The traditional American notion of higher education has been that students who choose to pursue college education obtain their undergraduate degrees in four years and enter the workforce to pursue their career goals. But in reality, the time it takes to obtain an undergraduate degree is now well above the traditional four years. Nationally, 1993 figures indicate that 53% of students in bachelor degree programs graduated within five years (Precious, 1999). More and more students are taking anywhere between five and seven years to complete their undergraduate education. The reasons for this trend are varied and range from being employed while attending school, to individual college requirements to graduate, to student motivation, to number of credit hours carried per semester, to the quality of student effort, to the mechanics of learning, and the impact of student ability.
There is evidence is to show that many students are unsure of their career goals when they enter college and experiment with different courses and majors before they choose one that they eventually graduate with. Other students drift from one major to another because in many cases, they are unable to pass the courses required to be allowed to major in the field. This is also thought to influence the time taken by a student to graduate, commonly referred to as time-to-degree. In other words, by the time these students graduate, they have accumulated more than they need to fulfill graduation requirements and they have taken over four years to accomplish it.
Clifford Adelman in his research on the trends in undergraduate education identifies this as a potential correlate of the increased time-to-degree. He note that there has been a 10.6% increase in mean credits earned by undergraduates. Adelman speculates that the growing proportion of withdrawals, in-completes, and no-credit repeats that students appear to have accumulated could have an impact on increased time-to-degree (Adelman, 1995). In his research, Adelman has identified two sets of courses. The first is a list of courses where students have either withdrawn, repeated or taken an incomplete. The second is a list of courses that have the highest rate of failures and penalty grades. The theory is, students are failing key courses that are necessary to majoring in a particular field switch majors, thereby lengthening the time it takes to graduate. These key courses have been referred to gatekeeper courses, gateway courses, and sometimes barrier courses.
A variety of research studies (Daly & Bateman, 1978; Reed, 1981; Adams & Becker, 1990; Miller, 1997) document that course withdrawals happen across institutions, from community colleges to universities. All of them focus on the reasons for course withdrawal and suggest strategies that universities could adopt to minimize its effects. But there has been no connection drawn between course withdrawal and time-to-degree. The reason for this could be that none of these studies have identified that course withdrawal had a major connection to academics. But the results of Adelman's comprehensive study on the patterns in course taking definitely provide enough reason to explore this phenomenon further.
Time-to-degree is very much an issue that has cost implications for students and colleges alike. As previously indicated, there is no research in this area to explore and determine if a connections exists between barrier courses and the time it takes to graduate. Therefore, it would be advantageous for educational researchers to consider focusing future research studies on determining if a relationship is evident between courses that have the highest failure or withdrawal rates and student increased time-to-degree.
The following are prospective research questions for the purpose of gaining empirical data that will increase educational policy makers knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon of 'barrier courses and time-to-degree'.
About the Author: Radhika Suresh is a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy.