<p>Just to clarify a typo - in post #27, I meant to write, “many students graduating from UC’s or CSU’s in year #5 or #6 who have attended and paid for only 8 semesters, but just weren’t able to do so continuously.” </p>
<p>(You clearly understood what I meant to post, but just in case someone else reads it, it’s a big enough error on my part that I think it needs a correction).</p>
<p>You wrote:
</p>
<p>But I am not aware of any source of information that would give you stats for semesters. My son started college in 2001 and graduated in 2008; he would not show up in any any colleges graduation stats, no matter how many semesters he attended. As far as college #1 is concerned, he never graduated; as far as college #2 is concerned, he essentially never started. </p>
<p>College #1 does currently report a “transfer out” rate, but I don’t think they would pick up kids like my son because he wasn’t a direct transfer either. He officially took a one year leave of absence; at the end of that year he simply didn’t return. I don’t know whether he informed the college or not. Obviously at some point he ordered the college transcript to to transfer to college #2, but that may have been beyond the time frame for which the college now report the transfers. </p>
<p>My point is simply that the statistics give you some basic numbers, but they don’t tell you the “why” or the “how”. I do think that at public colleges, especially the less selective, commuter-type schools, it is probably fairly common that students do not attend college continuously. There just really is no particularly good reason why those students should attend continuously, except for the natural desire to complete the degree and move on. Most are not living in dorms, they are not centering their social lives around the campus, many are non-traditional students (older students, students who are married or have children, etc.). </p>
<p>I am not saying that all of the students who fail to graduate fit my proposed alternative model – I am just saying that you are looking at numbers that don’t mean much one way or another without more info.</p>
<p>I think you are trying to frame a common argument that I see on CC – that limitations of course availability at CSU’s and similar campuses force large number of students to attend for more than 8 semesters in order to graduate, and that extra cost should be factored in when comparing public to private costs. But I just don’t think there’s enough evidence to support that argument, as a large percentage of the students who don’t graduate in 4 years probably never graduate at all from those colleges, for reasons that have nothing to do with course availability. Also, the cost differential is so great between in-state public and private, especially at the lower tier publics, that even an extra 2 or 3 semesters would not cost nearly as much as attending as a full-pay student at a private college. I mean that’s simple math – if a semester at a CSU costs $4000 and a semester at a private college costs $18,000 – then 9 semesters at the CSU would be the monetary equivalent of 2 semesters (1 year) at the private college. So certainly the prospect of an additional semester to complete the degree would not be a logical reason to choose the private college over the public one.</p>