UMBC looks quite enticing for my STEM minded daughter. Only concern is with low 4 year graduation rates. Reasons behind this? (school not offering adequate number of required courses?) Are the rates appreciably better for honors/Meyerhoff Scholars?
What is the graduation rate? In my state, some of the peripheral campuses have 4 year graduation rates in the teens. From my perspective, that is tantamount to a scam as far as college education goes. I would not buy an appliance that has a 1 in 5 chance of lasting 4 years. Nor would I pay >$100,00 for it. Of course, one in 5 does graduate but winning a crapshoot does not seem like grooming for success.
UMBC is a very urban campus so attracts a lot of part time students, older students, STEM students who may take longer than 4 straight years to graduate. Any big public school is not going to have the same graduation rate as an LAC that meets full needs of students and mostly attracts students right out of high school who can commit full time to school. Williams’ 4 year grad rate is going to be higher than Cal’s.
Financing plays a big part in the grad rate too. Sometimes students just have to take a semester off to rebuild a bank account or go part time for a while. Some need to take fewer classes one semester because they need two labs or to do an internship.
Is there a 6 yr stat?
I did further digging on this using collegefactual.com and see the breakdown of students that twoinanddone alludes to above. UMBC gets good marks for freshmen retention (@89%) and overall grad rate of 61%.(which again is impacted by those who transfer or struggle with STEM curriculum.) However, I did see some comments on Rate My Professor that addressed difficulty in getting required courses to enable one to graduate in four years; unfortunately, no academic concentration is mentioned by those posters. This school is still definitely on our radar - it has a promising emphasis on STEM. We hope to visit this spring (daughter is a high school junior). If anyone is a current student or grad (or parent of one), I would love to hear about your experience at UMBC.
My son will be a freshman this year so i can’t speak on the availability of upper level courses. I can say that people in Honors/Scholars are able to register for classes prior to the rest of the students. I would imagine there would be a higher graduation rate for students in these programs. UMBC also has some nice scholarships available to the high stat students.