What is the main reason that it takes most students longer than 4 years to complete an undergraduate degree?

This article about college graduation rates was produced in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. 

Millions of freshmen are settling into college this fall, and 9 out of 10 of those pursuing bachelor’s degrees are confident they’ll finish in four years or less.

If history holds true, however, fewer than half of them actually will.

Colleges have gradually moved the finish line to give themselves credit for success if students graduate in six years — or even eight years, which is the measure used by the government’s newest consumer website, College Scorecard.

That’s like judging the success of an airline’s on-time performance by including the percentage of its flights that take up to twice as long as scheduled to reach their destinations.

Researchers, policymakers and journalists have largely unquestioningly used the six-year measure. But now it is attracting new scrutiny as graduation rates stagnate, the Covid-19 pandemic threatens to make them even worse and the Biden administration proposes spending $62 billion to improve completion rates at institutions with large proportions of low-income students.

While 90 percent of entering students in a nationwide UCLA survey say they’ll graduate within four years — the most basic promise made by a university or college to consumers — only 45 percent of them will.

And fewer than two-thirds of students manage to finish within six years, the Education Department reported. Completion rates are even worse for particular groups of students. Only about a quarter of Black and a third of Hispanic students graduate within four years, for instance, government figures show. 

Asked repeatedly why graduation rates are still measured in increments of six years, whether that causes confusion among students and families and what impact it has on pushing colleges to improve completion, the Education Department responded by cutting, pasting and sending the text of the 1990 law with no further comment or elaboration.

“They’re pulling a bait-and-switch on students,” said Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the advocacy group Complete College America. “I daresay that if you ask any institution what their graduation goals are, they would say four years. Either they’re fooling themselves or they’re not being honest about how the systems they’ve set up work against that. What about turning out your product in the four years that you promised?”

It is possible for consumers to see four-year graduation rates on another Education Department website, College Navigator, but they’re first shown six-year rates. Graduation rates by race, ethnicity and gender are all reported over six and not four years.

Accepting that fewer than half of students at four-year colleges graduate within four years means recognizing that many face significantly higher costs than they expected while delaying the starts of their careers. Some run out of money and give up.

“If a family has a plan, they end up financially unable to get to their goal,” said David Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former acting assistant secretary of education for postsecondary education.

Students also won’t find out about the long odds from the colleges themselves, and they’d have to dig deep to learn them from the federal agency that regulates higher education.

How the six-year measure came to be

The story of how the U.S. came to measure graduation from four-year colleges over six years opens in 1989, when Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., who played college and professional basketball, and fellow senators began to scrutinize the academic success of student-athletes — many of whom never graduated.

Until then, colleges, universities and the NCAA didn’t disclose their graduation rates at all and bristled at the prospect that they’d have to. Because athletic eligibility covers five years, the senators proposed requiring colleges to report athletes’ five-year graduation rates. Then they expanded the requirements to all students, not just athletes. 

After lobbying by universities and colleges, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., whose state was rife with higher education institutions, added a last-minute amendment defining completion as earning a degree within “150 percent of ‘normal time.’ ”

The law was passed in 1990, although the colleges managed to put off publicly reporting graduation rates until 1997.

That measurement also creates little incentive for universities and colleges to improve the rates, which started to plateau even before the disruptions of Covid-19. The proportion of students who finished within six years grew by only three-tenths of a percentage point last year, the smallest increase in five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Students can prolong their stays in college by arriving unprepared, taking too few credits per semester, working while in school, changing majors, running out of money or taking time off for family obligations and other reasons. Colleges and universities can slow them down by piling on additional requirements, failing to provide enough sections of required courses, offering inadequate advising and being stingy about accepting transfer credits.

 “Our expectation should be a four-year degree in four years,” Bergeron said. “Why do we set this expectation of six years, which just causes people to think it’s OK to make excuses for not getting it done in four? If we think it should take six years, isn’t it going to take six years?”

Some student advocates have a different problem with the way graduation rates are tabulated — growing numbers of students are pursuing higher education in dramatically new ways that don’t follow traditional timetables.

“Who are we measuring this for, and to what end?” asked Peter Smith, a former member of Congress, the author of “Stories from the Educational Underground: The New Frontier for Learning and Work” and a professor of innovative practices in higher education at the University of Maryland Global Campus.

“What we should admit is that a four-year completion rate, where it works, is working for a limited number of students,” Smith said. “The mainstream model is shifting to truly lifelong in-and-out, come-and-go education. And for some people that is four years or two years.”

