Full-time helps students succeed
John M. Crisp
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
If I imagined a grand reunion of all of the students who have enrolled in my college classes during some 25 years of teaching, I would also go to the trouble of imagining the commodious lecture hall that would accommodate all 5,000 or 6,000 of them at the same time.
But as I imagine this bank of faces — some of them well into middle age — I might be reluctant to ask for a show of hands to indicate how many had finished their degrees and moved into a job worthy of their college educations.
After all, mostly I’ve taught freshman composition, a demanding make-or-break course that challenges students who may not be fully committed to the rigors of college work. Not every student makes it through the first semester or comes back for a second.
Furthermore, because I’ve taught in an exclusive private university, in a large public university, and in a large public community college, my students have ranged across a broad spectrum of abilities and academic preparedness. Some were highly intelligent and talented; some should probably not have been in college at all.
Some came from a long line of university graduates; many others were the first in their families to even imagine going to college. Some were recent high school graduates themselves; many had been out of school long enough to raise a family.
Some were just plain smarter than others, and some were more motivated.
But when I ponder why some of these students succeeded in college while others didn’t, I note a two-year-old study from the National Center for Education Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Education. While controlling for other factors like gender and family income, researchers identified a single factor with a very significant correlation to success in college: part-time versus full-time attendance.
The difference is staggering: in a representative sample of students who began college in 1995 and attended on a part-time basis, only 15 percent achieved a degree or certificate of any kind after six years. And none achieved a bachelor’s degree.
Among full-time students, on the other hand, 64 percent earned either a degree or a certificate within six years, and 44 percent earned a bachelor’s degree.
So, while many factors influence a student’s chances of success in college, a prime predictor is simply the number of hours for which the student enrolls. According to this study, a student who takes 12 or 15 hours per semester is much more likely to stay in school and to eventually succeed than the student who takes only three or six hours.
Statistics aren’t destiny, of course, but considering that -- according to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s current Almanac Issue -- nearly 50 percent of all college students attend part-time during all or part of the year, one wonders if the deck isn’t stacked against some students just by the nature of their enrollment.
Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to attend college part-time. But many of the part-time students at the community college where I work -- around 70 percent attend part-time -- don’t register for a full load because of the simple economic necessity of having to put in close to a 40-hour workweek to attend college at all.
There’s a lot to be said for the virtues of “working your way through college.” But it’s one thing to put in a few on-campus work-study hours per week while attending an expensive university on someone else’s dime. It’s another to pull an overnight shift at a convenience store and then rush to your freshman comp class, which you can barely pay for.
Yet these hard workers are precisely the ones whose success in college would strengthen both our economy and our nation. Unfortunately, trends in our culture and in higher education are working against their full-time attendance and, therefore, undermining rather than enhancing their chances of success.
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Posted by Steve_Corbin (anonymous) on October 28, 2009 at 5:48 a.m. (Suggest removal)
An Option:
Join the United States Armed Forces and attend school on their dime.
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