A 3-year college?

No links, just a random thought that's been rattling around for awhile. I've been wondering how to kill two birds with one stone.

First, the "Education Myths" book argues that professors in general are paid better than engineers on an hourly rate (even taking into account work at home, etc.) and that the real problem in their annual salary is that they're only being paid for 9 months of work. Second, our new educational structures (on-line, year-round, cohort focused, patchwork, etc.) don't require that we follow an agricultural calendar of long summers off.

So, why not develop and market a 3-year undergraduate experience with a combination of on-line, internship, off-campus, and mission-trip opportunities over the summer? The faculty would be employed on a full-year basis supporting one of the above programs and doing alternative summer projects (administrative, teaching, research).

Admittedly, this notion has been around a long time, going back to Harvard's founding (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0161-956X(197407)51%3A4%3C269%3ATTDAMO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8) and continuing with much of the current English, Indian, and maybe now even European educational systems (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i13/13a04504.htm). I also understand that there are lots of logistical hurdles with such an idea, beginning with the possibility that students just aren't interested in such a thing, but the concept just seems to me to make too much sense and is being adopted so many other places around the world not to be piloted somewhere here in the U.S. (East Carolina being the only American institution I could find who is trying this - http://www.ecu.edu/threeyeardegree/).