<p>"Typical" means students who do not have a realistic chance of admission to highly selective colleges or universities, or full tuition or better merit scholarships at less selective colleges or universities.</p>
<p>It appears that most colleges and universities that are not highly selective have fairly low graduation rates (for this purpose, ignore schools with high co-op job participation, which skews four year graduation rates downward even when students are not taking extra semesters, but these schools are not the majority anyway). Would that imply that a student whose high school academic stats fall in the mid-range of colleges and universities with low four year graduation rates should realize the odds and consider the possibility of needing an extra semester or few?</p>
<p>If so, there could be cost implications that affect planning, since the extra semester or few will cost money, and financial aid and merit scholarships may run out after eight semesters. This could mean that list price becomes more important -- a $25,000 per year school and a $55,000 per year school discounted by $30,000 per year of grants and scholarships may appear to have the same cost, but if the grants and scholarships run out after eight semesters, the extra cost in case an extra semester is needed is much greater at the latter school.</p>
<p>Just want to note that for kids with registered disabilities, for whom a reduced course load is a legal accommodation, financial aid should continue through those extra semesters. May not be relevant for many, but for a few, this is an important key to success.</p>
<p>These days, there are many cost-effective ways to finish college, and there will be even more as higher education changes to match the realities of students who are older, working, with families, out of college for a few years, or otherwise “non-traditional.” Many students who don’t graduate end up finishing through an adult learner program, whether on campus, online, low-residency or blended.</p>
<p>Typical? Typical is a population characteristic, whereas students are individuals. If a student is unambitious or needs to work half-time or is attending a college where required courses can be unavailable, then yes a five-year plan is probably in order.</p>
<p>The graduation rates are based on a variety of factors - it doesn’t mean that it is particularly difficult for a student who is focused to complete college on time. It just is largely a function of demographics. Commuter schools probably tend to have lower graduation rate simply because it not particularly inconvenient for a student who lives in town to take off a semester here & there to work or take an internship; if the college charges by the course unit, then dropping to less than full time may also be a cost saver. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that the graduation rates do not show students who transferred to other colleges-- every time a student leaves college A. to attend college B instead, that student is causing a reduction in the graduation rate statistics for college A.</p>
<p>I think deciding on a major early has more effect on graduation rates than the school itself, at least in my experience. Most kids I know that decided by the end of sophomore year all finished on time. Those that had a hard time deciding were the ones that took longer. There are a few exceptions to this as some majors you have to start right away freshman year, but not many. Also, as soon as a student transfers, that almost always means an extra semester at least (or summer classes).</p>
<p>Not in my family. It’s four years and out. I have too many kids to fund more than 4 years at a college. I’ve had some of my kids take local state/community college on their own dime to make sure things are up to snuff on requirements. My rising college sophomore is doing just that this year, taking advantage of the very low NY state college tuition and his college has approved the course. He’s switching majors and schools within the university and doing this puts him in better position to get out in 4 years. However, according to his advisor and, on paper, he doesn’t have to do this. If he passes all of his courses, he would be fine even with the change and even without taking the extra course, but it doesn’t leave much leeway, and this gives him much more wiggle room and choice of courses. And he is going to a large state university that has strict quotas and rules about class sizes and getting into a course.</p>
<p>But under a number of scenarios, yes, it would take a fifth year or some heavy duty summer courses. If you switch to certain very directed majors like nursing, engineering, accounting and you didn’t take any or many of the foundation courses freshman year, you could have a problem. You could also get shut out for certain required courses. My son is waitlisted for a course as it is, because he is not in the specific school to which he is transferring, and those in that school or in certain programs get first priority for the class he wants. Still for him, he’ll be fine, but if this were a different program or more courses were in that situation, he would need an extra term. </p>
<p>This can happen in any number of schools. A lot of them have very limited number of seats and make it nigh impossible for those who are not in a specific major get certain classes so if you switch, you have those prerequisities to make up. Or a class might only be offered in a fall or spring semester which can put you behind.</p>
<p>Compmom, do you know if that applies to merit scholarships as well? I’m getting a National Merit Scholarship through my school, and they said the scholarship was capped at four years. But, I am getting a reduced courseload accommodation due to a chronic illness, and will probably take five or six years to graduate.</p>
<p>I can see where a “typical” student at a “tippytop” school might end up taking a reduced course load in order to handle the challenge. But why would you assume that a typical student at a typical college couldn’t handle a typical courseload?</p>
<p>It may be that those “typical” colleges also open their doors to a wider population, including students with various conditions that require reduced courseloads, students with financial or other issues that cause them to take a semester or two off or reduce their courseloads temporarily, etc. They may also attract transfer students, or serve as one-two year starter colleges for students who “move up” the educational ladder - and neither of those populations count in the graduation statistics. Certainly, some of the nongraduates/5 year graduates can be attributed to low performance (or possibly the realization that college isn’t the right fit for the student at this time), but being “typical” doesn’t necessarily indicate the inability to graduate in four yeas.</p>
<p>Compmom, I am also curious about your post. What is a “registered disability” for which a reduced courseload is a legal accomodation at the college level?</p>
<p>Edit: Also, students at less-selective colleges are going to have fewer AP credits, and may require more remedial-type courses that don’t carry college credit.</p>
<p>Our son did do the 4.5 year plan for undergrad. He needed to complete one semester of student teaching and could have smushed it in the eighth semester but it would have been ugly. He consulted with us before committing to the 9th semester…
