Even though Austin Sellers was considered a full-time student at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, no one ever pointed out that his course load of 12 credits per semester would essentially force him to spend five years to earn a four-year degree.
“Taking 12 credits a semester, you’re not going to graduate in four years,” said Sellers, a business major who graduated from UW-Milwaukee in 2013 after five-and-a-half years. “There’s no possible way.”
Sellers is hardly the only student to end up taking more than four years to earn a bachelor’s degree simply because his course load was not intense enough to do so in a shorter period of time.
One recent survey found that more than two-thirds of college students did not have a schedule that would enable them to graduate on time even if they never switched majors, failed a course or took an unnecessary course.
But now, a growing chorus of scholars and completion advocates are seeking to change that reality by raising the question: how can a student be enrolled full time and still not graduate on time?
“The fact that students can be enrolled full time and still not graduate on time is one reason why it takes students so long to complete degrees,” Serena Klempin, a research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, observes in a new report, “Redefining Full-Time in College: Evidence on 15-Credit Strategies.”
