Finish in 4: is it really that big a deal?

This article talks about how KSU is targeting students to get them to finish school sooner. “The school’s effort targets students like Brittany Meara, a 19-year-old freshman who takes a full load of classes and works 40 hours a week at a restaurant. It might take her longer than four years, she said, but she plans to earn a degree.”

My undergraduate degree took me 7 years. After a car accident that, thankfully, left me fine but my car totaled, I had to stop for a while. Later, I found that full time work and school was too much for me. After several false starts (and getting an Associates Degree to cut costs) I finally got my Bachelor’s. Part of the reason it took so long was I was unwilling for a long time to take on ANY debt, and later consented to a small amount of debt – which I paid off 7 months after graduating.

While I was in school, struggling to earn my Bachelor’s with a minimum of debt, an issue came up repeatedly in the school newspaper: how to get students to graduate in less than 5 years. One of the ideas proposed was to penalize students (i.e. charge them more) taking less than a full load. I believe that this suggestion was dropped (yay).

As far as I can tell (and someone, PLEASE correct me if I am wrong) the main reason for the push to get students to graduate within a certain amount of time is to increase rankings. Some say they also want to keep costs down for families, but that doesn’t help the student that’s paying their own way through school and has to work full time. As a student, I cynically thought this was just another attempt to increase the loan burden on the students- after all, you make more off a student paying interest over 10 years than a student paying all at once, right?

I’m a little less cynical now (though I still have a healthy dose of skepticism) and think that in large part, administrators do think they’re helping- get students graduated, get out from their parent’s wing, etc. However, this is just another of those annoying issues that seems to leave the non traditional students feeling that the school is not there for them and has no interest in serving them.

The focus should be more on overall graduation rates, and not how long it takes. If one school has a 60% grad rate in 4 years, and another school has a 90% grad rate in 7 years, which is better? Ranking should reflect that- if ranking penalize for non-traditional students, who may take longer to graduate, the schools that non-traditional students prefer will slip in the rankings for no good reason.

One of the things that I hope to do if I continue work in an academic library is to reach out to non-traditional students. But really, how many students are “traditional” anymore? How many have parents that foot the whole bill, can afford not to work, don’t have kids, etc. Like the definition of the “traditional family” the term “traditional student” needs to change.

One more aside:
One thing I rarely hear mentioned is how delayed graduation can help a school. Many students that don’t finish in 4 years do so because they change majors. They end up paying the school more for their indecision. Other students stick to a major, but take a lot of courses outside of their major, because the course sounds interesting. Imagine how boring course catalogs could get if students always took only the required courses. There would be no need for many of the esoteric classes that were the highlight of my college years.