Students caught in the slog of poorly designed academic pathways and burdensome costs who opt to take a minimal amount of credits per year are in grave danger of never seeing their academic ambitions through, and it’s up to our institutions to design pathways that can support students to push harder.
These are the predominant findings in a new report by Ad Astra, a software provider helping students complete their degree, based on sobering retention and completion rates from 1.3 million students attending 2-year public, 4-year public and 4-year private institutions. The report found that students completing 11 or fewer credits per year only have a 7% probability of graduating.
However, there is an upside: Students completing 18-23 credit hours per year are seven time more likely to graduate than students completing 11 credits or fewer per year. Here is how Ad Astra, accompanied by actual examples from colleges nationwide, suggests how higher education can alleviate potholes inhibiting students from completing their degrees faster—and thus—at a higher rate.
“Today, time remains the enemy—but we are finally starting to understand what exactly that means,” wrote Charles Ansell, vice president for research, policy and advocacy at Complete College America. “We know there’s an urgent need to move faster: By 2031, nearly three-quarters of all U.S. jobs will require education or training beyond high school.”
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Reframe student progress
The usual designation a college or university gives to a student is whether they are part-time or full-time. Ad Astra suggests that institutions approach students from a more granular perspective on a by-semester basis that fits them in subsets based on the number of credits they take. For example, full-time students should be further split into two categories that examine which are taking 12-14 credits and those taking 15 or more.
The reason? Students’ retention and completion rates increased at the same rate as their average term credits. A part-time student taking nine to 11 credits per term had a 50% chance of completion, nearly double that of the student taking six to eight credits.
As a result, Ad Astra defines real student progress by examining their “degree velocity,” or their ability to ramp up their course load through their academic career. By viewing it this way, institutions can consider the busy schedule of adult learners who can’t afford to allot more than four or five years of their lives to higher education.
Improve program flexibility
Colleges that try to offer flexible courses in a given college pathway without giving them close consideration and planning are doomed to run into deep logistical problems. For example, while some programs may say they can provide online programs, students frequently confront a blocked completion path due to multiple course requirements not following the flexible modality. As a result, the report found that 71% of the completion paths offered were blocked due to missing requirements, affecting 57% of degree-seeking students.
Let’s take a note out of Northeast Lakeview College’s playbook to examine how they stay on top of providing efficient flexible pathways for their students. NLC monitors multiple indicators of student progress to evaluate the course schedule, including average credit hours per semester, persistence from term to term, time to degree and average credit hours upon graduation, says Laura Boyer, vice president for academic success at NLC.
They use these indicators to determine if they provide the schedule that allows students to progress and complete degrees.
“By focusing on data-informed strategies, NLC has been able to infuse flexible course offerings, including additional online courses, evening courses, weekend courses, and 8-week courses to help students accelerate,” she says. “By focusing on efficiency and maximizing enrollment using scheduling analytics, we can financially support and sustain these flexible offerings and grow our new programs.”
