College students are taking fewer credit hours than before and conscious course scheduling is becoming more relevant, according to a new report from higher education resource company Ad Astra.
Dr. Lisa Hunter
The company produced “Complicated Lives, Competing Priorities: Reimagining the Course Schedule for Today’s Student” using 687 responses from a 2022 survey of institutional leaders – 241 two-year public institutional leaders, 260 four-year public institutional leaders, and 158 four-year private institutional leaders.
Among the report’s findings were that students took 14.6% fewer credits in Fall 2021 than they did two years earlier and that enrollment of full-time students decreased from 66.8% two years earlier to 64% in Fall 2021 at public four-year universities.
"I think that our research validated much of what we hear from industry experts around declining enrollments being a primary concern,” said Dr. Lisa R. Hunter, vice president of education at Ad Astra and the report’s primary author. “What we were able to see is that, of the students that are enrolling, that they're taking fewer and fewer credit hours. And while we might think of 12 credit hours as a full-time load, many of us in the industry understand that, if we want students to complete a two-year degree in two years or a four-year degree in four years, that they really need to be taking those 15-hour credit loads.”
According to the report, full-time students at four-year public universities were taking 14.75 credit hours on average, not quite the 15. Meanwhile, at public two-year schools, the average was 15.43 credit hours, a rise from the 15.20 of Fall 2020.
“I think it's really important that we consider our responsibility around helping students manage their expectations about how much time it's going to take to complete a degree,” Hunter said, “and then likewise, the institution's responsibility around being able to keep their completion promises to students and ask important questions like: Is the course schedule impeding students' ability to get that full 15 credits? What other barriers are in the way?"
The study did not investigate the reasons why these shifts and declines occurred, Hunter said.
