UF Researcher: College Policies Ineffective in Speeding Graduation Rates

June 18, 1997

GAINESVILLE — Politicians’ plans to prod students into graduating on time have little chance of success, a new University of Florida study finds.

In fact, the study suggests factors such as students’ age, marital status and financial obligations are likely to have far more effect on how long they take to graduate than many governmental policies or initiatives, says Ken Lowman, a UF doctoral student who did the research for his doctoral degree in higher education administration.

Students who are older or married generally take longer to graduate than other students, while, somewhat surprisingly, those who are financially supporting others take less time, Lowman found.

“Perhaps marital obligations reduce the amount of time married students spend studying, while having to support others acts as an incentive to complete a bachelor’s degree in as short a time period as possible,” he said.

Needing to make room for a huge expected influx of students, the Florida Legislature aims to graduate existing students by reducing the number of credits required for degrees from Florida’s 10 public universities and 28 community colleges, Lowman said.

“I would hope that legislators who read this realize that whatever they say and do cannot change the basic demographics of students, which are more important than any rules, regulations or laws passed,” said James Wattenbarger, a UF professor emeritus of education who supervised Lowman’s research and is credited with designing Florida’s community college system. “All these policies that universities are pressured to follow are really not important factors in whether students follow a certain time frame. Their own age, marital status and economic level have more influence than anything the university does.”

How much time is spent earning a degree should be less important than the quality of education or the ability to experiment with courses a student doesn’t know much about, Wattenbarger said.

Time to degree is of growing importance to legislators because it is much less costly to graduate students than to build more colleges and universities, Lowman said.

The majority of Florida’s high school graduates enroll in some form of postsecondary instruction, and most who commit to earning a bachelor’s degree require more than four years to graduate, Lowman said. One initiative legislators passed in 1995 to get college students to graduate more quickly was to reduce the number of credit hours needed to graduate.

“Since state governments generally subsidize the cost for students to attend a public college or university, the longer it takes a student to earn a bachelor’s degree, the more the state must invest in that student’s postsecondary education,” Lowman said. “State legislators are rightfully concerned that taking more than four years to earn a degree drains limited resources and restricts others from participating in postsecondary education.”

Lowman randomly surveyed 322 of the 1,788 students who graduated from UF with a bachelor’s degree in December 1995. He also found that a number of factors traditionally thought to explain why some students require more time to graduate than others, such as employment status, gender, race, standardized test scores and grade point averages were less important.

The study also found that the amount of time to graduation was affected somewhat by other factors. For example, students who initially enroll in the college or university where they ultimately earn their bachelor’s degrees require less time to complete a program of study than students who transfer there from a community college or some other college or university, Lowman said.

Students who began their college career at UF took an average of 14 semesters from the time they started their postsecondary education to get a degree, compared to 18 semesters for community college transfer students and 19 semesters for transfer students from another four-year college or university, he said.

Lowman also found that students who spend more time studying and interacting with faculty outside class tend to graduate sooner than other students.