The leaders of the University of Nebraska system capped at 120 last week the number of credits needed to finish a bachelor’s degree, as part of an effort to lower costs and shorten the time to graduation.
While other states have pursued the same goals, their policies have tended to provide incentives to students to graduate on time or to remove financial aid if they overstay their welcome. Nebraska’s plan is notable for exerting more pressure on the system’s campuses than on students.
“Our effort was to try to help students save money and reduce debt,” said Linda Ray Pratt, the system’s executive vice president and provost. “Some states have taken measures that punish students. We chose not to do things that would hurt students who wanted additional education.”
The Nebraska policy, which many faculty members broadly endorse, will go into effect for students entering in the fall of 2012. It guarantees that, with a few exceptions, any baccalaureate degree will require no more than 120 credit hours, which means that a full-time student carrying 15 credits per semester can graduate in four years. Six-year graduation rates on Nebraska’s three main campuses ranged from 42.5 percent in Omaha to 63.7 percent at the flagship, in Lincoln, in 2008 (the most-recent year for which figures are available). The national average is 57.4 percent.
Programs may be exempted from the 120-credit guarantee if they must require more credits for professional accreditation or state certification, or if they offer five-year, combined bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Exceptions can also be granted on curricular grounds; for example, students in some science disciplines gradually build their mastery through a sequence of courses that cannot easily be truncated.
About 80 percent of the bachelor’s-degree programs that are offered on Nebraska’s campuses now require 125 credits or more to graduate, said Ms. Pratt. In large part, she said, the number of credits required has crept upward to reflect the growth in subject matter across disciplines as varied as science and literature. “As knowledge expanded, so did the curriculum,” she said.
It’s a trend that Aaron M. Dimock, president of the Faculty Senate at Nebraska’s Kearney campus, acknowledged, although he also said it reflected the culture of higher education. “No one’s trying to require classes that they don’t think are necessary,” he said. “As we address curriculum, we accumulate extra courses rather than remove courses that are not necessary. We tend to modify by accretion rather than deletion.”
At the same time, Mr. Dimock, who is an associate professor of communications, hoped that capping the number of credits would not hamper students who are looking to continue to graduate school. He also wondered how faculty members would wrestle with determining which content to leave out. “Do we start having to go into the canon and saying we no longer have to teach these authors?” he asked.
Some departments and colleges have sought to meet the 120-credit cap by looking outside their majors, said Janice F. Rech, president of the Faculty Senate at Omaha and an associate professor of mathematics. For example, faculty and staff might steer students to one introductory anthropology course, which satisfies both a social-sciences and a human-diversity requirement in the general-education core.
Her department also sought to trim the number of electives needed. Such a strategy, she said, can carry risks to the intellectual breadth that college offers. “Students need to have a broader experience, not be parochial,” Ms. Rech said. “If college is not the time to study the world, I don’t know when that time would be.”
But a heavier credit load also comes with a cost to students, said Ms. Pratt, and faculty leaders agreed that was an important consideration. System officials estimate that students who remain on campus for a fifth year incur an extra 20 percent in tuition and related costs.
“We’re talking about five hours here between 125 and 120 credits, and I’m not sure that the difference in the five hours is going to have a major impact on anybody’s major or their general education,” Ms. Pratt said. “But it does throw a student into either summer school or another semester.”
Carrots and Sticks
Some states, such as California, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, have tried a variety of approaches to move students through college more quickly. (A few private colleges, including Juniata College, in Pennsylvania, have also offered a guarantee that students will graduate in four years, and promised to pay for the additional tuition if classes aren’t available or if advisers steer students awry.)
The efforts in other states have imposed surcharges on students if they earn credits over a certain number, or cut off state or institutional aid if students stay too long. No such measures are in place to usher a student quickly off a Nebraska campus, said Ms. Pratt.
“If a student wants more education and can afford more education, we’re happy to provide it,” she said. “We want to make it possible for students who want to a get a degree in four years to do so.”
Nebraska’s effort is noteworthy, both because of its less-punitive stance toward students and because it applies across multiple campuses, said Travis Reindl, program director of the National Governors Association’s Center for Best Practices.
“Traditionally at the system or state level, it’s more stick than carrot,” Mr. Reindl said. In Nebraska’s case, “the stick is put to the campus.”
As a result, the burden is placed not on students but on the university, he added. “It puts the onus on the faculty and the staff to basically say, ‘Work it out. Let’s take a hard look at our calendar to make sure we’re not putting together course sequences that lead to a dead end,’” Mr. Reindl said. “A lot gets back to basic advising.”
Kevin M. Corcoran, a program director at the Lumina Foundation, said that a broader array of advising, policy changes, and financial incentives, which go beyond what Nebraska has put in place, will be needed to move students through college more quickly.
“This is a good start,” he said of Nebraska’s efforts.
And, while it’s admirable for a system to declare that a student taking 15 credits per semester will graduate in four years, he said, it also assumes that students are making sound choices throughout their academic careers. “Implicit in that is that they’re taking the right courses,” Mr. Corcoran said. “I’d feel better about it,” he said, if Nebraska were “explicit about the advising piece.”
Ms. Pratt said the system is studying how to improve advising on its campuses and how to respond effectively when students change majors, which is the biggest factor in extending the time to degree.