Last week brought two significant events in the annals of the three-year bachelor’s degree. First, the president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut announced a new initiative to encourage the three-year degree on his campus. Second, Hartwick College in upstate New York graduated its first three-year class of a dozen students.

Hartwick College. (Courtesy of Hartwick College) The three-year degree holds great promise as a solution to several problems vexing higher education.

One is affordability. At Wesleyan, the annual sticker price is $58,232, although the average student receiving grant aid pays only $21,854. A three-year degree eliminates most or all of that fourth-year tuition and potentially puts the student in the job market a year early.

Another is attainment. President Obama wants the nation to regain the world lead in college attainment (the share of adults with degrees) by 2020. A three-year degree accelerates the pace of completion and opens more seats in the higher-education pipeline. Plus, it’s well-documented that students who remain in college longer stand a progressively worse chance of ever graduating.

With the recent explosion of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate study, the time would seem ripe for a three-year BA. Lots of students now enter college with one or two semesters of college credit already completed.

Leaders of the University of Virginia are noting the retirement of Yoke San Reynolds, their vice president and chief financial officer, who is credited with generating savings for the university that will total as much as $1 billion in coming years.

Yoke San Reynolds and husband Bruce Reynolds. (University of Virginia) Since joining U-Va. in 2001, Reynolds, 68, has saved the institution between $738 million and $1 billion through lower borrowing costs, higher interest earnings and increased revenue from the federal government. Her efforts have helped the university through an uncommonly austere decade.

“She is so creative in her approach,” said Pat Lampkin, vice president and chief student affairs officer at U-Va., in a news release. “She has quietly made a huge impact on the financial structure at the university, and I don’t think many people know the breadth of her contributions.”

Here is a guest post by Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University.

As I prepare for my commencement speech this year, I remember vividly when I first realized that I could graduate college in three years rather than four. As a freshman, I was certainly in no hurry to leave. Indeed, I loved being in college: I was excited by the combination of freedom and opportunity to work hard on subjects I loved with faculty I admired. I didn’t want to leave – even for vacations!

Wesleyan University’s 2010 Commencement. (Bill Burkhart) But I realized that graduating in three years would save my family lots of money. Neither of my parents had attended college, and they had sacrificed for years to send my brother and me to the schools of our choice. My father was a furrier, and my mother had given up a promising singing career to raise us (while earning money selling clothes in our basement). They were proud that they were able to afford good colleges for us, and they would never have asked me to skip a year.

Members of the Howard University chapter of Engineers Without Borders traveled to Choimim, Kenya, with two Howard professors to enhance water quality and quantity. Here, Kerry-Ann Hamilton, director of strategic communications and marketing at Howard, chronicles their travels.

A farmer in Choimim, Kenya, tills the soil at dawn. (Kerry-Ann Hamilton - HOWARD UNIVERSITY) Choimim, located 200 miles from Nairobi, is covered with lush tea fields and red clay soil.  Most villagers are subsistence farmers, and others raise cattle, mainly cows. In nearby Nandi Hills, scores of migrant tea workers live together in modest homes built close to the factories.

The women and young girls of Choimim village, a close-knit community in Nandi Hills, walk an average of three miles to gather water, and some traverse up and down a 62-foot hill to get water from the river. Some spend three to four hours daily fetching water for their homes. Because of poor water and sanitation, the villagers also suffer from a number of preventable waterborne illnesses such as cholera, diarrhea and typhoid.  

The Howard Chapter of Engineers Without Borders is here for two weeks, working to improve water quality for this rural community. 

A story in today’s Post talks about a generational decline in study time, the number of weekly hours college students devote to actual study. Since the 1960s, the weekly total has dipped from 24 to about 15. College has become, in effect, a part-time job.

A graduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of academia’s most studious institutions. (AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, Craig Schreiner)Students say they are more efficient than before, and adults say they are busier - - distracted by work, dependent care and long commutes. Researchers who track study time say those things account for only part of the decline. Even at the nation’s most selective schools, where few such distractions exist, the average student logs only about 18 hours in weekly study.

Here are five schools - - not all elite, and not all private - - where students spent 18 hours or more in weekly study. That means the schools, two of which are in Virginia, are probably among the top 10 percent of colleges nationally in weekly study time, as measured by the National Survey of Student Engagement, the source of the study-time data.