The Board of Higher Education is moving ahead with steps to allow public and private colleges and universities in Massachusetts to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees, reducing the typical 120-credit requirement.

The Department of Higher Education has internally circulated draft regulations, which will be shared with board members on Wednesday for the next step of internal review. The board plans to vote late summer or early fall about putting the draft out for public comment, after which they would take a potential final vote on whether to allow higher ed institutions to submit proposals to the board to offer reduced-credit bachelor’s degrees.

To earn a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree, students are required to take and pay for 120 credits. An associate’s degree, or a two-year degree, is 60 credits. The three-year bachelor’s programs which some universities around the country are beginning to offer, are sub-120 credits — students will graduate with the same degree as those who attend school for four years, but they’ll have completed fewer credit hours to do so.

The New England Commission of Higher Education, an institutional accreditor for most of the private and public colleges in New England, gave a green light last year to Merrimack College in North Andover to pilot a three-year program focused on non-licensure majors, like business, health science, physics and liberal arts degrees.

Merrimack College announced in 2022 that it was exploring three-year degree programs.

“We’ve heard interest from both public and private colleges explicitly and not limited to just that 90-credit idea that we first heard about, really, from Merrimack and a group of other colleges,” said BHE Chair Chris Gabrieli.

The regulations wouldn’t automatically allow these programs, Gabrieli said, just enable colleges and universities to submit proposals for potential approval to the board.