Staffed Up is a monthly series examining school staffing best practices and solutions for teacher recruitment and retention.
As more states and colleges explore the feasibility of three-year bachelor’s degree programs, Arizona State University is launching such a program in October for students aiming to be elementary or special education teachers.
The new three-year pathways were designed to remove financial barriers for students aspiring to enter the teaching profession, said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. The programs are available through both in-person and online courses.
“People are looking for different options,” Basile said. Within a few weeks of announcing the program in August, ASU had received about 130 applications, Basile said.
The new pathways come as teacher shortages persist in certain areas, particularly for special education, high-need schools and rural communities, she said.
Addressing financial barriers
Nationally, higher education costs have jumped by nearly 50% within the past two decades, according to a February 2025 analysis of federal data by the Learning Policy Institute. In 2020, student loans averaged $29,250 to complete an education bachelor’s degree, LPI found.
In the 2020-21 school year, about 60% of teachers — or about 2.1 million teachers — took out student loans, LPI said. Roughly 37% of all teachers — or 1.3 million educators — are still paying off their student loans.
“In order to build and maintain a well-prepared, stable, and diverse teacher workforce, it is important to reduce the barriers related to entering and staying in the profession,” the LPI report said. “The consequences of student loan borrowing and repayment could contribute to already challenging working conditions in the profession, which in turn can influence attrition and teacher shortages.”
Teacher pay nationwide averaged $74,495 in the 2024-25 school year, according to an April report from the National Education Association. Still, the nation’s largest teacher’s union found that educators’ salaries are struggling to keep up with inflation, and that pay has actually dropped 5% over the last decade when adjusted for inflation.
For other teacher prep programs considering three-year degree pathways, Basile said it’s critical to find ways to reduce barriers and create flexibility while maintaining high-quality course offerings. Those can include ensuring students are paid for clinical teaching experiences through apprenticeship programs, or helping paraprofessionals earn a degree while continuing their work, she said.
“They’ve got to put food on the table first,” Basile said. “That piece is really important.”
These challenges persist as fewer students are pursuing education degrees. The number of students enrolled in teacher prep programs at higher education institutions dropped notably by 33%, from 611,296 to 407,556, between the 2012-13 and 2022-23 school years, according to an October 2025 analysis of federal data by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
Concerns raised over three-year degrees
While some see three-year degrees as one solution to college affordability and workforce shortages, others are skeptical.
After two institutions in Massachusetts announced three-year degree programs in fields such as criminal justice and healthcare administration in June, immediate criticism came in a joint statement from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson.
Weingarten and Wolfson said the move can “create the illusion of reducing costs, but it ignores the root causes of skyrocketing higher education tuition.” To make higher education affordable for all, federal and state student aid needs to be bolstered, they said.
Bachelor’s degrees, they said, should not be solely designed to achieve the “fastest possible route to the labor market.”
“Compressing or reducing the curriculum threatens to narrow students' education at precisely the moment when society needs graduates with stronger critical thinking, communication skills, scientific literacy, and civic understanding,” Weingarten and Wolfson said.
ASU’s strategy for boosting recruitment, retention
ASU, in its August announcement, said its three-year education degrees are believed to be the first of their kind at a public university. The university is also considering expanding three-year offerings to other fields beyond teaching.
Designing a 90-credit program — as opposed to the standard 120-credit, four-year program — means finding redundancies and getting creative with building out courses and content, Basile said. Still, a university has to ensure that the most important components of a program remain. In the case of education programs, she said, that should include on-the-job learning.
“This is really a design challenge,” Basile said. “This isn’t just ‘Oh, we just went in and willy-nilly took out 30 credits.’”
The program also helps get students into their careers and their own classrooms sooner, she said.
At the same time, Basile said it’s equally important to ensure retention strategies are in place to keep those teachers in the classroom.
She pointed to one way ASU is trying to retain teachers through its education college's Next Education Workforce model, a school staffing initiative developed by the Mary Lou Fulton College. During the 2025-26 school year, ASU partnered with 128 schools to help them launch their own team-based staffing models.
The approach allows several teachers to work together across multiple learning spaces rather than the traditional one teacher per classroom.
The Next Education model, Basile said, aims to use strategic staffing to “stop the isolation and the inflexible nature of teaching and build teams.” Early research has revealed that teachers are happier and retention rates are higher when schools implement ASU’s staffing model, she said.
