The latest Newsweek cover story is titled, “The Three Year Solution: How the Reinvention of Higher Education Benefits Parents, Students, and Schools,” by Senator (and former University of Tennessee president) Lamar Alexander. Like the discussion of three-year bachelor’s degrees generally, the article is at best shallow and at worst deeply confused.

The article begins with the story of Hartwick College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York located halfway between Binghamton and Schenectady. (Having gone to high school in Schenectady and college in Binghamton, I spent a number of weekends at Hartwick. Having been in my late teens at the time, I remember the details of very few of them.) Hartwick has  a small program whereby students can earn a B.A. in three years. This, says Alexander, “could be the higher education equivalent of the fuel-efficient car,” before spending the next three paragraphs explaining how the Japanese built fuel-efficient cars and beat the pants off GM, in case you didn’t know.

This analogy makes very little sense. A college degree is a certificate of learning. Learning in college is measured in credits. Bachelor’s degrees signify that you’ve earned 120 credits or thereabouts. They’re called “four-year” degrees because that’s how long it takes to earn 120 credits if you follow the standard schedule of eight semesters, or 30 credits per year. The large majority of students who earn bachelor’s degrees take between four and six years to do so.

Students in the Hartwick program simply take 40 credits per year instead of 30, but pay the same rate (unless they go to summer school, in which case they pay more). So Hartwick hasn’t invented a more fuel-efficient car. It’s just selling the same cars at  a 25 percent discount. The article cites a few other colleges that have similar programs, also for a small number of students (Hartwick enrolled 20 this year.)

There’s nothing unusual about an organization selling some of its services at a discount. Maybe you do it because you have extra capacity that you’d have paid for anyway, maybe because you can attract more customers and still make a profit (albeit a smaller one), maybe it’s good publicity and gets you on the cover of Newsweek. But there’s no way a university is going to give everyone a 25 percent discount, or even most students. This is like saying “Wouldn’t it be great if students could get the same education for 25 percent less money!” It would be–but it’s not going to happen, at least not if the university continues (as Hartwick has) to produce those credits in the same way. As Alexander notes, “there are no changes in the number of courses professors teach or in their pay.” That costs money, which can’t be generated out of thin air.

Moreover, it’s not like this is actually a free-and-clear 25 percent savings for students. It takes time to learn. If students are spending more time learning, as they must to earn 40 credits per year instead of 30, then they’re spending less time doing other things, like working and engaging in extra-curricular activities. Maybe that’s a net positive trade-off, but it’s not free.

Alternatively, one could start handing out credentials called “Bachelor’s degrees” to students who have earned 90 credits. There’s some precedent, I suppose, in that there are both one- and two-year Masters degree programs. (I’ve always thought this was weird, actually. I spent two years in grad school and learned a bunch of useful stuff in the second year.) But I suspect the markets for jobs and graduate programs would catch on and people would start asking for a little more information about how many credits were earned, which would defeat the whole purpose, which is to say “Wouldn’t it be great if students could take 90 credits and earn a degree that signifies 120 credits?” The answer to which is, no — that’s just a scheme to screw over the students who actually earned 120 credits.

There are smarter ways to think about this issue. One is that universities really could reduce their per-credit hour costs of instruction, but only if they’re willing to use technology and embrace some radically different modes of learning.  The other is that we should stop basing credentials on time–even credits are actually credit hours, time spent in proximity to an instructor. Instead, we should base credentials of how much students have learned on some actual, verifiable evidence of how much students have learned. Hold learning constant and let time vary, instead of, as is current practice, the other way around. It’s obviously not the case that every disparate course of study requires precisely the same amount of learning–why put the degree cart before the learning horse?

I also can’t let this pass:

Congress, acting with the best of intentions, has tried to help students with college costs through Pell Grants and other forms of tuition support. But some of their fixes have made the problem worse. The stack of congressional regulations governing federal student grants and loans now stands twice as tall as I do. One college president lamented to me that filling out these forms consumes 7 percent of every tuition dollar.’

I’m sure this is true, in the sense that one college president really did say this to Senator Alexander. I’m also sure the seven percent number is total fiction. The University of Tennessee, for example, takes in more than $180 million in tuition revenue per year, and that’s not counting state subsidies that effectively replace foregone tuition dollars.  Does Alexander really believe the university spends $12 million per year filling out financial aid forms? Does he know that forms aren’t filled out by people feeding sheets of paper into typewriters anymore? Perhaps “filling out forms” is a euphemism for the larger expense of “complying with regulations,” but surely Alexander would concede that many administrative expenses serve actual valuable purposes, such as keeping track of how tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are used every year. The idea that the rising cost of college is in any significant way driven by the cost of federal regulatory compliance is completely bogus; it’s like we don’t live in an era where huge advances in information technology have made the cost of storing, processing, and transmitting information exponentially cheaper.