We agreed to pay the tuition/fees but refused to pay the dorm fees. He found a perfectly lovely school commutable from our home and paid his commuting costs that last semester.</p>
<p>I agree that there are many different reasons for looking at greater than 4 years. We just didn’t want it to be a surprise and feel cornered into paying for it.</p>
<p>If you look at four year graduation rates from common data sets at four year universities which are not “tippy top” in terms of selectivity, you can see that a lot of students are not graduating in four years:</p>
<p>University of California - Berkeley: 70%
University of California - Irvine: 65%
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University: 56%
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities: 55%
University of Texas - Austin: 53%
University of California - Santa Cruz: 50%
University of Texas - Dallas: 41%
North Carolina State University: 41%
University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa: 38%
Arizona State University: 32%
San Diego State University: 28%
San Jose State University: 25%
University of Alabama - Birmingham: 23%
University of Alabama - Huntsville: 14%
California State Polytechnic University - Pomona: 12% *
California State University - Long Beach: 12%
California State University - Sacramento: 11%
University of Texas - El Paso: 4%</p>
<ul>
<li>Has a four year graduation guarantee program, but also may have significant numbers of students doing co-op jobs.</li>
</ul>
<p>In other words, would it be more realistic for students and parents to consider the significant chance or risk of an extra semester and associated cost and financial aid implications if the student does not have the academic credentials to have a realistic chance of getting into a “tippy top” selectivity college or university (whether or not the student actually applies or wants to go to such a school)?</p>
<p>Your data includes not only students who take longer than four years to graduate, but also those who never make it out of their first semester - and everyone in between, including transfers out.</p>
<p>Take two of your California state schools, UCB and SDSU, for example. At SDSU, 14% of freshmen don’t come back for sophomore year. At Berkeley, it’s 3%. At Berkeley, only 69% graduate in four years, and another 20% graduate within five - but only 2% more within 6. At SDSU, the percentage who graduate in their fifth years is actually higher than Berkeley’s - 29% - giving the school a five-year rate of 59% - and another 7% in the sixth year.</p>
<p>Edit: Also, SDSU has 13% part time students, who by definition will take longer to graduate, whereas Berkeley is under 3%.</p>
<p>Dropping out or flunking out would be an even worse outcome than graduating late.</p>
<p>Transferring out would also entail risks to one’s cost and financial aid planning.</p>
<p>Assuming that 87% of SDSU students are full time, the 28% four year graduation rate becomes 32% of the full time students. Still not particularly high. In other words, about two out of three entering freshmen take longer than four years to graduate, drop out, flunk out, or transfer away.</p>
<p>Obviously, a “tippy top” student at SDSU is probably much more likely to graduate in four years. But a “typical” student at SDSU (let’s say median high school academic credentials for SDSU freshmen) would appear to have a non-trivial risk of not graduating in four years, so student and parent cost and financial aid planning may have to take that into account.</p>
<p>But my point, going back to your original question, is to look at what percentage of students take not four years to graduate, but five (or four and a half, which cannot be disaggregated from five based on publicly available data). At SDSU, 29% of the entering freshmen take an extra semester or two to graduate; at Berkeley, 20%. Thats a much smaller difference than just looking at the differences in non-four-year rate, 72% (SDSU) vs. 30% (Berkeley). The data also shows that two-thirds of the non-four-year Berkeley students do graduate in the fifth year, versus 40% of the SDSU students; and that a very large percentage of SDSU freshmen never graduate - at least not in six years or not from SDSU - whereas 9 of 10 Berkeley frosh have their Berkeley diplomas within six.</p>
<p>Students drop out or leave college for a variety of reasons. As you go farther down on the scale of selectivity, you are also going farther down on the economic scale – but of course college that are less selective also tend to have less funding available for need-based aid. So there is going to be an ever-increasing number of students who leave school for economic reasons. </p>
<p>I also think that at least for the UC system, the reported stats are missing a huge part of the picture by failing to account for the large number of students who come in as junior year transfers after community college – that is an extremely common path to a 4-year degree in college, again among those who are faced with economic barriers. </p>
<p>Rather than draw unwarranted assumptions from raw statistics, why don’t you see if you can correlate 4-year graduation rates to the percentage of students who reside on campus? or correlate graduation rates with percentage of Pell grant recipients? You seem to assume that most students want to attend university continuously for 4 years— but I don’t think that path makes economic sense for many.</p>
<p>This is an absurd question. Anyone can find out that the <em>six-year graduation rate</em> is 55% at public universities. It seems reasonable to conclude that the “typical” struggles to graduate within six years, much less 9 semesters.</p>
<p>As for not making conclusions from “raw” statistics, I thought one of the ideals of statistics was a representative population. If you don’t have “raw” statistics, what statistical conclusions can you make?</p>
<p>You can’t draw any conclusions from raw statistics without considering the variables that go in to impact the statistics. Without looking at statistics in context, they are simply numbers. </p>
<p>Even US News knows that – their algorithm factors in an “expected” graduation rate because they know that the students with higher stats going in are more likely to graduate in 4 years than the student with the weaker stats. </p>
<p>There is also considerably more economic pressure for students at private colleges to finish in 4 years than for students at public colleges, particularly because most private colleges limit their financial aid to 4 years. So how is the middle-class student who decides to hang on for an extra semester at Yale going to come up with the $20K tuition for that one extra semester? At the public university, the question may be framed in reverse fashion — the student is far less likely to be the beneficiary of generous financial aid - and the best way to come up with the $7K tuition for the next semester may well be to take off from school and work full time to earn the money.</p>
<p>Students in California who go to UCs or CSUs can have low four graduation rates for reasons unrelated to their ability or motivation. With the budget cuts that California public universities have had to endure in recent years it is often just not possible for even the most capable and hard working students to get a seat in all classes required for graduation within four years.</p>