In a recently published opinion piece in ARCHITECT, Michael Armstrong, CEO of the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, called on architecture schools to join the conversation about creating a four-year professional degree. “Now the academy needs to do its part,” he wrote. With “the pandemic and the overdue calls for social justice … there is an opportunity to seize the moment and embrace meaningful change.”
As the organization whose members include every accredited professional degree program in the United States and Canada, we at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture welcome the invitation to make meaningful change to increase access to architectural education and jobs in the profession. However, we find the arguments in Armstrong’s article, and in a recent Archinect interview with NCARB’s president and first vice president, oversimplified and too narrow.
The idea that less time enrolled in school equals less debt for students may seem like a powerful argument on the surface, but it avoids consequences that we do not see NCARB or the profession ready to mitigate. A four-year professional degree will produce graduates who are less prepared for a rapidly changing profession, and it will reinforce the unequal prospects they already face in the workforce by limiting opportunities for advancement after graduation.
We are concerned that a condensed professional curriculum will focus on courses that provide job-ready skills at the expense of courses that prepare students for knowledge-based challenges related to climate change, human health, urbanization, and resource depletion. Students with more education will have the upper hand when it comes to acquiring the advanced skills required of future leaders. This education gap will only increase the inequalities in opportunity that contribute to the lack of racial and ethnic diversity within the profession.
As noted in ACSA’s recent article "Where Are My People? Black in Architecture," the proportion of Black students in four-year pre-professional architecture programs is twice as high (10 percent) as the proportion of Black students in programs accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (five percent). A four-year professional degree would meet the current NCARB education requirement, but absent any other changes in the profession, we question whether it would provide graduates the same opportunities to become principals or design leaders in firms.
A four-year professional degree may also disadvantage students who arrive at college with remedial needs in writing, mathematics, and the arts. A shorter degree that covers the same scope of learning in fewer credit hours cannot effectively serve these students and will likely reduce their prospects of success through and beyond college.
Even if a four-year degree does funnel more students into the pipeline, they will still face a significant obstacle: completing NCARB’s Architect Experience Program. Research from NCARB and the National Organization of Minority Architects, as well as from AIA San Francisco’s 2016 Equity in Architecture survey, shows that designers who are women and/or Black, Indigenous/Native, or other people of color encounter more barriers to licensure and advancement into positions of firm leadership than white males, including having difficulty finding a firm to support their progress through AXP. According to NCARB, the average time from the start of college to licensure has decreased but still averages 12.7 years. For a B.Arch or an M.Arch graduate, more than half of those years are spent earning AXP hours that total slightly less than two years of full-time employment.
Students looking ahead to the challenges of the coming decades envision a different future for themselves than working six to seven years before being deemed full members of the profession. What ACSA hears from our member schools is that students want to do their part to make an impact on society—now. They want to address racial equity—now. They want to address climate change—now. They want to work with other disciplines to solve problems—now. Less preparation won’t provide them with the opportunity to “seize the moment and embrace meaningful change.”
This is what NCARB’s board of directors misses in calling on higher education to do its part. Students now find more flexibility in higher education than ever before, with multiple architecture degrees (associate’s, four-year bachelor’s, B.Arch, M.Arch, D.Arch, and Ph.D) providing different departure points into a variety of jobs. Licensure remains an essential way the profession contributes to society, but architecture schools must also embrace a broader vision for how best to equip students from varied backgrounds and education levels for the future, including practice in firms of equally varied sizes and contexts.
This is why last December we recommended a profession-wide discussion to define levels of knowledge and skill-based expectations for graduates of every level of architectural education. Presently all three NAAB-accredited degrees (B.Arch, M.Arch, and D.Arch) satisfy the educational requirement to become a licensed architect. No other qualitative or quantitative distinctions exist that differentiate between the skills and knowledge of graduates who earn a B.Arch in five years or a D.Arch in seven. Having a clear understanding between educators and practitioners about what knowledge and skills each degree provides would go a long way to help students and their parents make informed choices about which degree to pursue and the opportunities it will provide in the profession.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
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