The state of Texas has recently started focusing on the issue of length of time to graduation. College students across the nation are taking more than the assumed four years to complete their undergraduate degrees, and this trend has surfaced at Texas A&M University-Commerce as well.
According to Data Specialist Jack Harred, the university has conducted numerous surveys that indicate several reasons why A&M-Commerce students tend to extend the length of their undergraduate stay.
“Our students are significantly more likely than undergraduate students at other universities to be working and taking care of dependents,” Harred said. “We have a significant nontraditional student population and they face unique challenges in their pursuit of higher education.”
According to information provided by Harred, the average number of semesters students at A&M-Commerce take to complete their undergraduate degrees is always over eight semesters for every program offered, which means the average student takes longer than four years to graduate. The institutional average for students is ten semesters toward their baccalaureate degrees. This equates to about five years spent as an undergraduate in college.
To graduate in the traditional four-year time span, students can take summer courses or additional classes during the winter break or in May. Other options include testing out of credit hours through CLEP tests, although this does not exclude students from having to pay a price for these hours, as there is a fee to take each exam.
The growing trend for students to remain in college longer is not isolated to Texas. Graduate student in music education with emphasis on percussion Brody Ross took five years to get his music performance degree in percussion at the University of Iowa and said it would have taken him six years if he had gone after a certificate in teaching.
“It’s not that I wasn’t taking enough hours to get out in time, there were just too many classes,” Ross said.
Ross averaged around 21 hours a semester, with his busiest schedule rounding out at a high of 24 credit hours. His idea to allow students to graduate in a timely manner would mean students would have more electives, and thus, would make students in charge of deciding which classes would be more beneficial towards their degree.
“I think they should have a requirement pool of multiple classes that they [the university] believe you need, but let the student decide with a description of what the class actually entails,” Ross said.
Other students think college should remain a place of higher learning in all subjects, not just one’s specific major and minor.
“People come to college and they complain that they have to take all these classes, which are meant to expand their knowledge and educate them on things they would normally not be interested in,” second year senior photography major, Phillip Clark said. “If people complain they should go to vocational school. They don’t actually come out of a course with anything other than the grade they got.”
Clark said he realizes he is behind, and he probably has another year or two left as an undergraduate to finish within five or six years; however, he said he is not in a hurry to graduate.
“I don’t know why people are,” he said. “College is fun. Why not enjoy it? I mean a part of it is, I don’t want to have to grow up and get a job in the real world.”
For some, the realization graduation looms farther off in the distance than expected comes as a surprise and is something universities are not upfront about.
“I think it’s behind the curtain,” Ross said. “They say come in for four years. You come in there and you have to take this and this…I think it could be a four year degree, but you need to have everything scheduled out before you start your degree coming in as a freshman.”