Bloated curricula, remediation roadblocks, and students’ meandering path through college are contributing to a completion crisis that is costing students and their parents billions of extra dollars a year, according to a report released on Monday by Complete College America.
The report, “Four-Year Myth,” will be the centerpiece of discussions on Monday and Tuesday here at the annual meeting of the nonprofit group’s Alliance of States. Participants include college administrators, policy makers, and legislators from 35 states whose governors and higher-education leaders have pledged to make completion a top priority and to follow strategies outlined by Complete College America, the group says. Those include tying a portion of states’ higher-education allocations to graduation and retention rates, eliminating most stand-alone remedial courses, and streamlining degree requirements.
The nonprofit group, which is heavily financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has as one of its mantras “time is the enemy of college completion.”
The report starts out by taking issue with how the federal government and most two- and four-year colleges measure their completion rates. “Establishing graduation benchmarks of three and six years for associate and bachelor’s degrees, respectively, signals an acceptance of the status quo and alleviates the pressure to change,” the report says. “Using these metrics may improve the numbers,” but at a high cost to students and parents: $15,933 more for every extra year at a public two-year college and $22,826 for every extra year at a public four-year college, according to the report.
One reason it takes many students so long to get through, the report says, is that colleges have added too many degree requirements. Colleges should scale them back to 120 credit hours for a bachelor’s degree and 60 for an associate degree, it says. The degrees can be completed in four and two years, respectively, as long as students take 15 credit hours per semester.
The problem, according to the report, is that too many students define full-time enrollment the way the federal government does, as 12 credit hours per semester. There’s no way, without attending summer classes, to finish in two or four years at that rate.
‘We Are Not High Schools’
But 15 credit hours a semester is a heavy load for some students, skeptics say. “The emphasis on full time is simply not realistic for millions of community-college students,” said David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations and research at the American Association of Community Colleges. Sixty percent of community-college students attend part time, because of cost, work, family obligations, or a combination of factors. The highly structured scheduling called for in the report “could help students mesh community-college attendance with their other lives,” Mr. Baime added, “but that is easier said than done given the realities of institutional life, including faculty schedules. We are not high schools.”
Even if they could afford to tackle 15 hours per semester, that could be overwhelming for students with weak academic backgrounds, including many low-income and minority students, or for older adults who haven’t been in a classroom in decades, some educators worry. That’s especially true if prerequisite remediation is cut, they say.
In addition to offering remediation alongside, instead of before, most college-level classes, Complete College America has been promoting a plan it calls Guided Pathways to Success, or GPS. With that approach, every major is organized into a prescribed pathway of sequenced courses that will allow students to graduate in two or four years.
“Think of it as a mutual-responsibility agreement,” says the report, which breaks down state-by-state graduation rates by race and enrollment status. “Students will pledge to stick to a structured schedule of courses and elective offerings that represent the shortest distance to completion, eliminating the semester-by-semester uncertainty and huge expenses that often accompany a college career. In return, institutions will provide clear degree maps, closely monitor student progress, and guarantee that the necessary courses will be available when they are needed.”
Students who have not declared a major start out in broad clusters of fields, called “meta-majors,” that narrow into more-specific areas of study. Instead of funneling everyone into college algebra, for example, GPS allows students who don’t plan a mathematics or science major to take math courses more relevant to their major, including rigorous statistics and quantitative-reasoning courses.
‘Education Isn’t Like a Pizza’
The GPS system is one strategy the City Colleges of Chicago uses to help students save time and money. Finishing on time, however, is “only half of the equation,” said the system’s chancellor, Cheryl L. Hyman. “College programs must first be relevant, meaning they prepare students with the skills employers and four-year colleges demand, so that when a student does complete, he or she is ready to succeed in further college or a career.”
And while streamlining approaches like GPS could get students to the finish line faster, it’s bound to draw resistance from students who are accustomed to a wide choice of courses and from faculty members whose courses are cut. To skeptics, the focus on efficiency is more suited to a factory than a college, and it rankles educators like Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
“Education isn’t like a pizza,” she said. “It isn’t something you deliver.”
While she agrees that the completion crisis is real and strategies like structured schedules and intrusive advising can help, she worries that reforms pay too little attention to the faculty’s role in overseeing the curriculum.
“A lot of people immediately assume that faculty are the problem and we’re just going to jump over them,” said Ms. Humphreys. Many faculty members agree that the curriculum is bloated, but they want assurances “that efficiency won’t come at the expense of quality.”
To keep students on track, a growing number of colleges are providing on-time graduation guarantees, like Temple University’s “Fly in 4" program.
The program guarantees that, if students meet with advisers each semester, advance in class standing each year, work no more than 15 hours a week, and fulfill other requirements, they’ll graduate in four years; otherwise, the remaining classes are free. It also offers 500 financially needy students in each class grants of $4,000 per year, on top of other aid, so they can spend more time studying and less time working. Temple’s four-year graduation rate is 43 percent, up from 39 percent two years ago.
“The idea of working your way through college is a myth,” said Temple’s president, Neil D. Theobald. Students who graduate in six years have nearly double the debt of those who graduate in four, he added.
“The money you’re borrowing is more than you’re earning during those extra years,” he said he tells students. “Let’s take that money and get you to graduate so that you’re not working at the mall—you’re out working as an accountant or teacher.”
