By Futurist Thomas Frey
The Question Nobody Can Answer
Who invented the four-year college degree? Try researching this. You’ll find it’s astonishingly difficult to identify a specific inventor, date, or rationale for why bachelor’s degrees require exactly four years.
The system emerged gradually from European medieval universities, evolved through American land-grant colleges in the 1800s, and was standardized somewhat arbitrarily around credit hours and Carnegie Units in the early 1900s. But there’s no founding document explaining why earning a degree requires four years rather than three, five, or competency-based completion.
The truth? The four-year degree is an administrative convenience that became entrenched—not an optimal learning design. And it’s about to be replaced by something fundamentally different.
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