For years, we thought of college as a four-year experience. Students entered an institution as freshmen, went through the requisite hoops with a cohort of other students and graduated four years later. We now know that this traditional pattern applies to less than half the students in the country. Increasingly, students are going to school part time, dropping out and dropping back in, and taking longer to complete postsecondary degrees.

Why is it taking longer for students to complete a four-year degree? Based on my experiences working on several campuses and advising several hundred others over the past 40 years, key reasons explain this trend:

• Courses that students need for degree completion are not always offered in the sequence or at the times that students can take them. Some institutions do not schedule courses on a student-demand basis, retaining instead a faculty-driven scheduling system. Large numbers of students must simply bide their time, waiting for the right courses to be offered.
• A large number of admitted students are not academically prepared for college. Thus, the time and cost of remediating them can be extensive. If this “catching-up” takes place at higher cost, four-year colleges or universities, remediation can be even more expensive.
• Most students today work part time to help pay for the high costs of college. As more and more time is spent working (because costs are going up), less time is available to take courses, and student load averages per term are dropping. Ironically, the longer they take, the more the price rises.
• Some institutions have permitted some of their academic departments to add to the degree requirements beyond what can reasonably be accomplished in four years. This practice–whether academically justifiable or not — adds to the time and cost required to graduate.
• Many students, whether because of ineffective advising or because they change their minds, switch majors mid-stream and discover that some credits already achieved will not count in a different major. A few students seek dual majors, and this adds to the number of credits needed to satisfy total requirements. Still others transfer to other institutions and lose credits in the move.
• A few majors — engineering, accounting — and some intern programs have evolved over time into five-year degree programs.

In an effort to control costs and reduce time to degree, some states are considering laws that would cap the length of time it takes to complete a college education. Although legislation may not be the answer, states and institutions might consider working together to devise policies that take the above factors into consideration.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 9:46 am and is filed under Time to degree. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.