{"title":"Beyond Credit Hours: Accreditation, Curriculum Integration, and Content Preservation in Professional Degrees","short":"Beyond Credit Hours","subtitle":"Accreditation, Curriculum Integration, and Content Preservation in Professional Degrees","rqs":[{"id":"RQ1","text":"How do general education and accreditation requirements shape the feasibility of reduced-credit professional degrees across different regulatory environments?"},{"id":"RQ2","text":"How do course consolidation and the integration of general and professional education interact to expand curriculum feasibility while retaining identified professional topics?"},{"id":"RQ3","text":"How does incorporating documented course content change the estimated feasibility of shorter professional degrees?"}],"keywords":"reduced-credit degrees; professional education; curriculum integration; accreditation; general education; curriculum optimization","australia":true,"figures":{"Figure_geography":{"number":1,"caption":"Geographic variation in 90-credit degree feasibility: a) state requirements; b) degree feasibility and national shares"},"Figure_integration":{"number":2,"caption":"Observed patterns of curriculum integration: a) professional topics taught together or separately across programs; b) general education subjects appearing in construction coursework and business subjects taught separately"},"Figure_scenarios":{"number":3,"caption":"Degree feasibility across curriculum scenarios"},"Figure_redesign":{"number":4,"caption":"Credit reduction in a representative program. Alternative curriculum designs illustrate changes in general education, course integration, and professional credit requirements. Totals represent modeled minimum credits."}},"supplement_figures":{"S1":{"caption":"Hypothetical financial thresholds of a 90-credit degree under stated assumptions, not observed outcomes: a) modeled net benefit per graduate, in present value at a 3% discount rate over a 40-year career, against an assumed annual pay penalty; lines give the median and bands the middle half of 168 programs; b) the share of new students a 90-credit cohort would need for the institution to break even, median and middle half, by the cost of a removed credit","short":"Hypothetical financial thresholds of a 90-credit degree under stated assumptions, not observed outcomes"},"S2":{"caption":"AI task exposure and credits by construction course group: a) exposure of the tasks each group’s courses train, from an external rating of tasks (Eloundou et al., 2024), groups that share a content type sharing one value; b) mean credits per program today across the 81 modeled programs. Exposure describes the tasks a course trains; it is not evidence that a course can be shortened or merged","short":"AI task exposure and credits by construction course group"}}}