The Four-Year College Myth

The premise of this blog is that the prevailing view about who attends college, and how they engage, is way off the mark.  The general assumption is that students go directly to college after high school, live on a campus, and study full time. That view drives public policy decisions even though it addresses a distinct minority of contemporary college students.  Roughly 85% of today’s college students are older, work, and often study part-time.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to see this Boston Globe article, which describes what it calls “the four-year college myth,” the idealized view that college students graduate from high school and go directly to a college campus, study full-time, and finish in four years.  Not the way it happens.  In fact, the article’s author, Neil Swidey, states that his rough calculations using federal data would indicate that fewer than 10 percent of adults who have a bachelor’s degree earned that degree in four years or less.  He writes, “By definition, that’s no longer traditional.  It’s radical, and it makes you wonder why we still call them four-year colleges.”

Swidey believes that the reason our perceptions are so far from reality is that the “old path still dominates at name-brand private colleges.”  Maybe. But I think the answer lies more in his description of how Gerald Chertavian, founder of the successful “Year Up” program that deals with students who struggled in high school, asked participants in a summit meeting of the New England Board of Higher Education about how many had finished a bachelor’s degree in four years.  About 80 percent of the hands went up.  That is the way that these education leaders did it, and that is the way today’s legislative leaders did it, and that is the way many of us older folks did it.  And, we just assume that nothing has changed … that the world is just going along the same old way.  We fail to understand the realities of the people we claim to serve.

Not only has the world changed, but it is reasonable to expect that the current economic situation will drive even greater changes.  And we throw out ideas like going to “three-year degrees,” most of which are simply accelerated programs that are totally unfriendly to students who must work and attend part-time.  These programs are intended to be attractive to parents who don’t want to pay for four years if they can only pay for three years.  But again, most students these days are older, working, studying part-time.  What they need is the fastest and least costly track to a degree, but three years versus four years is the wrong way to think about meeting those needs.

Swidey presents some examples of students who are part of the other 85 percent.  He ends by quoting Allison Hartle, who took six years at two colleges to earn her baccalaureate degree, “The traditional path is painted as being the proper thing to do, that if you don’t take it you’ve somehow failed.  But that’s not true.  I know a ton of kids who went off to college and wasted their parents’ money.  I don’t think I wasted anything.”  Swiney concludes with the statement, “How radical is that?”  My answer is that it is not radical, it is real.  And many, if not most, of the other 85 percent of students, who are like Allison, would say something similar.  What is radically wrong is that public policy continues to be driven by outdated and inaccurate assumptions about who attends college and how they do it.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike