photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

KU's Lippincott Hall is pictured on April 14, 2023.

Getting a four-year degree at the University of Kansas soon may require students to spend a lot less time at KU.

Instead, students might be able to take more than half of their classes at community colleges and still graduate with a KU degree, thanks to changes approved Wednesday by the Kansas Board of Regents.

The degree requirement changes apply to KU and the other five Regents institutions — Kansas State, Wichita State, Emporia State, Fort Hays State and Pittsburg State — and are focused on making college degrees more attainable for more people.

“This certainly works towards the board’s vision of reducing costs for students,” Daniel Archer, vice president of academic affairs for the Regents, said at Wednesday’s board meeting.

Tuition rates at community colleges generally are much cheaper than those at KU and other four-year universities in the state. However, for years KU and the other Regents universities generally would not allow a student to transfer more than 60 credit hours from a community college to a four-year degree.

Under the new system, up to 75 credit hours from community colleges can be eligible for transfer to KU and the other universities. Most four-year degree programs have a total of 120 credit hours, meaning more than 60% of a degree’s classes can theoretically be taken at the community college level.

It is a move that KU has pushed for and helped implement. In 2019, KU received approval to begin a pilot project that would accept greater numbers of community college credits for degree programs offered at its Edwards Campus in Overland Park. However, the program was limited to community college credits from select community colleges in the Kansas City area.

“The pilot went really well,” Archer said. “Students who participated in the pilot program did just as well students who did not.”

By 2022, KU was interested in expanding the program to include more community colleges. The Regents allowed that change for KU and the other Regents universities, but said each university would have to negotiate a transfer agreement with each community college that it intended to work with.

On Wednesday, the Regents unanimously agreed to eliminate that requirement for a transfer agreement with community colleges. Archer said the transfer agreements were proving to be time consuming and created limitations on how many schools actually could participate. Now, the transfer option essentially will be open to students at any accredited community college.

However, none of this means it will always be feasible for students to take more than half their classes at a community college. Archer said some programs — he mentioned engineering as an example — require so many upper-level classes for graduation that it would be difficult to find a community college that offered all those courses. In that case, students likely would still be taking the majority of their classes at the four-year institution.

“This won’t work for every program, but there are a lot of programs that have flexibility or a lot of electives, and this will work well for those programs,” Archer said.

While the degree requirement changes might mean students spend less time enrolled at KU, they also might produce more overall students enrolling at the university. KU and other universities have been looking for new ways to increase the number of people seeking degrees. Universities nationwide are facing a “demographic cliff,” where the population of traditional college-age students has declined significantly due to trends over the past two decades of decreasing family sizes.

In other business, the Regents:

• Unanimously approved updated five-year capital improvement plans for each of the Regents universities. As the Journal-World reported, KU’s new CIP included the addition of a $40 million project to move the KU law school into a renovated Lippincott Hall along Jayhawk Boulevard, $1.2 million to demolish two towers that are part of the Jayhawker Towers apartment complex, and $2 million to renovate the Kansas Geological Survey building on KU’s West Campus.