“… Starting this fall, the private University of Evansville — where the four-year completion rate was about 58 percent — officially rolls out a guarantee: Finish in four years or the fifth year is tuition free. Several other schools have initiated a similar push to get students in and out.” …
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/colleges-students-cant-graduate-time-115741431.html
I have seen this type of offer at a number of schools, but you have to read the fine print. The student has to be making good academic progress and, in some cases, the offer isn’t available to students who have changed their majors.
It’s a nice gesture for a college to make, but that’s about the extent of it
This is not that new a thing.
A number of colleges with low four year graduation rates make this kind of guarantee. Typically, the student has to meet conditions like take full course loads, follow his/her major’s course plan, not change major (at least not to one that cannot be completed in the remaining number of semesters), not fail any courses, not need remedial courses, etc… That the four year graduation rates are still low indicates that most of the delayed graduations are due to student-specific reasons, not the commonly-blamed “cannot get into the classes needed to graduate on time”.
Example: https://www.cpp.edu/~academic-programs/graduation-pledge/4yr_Graduation_Pledge.shtml . This school has a four year graduation rate of around 15%.
This one I find quite amusing - it would basically guarantee a 4-year graduation unless you managed to not be able to fit in core requirements. Am I missing something there?
They are promising that the needed courses will be available, or that the student can take them at no additional tuition cost:
University at buffalo does this. It’s not like Evansville is the first to do it
I find this hilarious as my SO’s whole family pretty much went there and I decided not to go there for physics due to the high cost. I would’ve had to take another year to finish there if I hadn’t transferred to Cal Poly Pomona instead.
I guess I’m glad this is happening for future generations, but I wonder for how long. I also find it funny that my alma mater was mentioned in this thread as a school that has a low four year graduation rate. I think that’s pretty common to me considering a good chunk of the population are engineering students and they typically take five years to get out. Not quite sure how often this happens, but I think I heard it was also common for engineering majors or some STEM majors to bail out their junior year and then try to finish in a different degree, which extended their stay. I still know someone who was on track with me to graduate two or so years ago, but he is still at Cal Poly Pomona taking classes since he switched out of the math major doing some finance or accounting degree.
I only managed to get out on time by basically killing myself (I was not a four year pledge). I know a lot of people at this school in the math department worked as well and still wanted to do well, so that was a factor in taking longer.