están estudiando en la universidad hace menos de 3 años

14:05 Oct 10, 2018 

thanks for your explanation, Charles. TechLawDC, nice to have your opinion too.

13:37 Oct 10, 2018 

"Less than" is correct; "fewer than" is somewhat didactic.
"Less than" is a contraction for "a period less than". The subject here is a continuously variable quantity, namely time; it is not an integer quantity such as a number of products. Anyone who says otherwise is not knowledgeable in idiomatic English.

13:22 Oct 10, 2018 

I am not sure whether "hace" for "desde hace" is correct. I would say it's very unusual, at least in peninsular Spanish. My point was simply that it does occur, that "hace" does mean "desde hace" here, and that this is not an isolated instance or a typo.

On "less than/fewer than": you could argue that if "menos de 3 años" means a number of years lower than 3 (i.e. 1 year or 2 years), then it should be "fewer than three years". To put it another way, "fewer than 3 years" would mean for a number of (whole) years lower than 3. However, if it means for a period of time less than three years (e.g. 2 years 11 months), then "fewer than" would be wrong; it would have to be "less than", because "3 years" would then denote the duration of a single period of time; it would not be strictly numerical.

In any case, even if it meant the former (1 year or 2 years), many people would not consider "less than 3 years" wrong nowadays. I was taught at school that you can't use "less than" with a number, but only "fewer than", but that was a long time ago, and this rule is nowadays widely disregarded (though many people do still observe it).

13:11 Oct 10, 2018 

I don't think it's correct to omit the "desde", but in any case the meaning is the same like Jennifer says. by the way, is it "less than" and not "fewer"? Maybe a stupid question, but I ask it anyway. I may be stupid but I'm brave. :-)

06:21 Oct 10, 2018 

"Están estudiando en la universidad hace menos de 3 años" is not ambiguous. It means that they are currently studying at the university and have been doing so for less than 3 years. The possible ambiguity of "años" does not concern us here.

"Hace" + period of time, with a verb in the present, is sometimes used as a variant of "desde hace", which is standard. So:
"están estudiando hace menos de 3 años" =
"están estudiando desde hace menos de 3 años".

"La construcción hacer + cantidad de tiempo tiene carácter localizador pues localiza el evento en la línea temporal, pero no indica cuánto tiempo dura. Pero puede tener carácter durativo delimitativo y ser equivalente a desde hace + cantidad de tiempo en presente y en imperfecto y con predicados de estado:
Odia a su vecina hace tiempo. =
Odia a su vecina desde hace tiempo."
http://hispanoteca.eu/gramáticas/Gramática española/hace-hac...

Another way of saying the same thing is "hace menos de 3 años que están estudiando". They are still studying, and the time when they started could be any time in the last three years: six months ago, two years ago, whatever.

05:50 Oct 10, 2018 

Well, for me the key is that they have been studying for less than three years as a whole, and still are. If it were just any period within the three years, the form to express that would have been a different conjugation.
But yes, there is some ambiguity.

05:44 Oct 10, 2018 

The text carries a certain ambiguity: What exactly are "years". A panel of translators would probably say they are 1 year periods in terms of 365 successive days. There is no particular reason to assume that they are academic years or calendar years. If you think that they are academic years or calendar years, ask your self 2 questions: (1) What right do I the translator have to edit the author here? (2) Do academic years or calendar years derive from the Spanish here, or just from my inclination as to what I might carelessly mean if I myself wrote the sample text. (You might think, shame on the author for not writing "años académicos" or "años calendaros".)