From Tamar Lewin.
At most public universities, only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, the report found. Even at state flagship universities — selective, research-intensive institutions — only 36 percent of full-time students complete their bachelor’s degree on time.
One could counter that many of these eventually do graduate, and that is ok, although the article points out that this makes college more expensive–and that does not even include opportunity cost.
One could also argue that colleges are doing a favor by admitting lots of students who will not graduate on time. They are “taking a risk” on marginal students, and all that.
Still, my position is that the reason that few come out of the funnel on time is that too many unqualified students are being crammed into the funnel in the first place. Talk to anyone who has taught at something other than a prestigious private institution, and chances are the professor will be surprised that the graduation rate is as high as it is. Most of those professors are bending over backward to grade generously, and even so….
UPDATE: Possibly related, Ben Wildavasky says that tuition at public universities is too low.
Not that that isn’t true about unqualified students, but I wonder how much of this is students just being lazy or not eager to join the labor market. With the decrease in time spent studying by the average student over the last thirty years combined with increase in campus amenities, it’s clear that college is a lot more about recreation and building social capital these days rather than building more traditional forms of human capital like knowledge and skills. With that in mind, finishing on time becomes less desirable.
The four year mark isn’t a great marker of significance.
At UT Austin engineering, many of the engineering workaholic super students took five or even six years to graduate. These weren’t dumb or slow or lazy types at all. Some students changed majors, some transferred, some needed to take foreign language that they didn’t have from high school. Also, to finish in four years you generally need some summer class and some students chose more internships instead which could require a fifth year. Recently, UT dropped some course requirements specifically to increase four year graduation rates, but I still think those five and even six year students had amazing prospects. I’d rather my children finish a super challenging prestigious degree in five/six years than a fluffy degree in four.
also double majors. No one really thinks those double major students taking five/six years is a problem, but it makes the four year metric a poor choice.
I finished undergrad in 5 years, but only 8 semesters as I was an engineer that took a co-op position.
Lots of friends that did the same, though that’s a somewhat non-representative / self-selected group.
Also, in the late ’70s and perhaps still, even flagship state universities seemed to have rules like “if you are a resident of the state and in the top X% of your graduating high school class and X and Y, you are entitled to admission…”
It was fully expected that many who matriculated would not graduate. A large percentage of them didn’t make it to the end of the first semester.
So what?
Don’t assume it’s not scheduling of critical classes as well. My daughter went to UCF, known as yoU Can’t Finish for this reason. She graduated but not in four years.
I took 4.5 years to graduate from a top-tier school… with two degrees and a minor for one of them. Yeah, if I didn’t slack off, I could have done the same in four years flat — but the measurement is still missing an important detail.
This is one of those cases in which a simple infographic of the flows of ‘divergent destinies’ would be much better than picking a particular metric like ‘graduates within four years’ which, as the other commenters have mentioned, is problematic. It would look like a river splitting up in multiple forms.
And it would be nice if one could color or texture each fork to reflect the quality of the input (test scores and grades) and outputs (degrees, life outcomes, income, etc.)
I suspect that when one does this, much of the confusion and objection will melt away instantly. One will be able to see the ‘mainstream’ of decent students graduating on time with a single major and getting decent jobs. There would be some people in a small stream on the right taking a bit longer, and/or doing a bit more, and probably ending up in about the same place.
But I suspect that there would also be a large stream on the left with a high attrition rate every semester, that has both poor inputs and poor outputs, and with a few people finally making it through after a few extra semesters with a slight boost from the credentialing sheepskin effect.
Most of that left stream reflects a big mistake. Some are not so bad. If you are going to drop out of college, best do it early, and you haven’t sacrificed much tuition or time you could be working and earning an income. If you are really close to graduating and just need an extra semester or two, well, time spent is a sunk cost, and on a forward-looking basis, you might still actually recoup your additional investment by getting the diploma if you persevere.
But a lot of these students are probably wasting a lot more time and tuition, and end up not finishing anyway, and forsake the opportunity cost of income, which is really the worst situation. Unless you happen to think that, even for dropouts, the time they spend in college was still somehow incredibly valuable on a personal or spiritual level, as opposed to an economic level.
A lot of people think that, but I notice that almost all of them are people who got a degree in four years.
I’d expect this is much more a function of major-switching (combined with excessive and inflexible graduation requirements) and class-scheduling than poor academic performance. I doubt that many of the 2/3rds of students at flagship state universities taking more than 4 years have any failed courses at all. Another factor making students take longer than in the past is that universities have gotten stingier about awarding AP credits.
The bigger concern, I think, is that if you believe in the signalling story of higher education (I do), even if a degree is a negative Net Present Value investment, you still need to do it (or try), because there is stigma (or a negative signal) associated with not going to college.
I would favor a system where most kids begin working full time at 18 and take short course modules to help them with specific skills. Continuing education. Of course if you think you’re PhD material you should go straight to university, but that’s what, 1% of students?
But most 18-year olds seem ill-prepared by high school. Their writing and basic math skills are weak.
Anyway the higher education industry isn’t going anywhere. So what /can/ be done? Well, letting parents and students know about tuition, debt, completion rates, and postgraduation jobs, so they can make better-informed decisions.
I seem to vaguely recall reading lately, somewhere, of a noticeable increase in the number of first year college students having to take remedial classes, i.e., English composition, calculus or trig,) That would delay students by at least one semester, maybe two, in even signing up for first/second year required courses. Add the corresponding delay in taking prerequisite courses for the chosen major, which typically (at least decades ago, when I graduated university) have very restricted scheduling opportunities. So that may build in another semester to fit those, or require summer classes.
Could it be that the 1-2 additional years to finish college might stem, at least in part, from an increased lack of academic rigor in high schools across the country?
Why graduate? You lose the subsidies and have to start paying back all those loans. It’s a wonder that anyone does so!
I graduated in 5 years because I worked during years 2-5. I learned more from the work than the classes. Paying for the 5th year was unquestionably worth it.
I’m also inclined to say that a 4 year schedule, which requires taking 5 courses per semester, and which typically front-loads general studies and back-loads upper-division major courses, is just The Wrong Way. To me, such a schedule seems practically *designed* to maximize failure-to-graduate.