Friday morning often carries a familiar weight; one more long push before the weekend finally arrives. But what if that feeling didn’t have to exist at all?

In recent years, the world has seen the rise of the four-day workweek, giving employees an extra day of the weekend to create a better work-life balance. The trend has risen primarily across the pond in European nations, while the United States has dragged its feet on the idea. Perhaps little ol’ Clemson could be the nation’s leader in creating a new norm.

Numerous studies have been conducted regarding the effects of a four-day workweek, with one study published by Nature Human Behaviour finding increases in job satisfaction, productivity, mental health and a reduction in burnout.

The study took place over a six-month period across 141 companies in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom. At the end of the trial, more than 90% of companies opted to keep the four-day workweek, which indicates the companies benefited alongside the employees.

This study could similarly be applied to a college week, giving students and faculty one less day of classes and an extra day to focus solely on their work or an additional day of the weekend. There is a caveat, though.

Any student who has registered for classes knows just how quickly they fill up, whether it’s a Tuesday-Thursday class or a Monday-Wednesday-Friday class. To cut an entire day from the school week, many classes would likely have to either be pushed online or scrapped altogether, with neither idea likely being all that popular.

A solution to this could be to keep five days but make all classes 75 minutes. This would open the possibility of three class blocks: Monday-Wednesday, Tuesday-Thursday and Wednesday-Friday. While it would not guarantee that students would have only four days of classes, it would greatly increase the chances of it.

For that option to work, some classes would likely still need to be pushed online to accommodate the rooms taken up by an extra 25 minutes in each class, but not nearly as many as would be needed if an entire day were taken away.

That extra 25 minutes in class, though, would be another point of contention for some students, who would argue that the 75-minute, two-day classes feel much more drawn out than the 50-minute, three-day classes. My counter to that argument is simply that those classes feel so much longer because students are more used to the shorter classes.

If you have class five days a week, three of those are spent in 50-minute classes, while only two are spent in 75-minute classes. With more days of the shorter class periods, it only makes sense that the other classes would feel much longer.

However, if two-day, 75-minute classes become the norm, that comparison will no longer be there, and students would likely feel indifferent about the change after becoming accustomed to it. Add in the gain of an extra day to be able to do something beyond the classroom, and students and faculty would be able to experience similar gains in mental health that employees in the aforementioned study reported.

While a four-day school week could be beneficial for all involved, there are a lot of hoops that would have to be jumped through in order to make it work. However, with a little flexibility, it might just be possible.

Nathan Inman is a junior sports communication major from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Nathan can be reached at [email protected].