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Jael Goode has always enjoyed offering hospitality to those around her—even if that’s not what she called it.

The Virginia native grew up helping her father, a pastor, foster a welcoming environment in their church. She’d help plan events like cookouts to feed unhoused people in their community or small dinners for congregation members after worship services. 

“I’ve always been in a hospitality environment,” she said. “I didn’t know at first that it was hospitality, but I knew I loved doing it and being a part of it.”

After graduating from high school, Goode, now 20, decided to apply that passion to earning her associate’s degree in culinary arts and restaurant management. But after completing that program, she realized that she wanted “a more broad understanding of what hospitality was, not just limited to food and beverage.” A degree in hospitality management, Goode thought, would do the trick.

A quick Google search put Charlotte’s Johnson & Wales University on her radar. The private college—which operates its main campus in Providence, Rhode Island, but has a smaller location in the Queen City—brands itself as dedicated to hands-on experience. The university is best known for its culinary programs, but it also offers more than 50 majors in disciplines including business, technology, health sciences, and hospitality.

This fall, the Charlotte campus’s hospitality management major offers a unique draw: Students can earn their Bachelor of Science in three years instead of the traditional four. That means completing 90 credit hours instead of the usual 120. 

Johnson & Wales says the in-person, reduced-credit program is the first in the Southeast. The university also started the nation’s first in-person three-year undergraduate programs, including one in hospitality management, at its Providence campus last fall. Some of the university’s accelerated degrees are also available online.

Johnson & Wales says Charlotte is a good fit for its accelerated hospitality management degree because the city is hosting major events and attracting more tourists. (Kirby Lee via AP)

More than 100 students are enrolled in a three-year degree program across both Johnson & Wales campuses and online. Goode is one of eight in the new three-year hospitality program at the Charlotte campus, which has a student body of about 1,300.

Three-year bachelor’s degrees are one of the hottest trends in higher education right now. Universities nationwide are exploring whether to offer accelerated pathways as students worry about college costs and how to land good-paying jobs after graduation. A majority of schools in the UNC System submitted ideas for potential programs this spring. 

Once skeptical of reduced-credit undergraduate programs, every accrediting agency in the U.S. has changed its regulations in recent years to allow them, according to Inside Higher Ed. Still, most accreditors view the programs as experimental pilots. Johnson & Wales’ agency, the New England Commission of Higher Education, is limiting its schools to offering no more than five three-year degrees “until evidence of their effectiveness is more widely available,” and they have to be clearly differentiated from their four-year counterparts.

The degrees have their critics. The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers in June blasted the programs, saying they promote “speed over essential intellectual development.”

“This move may initially create the illusion of reducing costs, but it ignores the root causes of skyrocketing higher education tuition,” the joint statement read. “A bachelor’s degree should both prepare students for the workforce and provide them with deep learning, broad intellectual development, and sustained engagement with faculty and peers—not simply the fastest possible route to the labor market.”

Per The Hechinger Report, no students have graduated with a three-year degree yet, making it difficult to determine their success. Johnson & Wales leaders say their programs aren’t compromising quality. Provost Rich Wiscott told The Assembly that students who enrolled in the university’s three-year programs at the Providence campus last fall are faring the same as or slightly better than their four-year counterparts on metrics like class attendance, course grades, and staying enrolled from semester to semester. 

Students in the three-year degrees take the same general education and major courses as they would in the four-year programs, which Wiscott said provides “a foundation for productivity and involvement in civic life and community life.” But they take few or no elective courses. They can also earn credit for workplace experience in their field.

Otherwise, the students’ experiences are largely the same as their traditional classmates. Most live on campus and can participate in clubs, go to school events, and play varsity sports for the school’s NCAA Division III teams. They can also study abroad, though generally only in the summer due to the programs’ accelerated timelines. And like any student who meets the income requirements, they are eligible to receive free or reduced tuition through the JWU Pledge.

Rick Mathieu, left, president of the Charlotte campus of Johnson & Wales University, walks on campus. He says three-year degrees give the school a new way to prepare students for their careers. (Courtesy of Johnson & Wales)

School officials don’t see the programs as a wholesale replacement for traditional four-year degrees. They believe it is an attractive option for students who have a firm idea of the industry they’d like to work in—and want to get in fast.

“Some folks who go to college want to explore,” said Rick Mathieu, president of the Charlotte campus. “I don’t think the three-year program is necessarily geared for that person.”

So far, it’s common for three-year degree programs across the country to focus on professional fields as opposed to majors in the humanities or sciences, said Bob Zemsky, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and a cofounder of the College-in-3 Exchange, an organization of schools that offer or want to start shortened degrees. 

Johnson & Wales’ accreditor mandates that any three-year degrees its schools offer “have an applied or career-focused/workforce orientation.” The UNC System asked its schools to articulate how three-year degrees would align with North Carolina’s “critical employment needs,” and the system’s accreditor says the programs should “create a more direct and efficient path for students to complete bachelor’s degrees in high need career-focused fields.”

Zemsky said he thinks the trend is also responsive to students’ interests, noting that a declining number are majoring in the humanities. 

A reduced-credit degree in hospitality management was a natural fit for the Charlotte campus, Mathieu said, with the city growing as a tourist destination and hosting more major events. He said the university works closely with organizations like the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority to connect students to job opportunities while they’re earning their degrees and after they graduate. 

“Hospitality is a big deal in Charlotte,” he said. “We were really excited to bring a three-year program to market, which really makes sense in hospitality because it’s a field where people can work while they’re going to school.”

Goode said the shortened program appealed to her because she could build on her culinary credential and get on a fast track to her dream job of directing hospitality for a luxury hotel after she graduates in 2029. 

A courtyard on the Charlotte campus of Johnson & Wales University. (Courtesy of Johnson & Wales)

“The faster, the better that I can get into the field,” Goode said.

Whether students land jobs in their fields at the same rates and with similar salaries to their four-year counterparts will be the ultimate “demonstration of success” for the three-year programs, Wiscott said. Currently, the university’s accreditor says that schools must inform students at the outset that some employers and graduate schools may not accept reduced-credit degrees.

Johnson & Wales is confident that its students will succeed. Wiscott said that when the university surveyed more than two dozen employers that commonly hire Johnson & Wales graduates and asked whether they would hire three-year graduates, “they were unanimously in support of this.” He noted that fewer than 10% of Johnson & Wales students seek graduate degrees immediately after completing their undergraduate studies, but the university nonetheless changed its policies to accept three-year bachelor’s degrees from students entering the university’s graduate programs. Other universities may follow suit as three-year programs expand, per College-in-3.

Wiscott said the university expects a site visit from its accrediting agency next year to evaluate how students are faring in the shortened programs. Depending on the evaluation’s outcome, Johnson & Wales could gain approval to expand its portfolio of three-year degrees. Wiscott suggested business and psychology as promising possibilities, though he noted that no decision had been made and that additional programs would be considered based on workforce needs and students’ interest.

To Mathieu, the programs are simply a new flavor of what Johnson & Wales has long sought to do: prepare students for their careers.

“We have an over 100-year tradition of focusing on that,” he said, “and it just happens to be more timely than ever.”

Korie Dean is a higher education reporter for The Assembly and co-anchor of our weekly higher education newsletter, The Quad. She previously worked at The News & Observer, where she covered higher ed as part of the state government and politics team. She grew up in Efland and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill.