA will crank out computer information and systems managers and information security analysts, and data scientists, database administrators, and software developers. Somewhat similar programs for the LSUA pair are in computer science, cybersecurity, and biology, while the LSU one claims it is entirely dissimilar to any other in the state although it facilitates entry into a masters degree in computer science.
These programs invoke the biggest controversy surrounding accelerated – fewer than four years’ worth of study – degrees: whether they cheapen bachelors degrees. The normal bachelors of sciences degrees, by which these AccB varieties – defined as having “a comprehensive general education core and a specialized curriculum developed by faculty in collaboration with industry partners, usually focused on a high-demand career field – just approved would have been categorized, require the standard 39 hours of coursework in approved options spanning English, mathematics, natural sciences, humanities, fine arts, and social/behavioral sciences. But the AccB would dispense with 12 of these general education requirement hours of their choosing, which almost certainly would come from the six hours of English and/or three hours or arts and/or nine hours of humanities and/or the six hours of social/behavioral sciences. In essence, everything but the hard sciences in the GER would be sliced in half in its size.
There’s a reason why the state’s GER has distributional requirements spanning all major areas of study at a university, and 24 of those hours devoted to the non-hard sciences: to create academically well-rounded graduates whose breadth of knowledge could inform them as they made decisions in their individual disciplines. After all, the origins of “university” stem back to the idea of a community of scholars of a whole body of knowledge, emphasizing a unified body rather than just a place of learning, with the latter being vocational.
That’s the threat with the AccB, allowing a bachelors degree to be vocational rather than universal. The state already has vocational college degrees: associates, which acknowledges that status with only a 27-hour GER required – in essence, what the AccB asks – with 15-18 hours outside of the hard sciences (more than the AccB seems poised to allow!), and even one kind of associates degree, the associates in applied sciences, which only asks for nine hours outside of the hard sciences, although that is conferred at technical colleges.
In essence, the AccB asks for 63 hours of non-GER coursework, presumably related to mostly courses in the program of study and the remainder more general hard sciences coursework as prerequisites. Then why not make it an associates degree with just 15 hours of a GER and accelerate it with year-round study that finishes in two years plus a summer semester? That would keep in the vocational nature of the program and not dilute bachelors degrees.
Because of the optics. A number of states and some accrediting agencies already have authorized these degrees (and some not tied to the high-demand qualification of Louisiana’s AccB), and an AS won’t look as good or as competitive as the AccB equivalent. (And a leading reform group in higher education, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, despite its insistence on quality, well-rounded degrees which it too often finds these days degraded by identarian and dubiously-academic courses allowed to fulfill distributional requirements, favors the AccB type because it points out the superfluous components to so many bachelors degrees that disdain a traditional emphasis on the liberal arts).
At the very least, the LSU System should not forward for approval AccB majors that take away from the non-hard sciences GER requirements and lop off the 12 hours from the 15 required in the hard sciences, nor should the Regents approve that. Anything else signals a willingness to issue a devalued bachelors degree that less likely imparts wisdom and career flexibility to its achievers, which is what a university education should be all about.
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