The four-year liberal arts degree seems to be devolving into myth, and delayed graduation has emerged as a separate academic lifestyle. According to a 2006 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, only one-third of students at colleges offering four-year degrees were able to complete their bachelor’s degree in said time. At the University of Wisconsin, that number has been more like one-half in recent years, yet nearly one-third of the students who entered as freshmen in fall 2003 is still among us, working toward a diploma they may never earn.
To be fair, most fifth-year seniors just need the time to fit in a few academic requirements before they pick up their tassels — scheduling conflicts or personal issues may have brought on the delay. But the remaining students who stay on for six or more years are part of an alarming general trend. Why do students keep paying tuition for extra semesters when they aren't going to graduate?
School is an expensive habit to sustain. Tuition rises every year, and student loan debt often takes longer to pay off without a degree. Now is a really bad time to be an undecided junior or senior, but for some reason, these students do not choose to leave now and cut their losses. Instead, they take fewer credits per semester so they will have time to work, even though the minimal course load will only prolong their time to earn a diploma and rack up expenses, while the outside jobs draw their attention away from school.
Consequently, some of these students will realize too late that their day jobs have become their professions and that they have amassed years of avoidable loan-debt before arriving at this conclusion. Just as college isn't for everyone who graduates high school, graduating with a degree isn't for everyone who goes to college.
In the past decade at UW, the percentage of degree-seeking students who eventually get what they came for has consistently been around 80 percent, which is decent. But out of students matriculating in 2002, 78.7 percent earned their degrees in five years or fewer. That doesn't look good for students who are now in their 11th semester. On an individual level, these are students who have spent so much time as undergraduates that they might as well finish their degree. Viewing it through a larger scope, however, shows that some large societal forces must be at work.
Perhaps students are overwhelmed with multiple majors or have switched concentrations too many times. At a university the size of UW, students have a lot of choices, but not a lot of immediate guidance.
Other students, especially first-generation college students, may have been pressured into higher education as the U.S. economy demands more specialized work and thus are in uncharted territory to begin with. Still, these are not valid excuses for failing to earn a degree in a timely manner. The average high school graduate cannot afford to be a professional student, and if he had the planning skills to get into UW in the first place, you'd think he could find his way around a DARS report when the time came.
Paul Bell, the dean of the University of Oklahoma, has noted that graduation rates are especially low at OU — only 47 percent after five years — and believes OU's "noncompetition culture" is to blame. In response to a student editorial in the Oklahoma Daily encouraging students not to rush their degrees, he defended OU's new campaign to prevent "student burnout" for the students' own good. "Time is precious," he concluded. This is exactly the preventative attitude we need to have toward our own academic careers at UW. UW's statistics are not as extreme as OU's, so we can't and shouldn't rely on our administration to hold our hands. Whatever the reasons, it is a waste of time and resources to continue without the goal of graduation in mind.
Carla Dogan ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in economics.
