Colleges and universities often require that degree requirements be met within a certain time span. i.e., a friend of mine who had completed 99% of his B.A. is now unable to graduate because 10 years have elapsed.
I’m currently petitioning my school for an exception to a requirement that all units are completed by the end of the 4th year. What I’m wondering while I’m writing this is, what are the reasons for having a time limit? Instead of just giving them a sob story, I’d rather be able to run down the list of reasons for having the policy, and explaining why it doesn’t apply to me.
All I can come up with so far is that as time goes by, records are more likely to be lost, or incomplete. But with technology today allowing for pretty secure storage and back-ups of large quantities of data, this justification doesn’t seem to fly very far. What are some other reasons for having such a policy regarding graduating within a certain timeframe?
Perhaps things are different on the humanities side of world, but science and technology move quickly. Ten years is a looong time. The content of coursework can change dramatically over that period. Imagine trying to find an IT job today based on a 1997 understanding of computer systems. You’d be hosed, and so would any company that hired you. The university doesn’t want to put its seal of approval on anything like that.
Especially with regard to state universities, probably the main reason for these policies is that tuition is subsidized by the taxpayers. Tuition doesn’t cover the full cost of educating a student. It is broadly in the state’s interest for you to finish your studies and get to work, becoming a taxpayer yourself.
One flaw in that reasoning is that one reason a lot of students take a long time to graduate is because they are working (perhaps even full time) while going to school. Very few people are taking 10 years of full-time study to complete the degree. Still, arguably, you will be more fully contributing to the workforce after you have your degree. But the logic of the time limit loses a lot of its oomph when the student has been working and supporting himself all along.
The best arguments for extensions are medical. Other than that, you might try explaining how you have been working and supporting yourself, if you have. Also, you might highlight situations where required courses have not been available or have been offered in conflicting time slots so you couldn’t meet requirements. Arguments about exploring several majors before “finding yourself” should probably be accompanied by your parents donating enough to get a building named after them.
My take is that a University degree is supposed to demonstrate a course of study not taking classes piecemeal over long periods of time. I can see the ten year requirement but I think you should be fine if you are just over the four year requirement. Things happen, family emergencies financial hardship or the dreaded change of major. A university degree is not just certifying that you completed a certain number of credit hours but that you were a full time student dedicated to achieving a course of study. One thing a degree signifies is good time management skills.
Thanks. And I didn’t want to muddy the OP with too many of my details and take this into MPSIMS, but just to get this out there:
I’m not the 10-year student – the policy cut-off for me was at the end of summer (i.e., September), a little over 4-years from when I started. And my main hold-up was my wife’s difficult pregnancy, our baby born in May, and my having to work full-time to support us. And my only deficit preventing graduation was a 1-unit internship requirement (65 hours) which I just completed. I was seething when I was basically dismissed off-hand as having exceeded the time limit, so I need to cool off a bit before I start writing my petition.
The biggest reason is that that a degree means that you can get your shit together and complete it no matter what. A person can be outstanding in their field and not have a degree but the simple fact remains that they couldn’t overcome obstacles to find a way to complete it. That statement isn’t meant to be completely condescending for people that couldn’t complete their degree for entirely reasonable reasons.
It is just deeply entrenched in the American psyche. I work for a mega-corp and we have a very hard time filling the positions in the area that I work in. I interview lots of smart people without degrees and we even hired two of them. They can make decent money but they can never be promoted. Management in the U.S. tends to want to see a bachelors degree, any bachelors degree in any field before they can move up. My boss have a BA in Music and the rest of our IT allied group have degrees in Political Science, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Economics. The fundamental requirement of having any 4+ year college degree is hard-coded in most companies but there are exceptions. 98% completion isn’t viewed very differently from some community college attendance.
Sometimes. But universities are increasingly marketing part-time degree programs and reaching out to non-traditional students. Being a full-time student is as much a product of lifestyle factors as it is of dedication.
And there’s no reason that time management skills are restricted to those students who study full-time. I’ve recently completed a degree that I did entirely part-time as an external student. Time management was a key requirement.
That is perfectly true. I know a handful of executives that all went through the Northeastern University MBA program part time. They are all multi-millionaires now and one has over $100 million dollars. However, the company that they were working for and building really wanted them to have a legitimate MBA. That is not uncommon at all no matter how well they are doing rising up among the ranks.
A degree that is 99% complete is a whole lot closer to 0% complete than it is to 100%. Companies and people in general tend to view this in a binary way. Do you have the degree of not?
It seems some science moves more slowly than others. Brian May, the guitarist of Queen, turned in his PhD thesis, “Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”, 36 years after he began it this past spring.
Another factor is when graduation requirements change. My school seemed to rejigger them every 5 years or so. If they use the original course requirements from when you started, some of the classes may not even exist anymore. And if they use the new requirements, some of your original classes may not be valid. A headache that the college just doesn’t want to deal with.
There are often several different deadlines. Here, for instance, there’s a rule that postgraduate programs must be completed within 6 years, but extensions are routinely granted on request, even retroactively (fortunately for me), with the caveat that they’ll usually only grant one extension per student. So you wait until you have all the real work done, and then ask for your retroactive extension.
On the other hand, there’s also a rule that coursework expires after 10 years, so if you take longer than that, you’ll need to re-take classes. This rule is considerably harder to get around, and we’re officially advised not to try.
One big reason for a time limit is that the body of knowledge a student is expected to learn changes over the years. When I took my first chemistry course, there were only 102 elements in the periodic table. When I received my degree in journalism, the Web didn’t exist, etc.
When my mother decided to go back to nursing after 10+ years out of the field, she had to go through a re-certification to learn all the stuff she had missed in her years out of the profession. She said the recertification class was in many respects more difficult than her entire nursing school curriculum.
I think universities try to discourage the “perpetual student”, although I object because I think that should be a life choice. It might make sense if tax money is involved.
I can’t see why a BA or BS needs to be completed in four years or else. I have many friends who worked and attended school part time, and 4 years just isn’t long enough. Myself, I took 9 years from high school to degree; I wasn’t going to school full time most years and that 9 years included nearly 3 in the active army. I don’t think that rule existed when/where I was in school.
Well technically the REAL reason that schools require time limits is that the state governing board that issues school approvals requires it. You cannot get a course of study approved if it doesn’t include a time limit (in Illinois, at least), although you are allowed to vagueify it by allowing exceptions on an individual basis.
For why the state requires it, see the above answers, each right in their own way. There is no single reason.
And I’d be surprised if the reason that the state governing board requires it doesn’t boil down at some level to “(almost) all the existing schools at the appropriate level already have a time limit on their graduation requirements”.
This is a somewhat glib explanation and an unprovable assertion, or at least difficult to prove assertion. But there is a very real circularity effect in many portions of higher education. The best professors publish in the best peer-reviewed journals, which are the best peer-reviewed journals because they have the best professors publishing in them , . . .
SmackFu already said what I wanted to say. In fact, when I was a senior, the university decided to eliminate the fourth semester of the foreign-language requirement, but made it effective with the class graduating in the spring of 2006. Since I was graduating in the winter of 2005, I had to take it, and I know a LOT of spring grads who were royally pissed because they took that fourth semester as sophomores or juniors and didn’t need to. The university ended up splitting the difference and allowed the spring grads to keep that course as a humanities gen-ed.
In terms of graduate programs, many schools which offer “executive” programs intended for working adults will operate on a cohort basis, meaning you start with a group and (ideally) finish with the same group. This makes scheduling and degree deadlines easier to manage for all concerned.