But for most people, he said, it’s not. That means it’s time to find new ways to measure success.

“The counting system we have — six years, eight years — is really telling us about how the traditional system is unable to meet these changing aspirations,” he said.

College, as the saying goes, is supposed to be the best four years of your life. But there's increasingly a new norm for students: spending six years getting a degree.

Even the government now measures whether students graduate on time if they do it within six years, rather than four.

Taking longer to graduate isn't cheap. It costs $15,933 more in tuition, fees and room and board for every extra year at a public two-year college and $22,826 for every added year at a public four-year college, according to a new report by the nonprofit Complete College America.

At a time when total student debt has surpassed $1 trillion, getting students to graduate on time has become critical.

So what's the reason behind students spending so much extra time getting their degrees?

Colleges have added too many unnecessary degree requirements and remedial courses that keep students in school for much longer than needed, according to the report.

A recent Education Department study found that the average graduate had accumulated 138.4 credits by the time they received a bachelor's degree, when 120 is usually sufficient. Tack on another 20.3 credits for the average amount of courses that students fail, repeat or withdraw from and those credit hours jump to 158.7 credits earned or attempted. At an estimated cost of $361 per credit, those credits start to add up.

"Most colleges and universities raise tuition and fees each year, while financial aid stays nearly constant," researchers wrote. "As scholarships and savings run out, students and their families are left to borrow more of the costs of attending school."

Administrators at Temple University and University of Texas at Austin, for example, told researchers that two extra years at their campuses increase debt by nearly 70 percent among students who borrow.

If schools want to rein in costs for students, Complete College America recommends they streamline curricula and cap the number of credit hours needed for bachelor's degree at 120 hours and for an associate degree at 60 hours.

Those hours are the already standard for a majority of degrees, though some schools have let departments pile on additional course work over the years. Capping credit hours, the report says, would make it easier for students to graduate on time as long as they take 15 credit hours a semester.

Carrying a full course load, however, may not work for students juggling school, work and family, not to mention those who simply can't afford to the cost. Nearly two thirds of students at community colleges, for instance, attend part-time because of those sorts of obligations, according to data from the American Association of Community Colleges. Earning an associates in two years would certainly reduce costs for those students, but increasing their grant aid would arguably be more effective. 

Still, schools could do a better job of creating a more direct route to graduation, the report says. Offering more sections of core classes, accepting transfer credits or simply monitoring students' course loads are just some of the strategies colleges could use to increase on-time graduation.

As it stands, only 50 out of the more than 580 public four-year institutions report on-time graduation rates at or above 50 percent for their first-time, full-time students, according to the Education Department's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds.

At the University of Arizona, only 34 percent of students graduate within six years, according to Department of Education data. At Michigan State University, it's 48 percent. Overall, at flagship universities, only 36 percent of students are getting their degrees within six years.

Another part of the problem, according to Complete College America, is the "broken" system of remedial courses that students with weak academic records are required to take.

About 20 percent of college students are enrolled in remedial classes, according to the most recent data from the Education Department. That means they must take courses in math or English to help them catch up to the rest of their classmates. But those classes don't count toward a degree and tend to delay students from graduating on time.

Complete College America wants schools to offer remediation alongside college-level courses, instead of having students take remedial classes before their core courses. Think of it as intensive tutoring.

The nonprofit has been promoting a plan it calls Guided Pathways to Success (GPS),which organizes majors into a set courses that allow students to graduate in two or four years. The way it works is students agree to stick to a structured schedule of courses and electives that represent the shortest distance to completion. And in return, schools provide degree maps, monitor student progress and make sure that necessary courses are available.

Rather than all incoming freshman taking algebra, for instance, GPS would let students with no interest in science or math degrees take math courses that are relevant to their major, like statistics or quantitative-reasoning classes.

Five states, including Massachusetts and Illinois, have launched GPS initiatives in science, technology, engineering and math programs, while Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee are working to scale up broader programs rooted in the GPS model.

The spartan approach to graduation is unlikely to win fans among students who want an array of courses or the professors who teach them. Placing students on a narrow path to graduation could also deprive them of the chance to explore subjects that don't neatly fit into their major.

But at a time when graduation rates have slumped and the cost of attending college has reached stratospheric heights, it's hard to argue against more streamlined programs—and a return to four years as the norm again for college.