Spend any amount of time looking at the marketing for graduate programs and you will start to notice a pattern.
Finish your degree in one year. Earn your master’s in 12 months. Fast-track your career. Get the credential you need sooner.
I understand the appeal. Time matters, particularly for working professionals. Graduate school requires an investment of money, energy, and hours that could be spent somewhere else. For some students, completing a degree as quickly as possible makes perfect sense.
But overseeing an online graduate program has made me wonder whether we have started to equate speed with value a little too easily.
I keep a close eye on graduate program marketing, particularly in fields related to communication, media, marketing, and journalism. I also oversee the marketing of our own online graduate programs. So I understand why speed makes such an attractive selling point. Prospective students want to know how long a degree will take, and “one year” is a wonderfully simple answer.
Our prospective students ask the same question all the time: How quickly can I finish?
Our master’s program is designed so that students can comfortably complete it in about two years by taking two courses per semester. Students who want to move faster can. Students who need or want to move more slowly can do that, too.
What interests me is what they actually choose to do.
On our recent graduation survey, 88% of respondents completed their master’s degree within eight semesters, or nearly three years. Given the opportunity to complete the degree more quickly, many did not.
At the same time, our retention, graduation, satisfaction, and other student outcome measures are very strong, generally above 90%.
I want to be careful about what I make of that.
Those numbers don’t demonstrate that taking longer produces better outcomes. They don’t tell us that students in accelerated programs learn less. And they certainly aren’t an argument that a one-year master’s degree is somehow a lesser degree.
Accelerated programs can be exactly right for some students. Someone may already have significant professional experience and need additional knowledge or a credential to move into a new role. Another student may have the ability to devote substantial time to graduate study for a year and want to make that investment intensely. For someone else, reducing the amount of time spent paying tuition or balancing school with other responsibilities may be enormously important.
There is nothing inherently better about taking longer.
But watching our students has made me curious about something else: If students tell us they want speed but don’t necessarily choose speed once they enroll, what exactly are they optimizing for?
Maybe they are simply busy. Our students are working professionals with jobs, families, and responsibilities that don’t disappear when a semester begins.
But I wonder whether there is more happening.
A professional graduate student might learn a new approach to audience research in October and use it at work in November. Something succeeds. Something else doesn’t. A few months later, that experience follows the student into another course, where a new faculty member or classmate causes them to think about it differently.
Then they take another idea back to work.
That cycle can repeat for two or three years.
We tend to think about graduate education in terms of courses, credits, semesters, and degrees. But for working professionals, some of the learning may happen in the spaces between those things.
Time allows students to apply what they are learning. It allows professional experiences to become part of their education. It allows relationships with classmates and faculty to develop. It gives students opportunities to encounter ideas, try them, reconsider them, and return with better questions.
How much is that worth?
I don’t know.
And that is precisely what interests me.
I don’t know that three years is better than two. I don’t know that two years is better than one. I don’t know whether students who move through graduate school more slowly learn more, build stronger professional networks, experience greater career growth, or feel more connected to their programs.
Those are empirical questions, and I would be interested in seeing more research that answers them.
But I do think they are questions worth asking, particularly as universities compete increasingly on speed.
Perhaps part of the issue is that time-to-degree is extraordinarily easy to market.
“Earn your master’s in 12 months” fits nicely on an advertisement.
“Spend enough time with us to develop relationships, test ideas in your professional life, reconsider what you think you know, and gradually become better at what you do” is a little harder to fit on a banner ad.
Yet the second promise may be closer to what many students actually want from graduate education.
There is also an interesting distinction between what prospective students say they want and how enrolled students behave. Of course prospective students ask how quickly they can finish. It is a completely reasonable question. They are trying to understand the commitment they are considering.
But perhaps “How quickly can I finish?” isn’t always the same as “I want to finish as quickly as possible.”
Those are different statements.
The first is about understanding the boundaries of an investment. The second is about maximizing speed.
Our students’ behavior has made me wonder whether universities sometimes confuse the two.
Maybe prospective students want to know that they can finish quickly while also wanting permission to find a pace that works for their lives. Maybe flexibility itself is more valuable than acceleration. Maybe the ideal graduate program isn’t necessarily the one that gets everyone through fastest, but the one that allows different students to move at the pace that makes sense for them.
And perhaps we should think differently about how we talk about time when we market graduate education.
We should absolutely tell students how quickly a degree can be completed. For some students, that information may determine whether graduate school is possible at all.
But we might also tell them what they can gain from the time they spend with us.
Because the goal of graduate education isn’t simply to reach the end.
The credential matters. Career advancement matters. Efficiency matters. Time and money certainly matter.
But so do the experiences between enrollment and graduation: the ideas students encounter, the people they meet, the things they try, the mistakes they make, the ways their professional practice changes, and the person who eventually walks away with that credential.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t only be:
How quickly can I earn this degree?
Maybe we should also be helping students ask:
What do I want to get out of the time I spend earning it?